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Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Introduction

All is Dust

Ahriman: Exile

Prologue

Part One

I – The Harrowing

II – Titan Child

III – Visitation

IV – Oaths

Part Two

V – Sons of Dust

VI – Memory’s Ashes

VII – Oracle

VIII – Rubric

IX – Dead Space

X – Summoning

XI – Warp Breach

XII – Change

Part Three

XIII – Clockwork

XIV – Taken

XV – Secrets

XVI – Gathering

XVII – Darkness

XVIII – Names

XIX – Peace

XX – Every Weapon

XXI – Remade

Epilogue

The Tale of Ctesias

I – The Dead Oracle

II – Fortune’s Fool

III – Hounds of Wrath

IV – The First Prince

V – Gates of Ruin

Ahriman: Sorcerer

Prologue

Part One

I – Dreams

II – Brotherhood

III – Conclave

IV – World Murder

V – Intersection

VI – Circle

Part Two

VII – Loyalty

VIII – Mindscape

IX – Storm Calm

X – Recall

XI – Land of Lies

XII – Broken

XIII – Blades

XIV – Claws

XV – Connection

Part Three

XVI – Apollonia

XVII – Patterns

XVIII – Revelation

XIX – Awakening

XX – Sorcery

XXI – Storm Break

Epilogue

Hand of Dust

King of Ashes

Ahriman: Unchanged

Prologue

Part One

I – Sorcerers

II – Spoken and Unspoken

III – By Your Will

IV – Control

V – Absence

VI – Preliminal

VII – Synchronicity

Part Two

VIII – Transitions

IX – Voices

X – Conversations

XI – Prospero

XII – Gateways

XIII – Ghosts

XIV – Perspectives

XV – Pyre

XVI – Labyrinth

Part Three

XVII – Returned

XVIII – Unleashed

XIX – Shards

XX – Ritual War

XXI – Beginnings

XXII – Losses

XXIII – Saviour

XXIV – Reforged

XXV – Failure

XXVI – Rubricae

Epilogue – A Final Beginning

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Night Lords: The Omnibus’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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.

INTRODUCTION

The book you are holding is one story. That sounds obvious, right? I mean, it’s a trilogy of books about the same character bound together; of course it’s one story. So what am I talking about?

Ahriman of the Thousand Sons is a character driven by guilt to try and fix the mistakes he committed in the past. In particular he is set on finding a way to save his Legion, the Thousand Sons, from the corrupting influence of Chaos. In this goal he is willing to do anything, including using the powers of Chaos, sacrificing countless lives and betraying those who might have thought him a brother or friend. His first attempt to save the Thousand Sons was a vast ritual called the Rubric. It went disastrously wrong, resulting in most of the Thousand Sons being turned from flesh into sealed suits of armour animated by the vestige spirits of those that wore them. Since then he has been trying to find a way to overturn that mistake.

When I began writing Exile I knew that if it went well that I wanted to write a trilogy. That was not just because books come in threes, but because I wanted to tell a big story, a story that was too big to fit in one book. I have always imagined Ahriman as moving through a series of grand projects in his quest for salvation, each one based on an idea of how he could achieve his ultimate goal. Recasting the rubric, manipulating time, capturing souls and giving them new bodies: he has probably tried all of these things over the millennia, and with each attempt he has to gather more power and knowledge to make them work, and even if they fail each grand endeavour will leave both Ahriman and the universe changed. This is the story of the first of those great endeavours, of how Ahriman pulled himself up from despair, and his first attempt to undo the effects of the Rubric and save his Legion.

The demands of a trilogy mean that the story I wanted to tell was sliced up into three books, which conveniently mirror the set-up, struggle and finale structure of classic stories. The only problem was that the strands that linked the three books might not be clear, because of the gap between the books being released. So, when it comes to this omnibus edition you really are getting the story as I intended: all together, from start to finish in one place.

This edition also let me draw together all of the other stories that I wrote about Ahriman, and place them together next to the main narrative. In particular the series of short stories told by the daemonologist, Ctesias fills in the details of how Ahriman and his followers find a way out of the Eye of Terror between Exile and Sorcerer. It also adds something that you don’t get by reading the novels on their own. Reading Exile it is easy to think of Ahriman as a good-bad-guy, a misunderstood anti-hero who is on the wrong side of history’s judgement. Ctesias’ viewpoint is an antidote to that. He does not like or trust Ahriman, and is not taken in by his ideals. Seeing Ahriman from that point of view before you go into Sorcerer and then Unchanged, should give you another way of seeing Ahriman’s actions in those books. Is he an anti-hero, or just out and out evil? Is he in command of the power he wields, or just a deluded slave to the Dark Gods of Chaos? Is he an idealist or a hypocrite?

Having said all that, the thing that most pleases me about this omnibus is that I could put the short story ‘All is Dust’ at the beginning, as the first thing you read. Although short, it shows you what it is like to be one of the Rubricae created by Ahriman’s Rubric, what remains of them, and, hopefully, shows you the tragedy of what Ahriman did. ‘All is Dust’ is emotional context for everything that follows. It also has a very particular and important place in the conclusion of the trilogy. I wrote ‘All is Dust’ at the same time as Exile, and very carefully and casually included the name of the Rubricae at the centre of the story as Helio Isidorus. That name crops up a few times in the main narrative, and then one last time, right at the end (no, that’s not a spoiler, you will see what I mean when you get there). Bringing everything full circle and being able to put that story in its proper place feels right.

This is one story, the first story of Ahriman’s path to ultimate damnation or redemption. I hope you enjoy walking it with him.

John French

November, 2016

ALL IS DUST

Only dust remains. Dust and emptiness. I do not know what I am. I had a name, but it is gone. I am nothing. I am locked in darkness, tumbling without end through broken memories.

I remember blue. The blue was sky, slashed red by fire. I could smell smoke. There were pyramids on the horizon. Fire leapt from cracks in their sides.

The dead were a slick carpet on the ground. The warrior stood amongst the corpses, his grey armour spattered, his mouth open like a dog panting for air. His pupils were black bullet holes in amber irises.

Blood pumped in my veins, roaring in my ears. I was running, firing as I moved, churning the dead into bloody mud with each step. The gun in my hands shook with a thunder-rhythm.

The grey warrior snarled and leapt to meet me. Rounds hit the ground around him, raising red craters in dead flesh behind his feet. He had an axe, its head a chest-wide span of black iron, its cutting edge curved like a skull’s smile. I remember it singing in the air. The axe hit me in the side. It cut deep.

I remember the pain, star bright, and ice cold. I bled, red liquid running over red armour, over gold, red drooling onto the ground. I looked up as the warrior pulled his axe back. Blood fell from the blade edge. It glittered in the sun, crimson against the blue sky.

I put him down then, I shot him until he was broken armour and folds of meat. I killed him before death could take me. I remember that I felt anger and joy at that moment, but I do not know why.

The memory fades. I am alone again. I have a shape. It is a shape like that of a man, but I am hollow. I am just the outline. I have hands, but cannot touch. I have no mouth, but I have been screaming since I began my fall. I want to breathe, but I cannot. I cannot remember what it is to breathe; only what it is to drown in an abyss, to sink without hitting the bottom.

Time passes. I can feel it passing, like wind burying a statue in sand.

I had a name once. It is an echo, fading but never vanishing, forever beyond hearing. I was once flesh, but that is gone.

+Helio Isidorus.+

The voice comes to me out of the black night. I know the name, but I do not remember why.

I remember fire. It was white, the stark white of a sun’s heart. It roared from a black sky and remade me.

I fell to my hands and knees. The ground beneath me was red dust, the colour of rust, the colour of dried blood. Pain, hotter and sharper than any wound, filled me. I could not see; the fire took my eyes first, and then it took my tongue before I could scream.

Inside my armour my muscles bunched, straining against metal. The fire burned through me, blistering my skin. I felt mouths open across my body, a thousand mouths each with razor teeth, each babbling a plea for the pain to stop. The fire pulled through my body like hands through wet clay.

I was suffocating, as if sinking in sand. The acid touch of panic burnt my flesh. I could not breathe. I could not move.

Everything stopped. It is like a razor drawn through the memory, a hard line severing me from everything that came before.

I felt nothing.

I stood slowly, the dust spilling from my armour. I begin to walk, one slow step at a time. A dull haze shrouds the world. Beside me, other shapes move. They are lumbering figures, like walking statues. Somewhere in the distance I can see a cluster of figures. Golden light outlines their shapes. They stand as if waiting. I walk towards them, towards the light. I cannot remember my name.

The memory breaks, and I spin on through the empty dark.

+Helio Isidorus.+ It is a dream voice shouting from the darkness.

I can see light. It is distant, like a moon glimpsed from beneath the waves. The light is getting brighter and closer. I am rising out of the dark. Hands that I cannot see are pulling me. I can feel fingers gripping flesh that I do not have. I try to stop. I cannot stop. The light is getting brighter and brighter; it is a sun that I cannot look away from.

+Helio Isidorus,+ the dream voice says again. I am drowning but I cannot breathe. I thrash my arms. Cold metal holds me still. I am a swirl of dust rattling in a skin of metal.

+Helio Isidorus,+ says the voice that is a thought.

I know the name.

+Helio Isidorus.+

It is my name.

I can see.

The world is movement, and fire, and the roar of distant sounds. I am standing on a plain of leaping fire and melting snow. Beside me is a figure. He wears armour the blue of the desert sky, and his helm rises into a high crest of lapis and gold. Silk robes flutter around him, though there is no wind. Golden light glows from him, filling my eyes. He is more real than anything else I can see. It is his voice that called me from my sleep; I know this but do not know why. He turns and points. I step forwards. I have a weapon in my hands. I see an armoured warrior moving towards us. His armour is the grey of storm clouds. I fire. Blue trails of flame find the grey warrior, and he staggers to his knees before he burns. I am moving forwards, turning my eyes on the world around me. Other figures in blue armour advance beside me; we move as one.

There are more grey warriors moving towards me. They are tall, but hunched with speed. I see axes, and swords, and grey armour painted with bright colours in jagged patterns. I see black pupils in wide yellow eyes. They shout as they come. I can hear them. I can understand them. They are screaming for vengeance.

A blow strikes my shoulder. There is a cut in the metal of my armour, a dark gash through metal to the black void within. I feel nothing. The cut glows; it breeds green maggots of light, and then closes like a silenced mouth. I turn my head. I see a warrior pulling back his blade from another strike. His face is bare and his beard is wet and red with blood. A cut runs across his face from temple to cheek. I can see white bone in the open lips of the wound. He is a pace from me. I do not know how he got so close.

I fire. My weapon is low and the rounds tear the warrior’s legs off in a blaze that burns even after he falls. His flesh begins to cook inside his armour.

I take a pace forwards, stepping through the flames. I pause. Memories swirl in the darkness within my skin, rattling like sand against bronze. I watch the grey warrior burn, become ash, become dust. I know this should mean something, but in my memory there is only the emptiness that drowns all else. I am an outline held in a dream of falling, and this moment means nothing.

AHRIMAN: EXILE

‘To talk of destiny and fate is foolish. Time, causality, the observer and the observed; we must treat our assumptions on all these matters with suspicion. We think of the past causing the future, but must that be so? Is fate created by trying to see it? What if we had not looked? Would matters have unfolded otherwise?’

– Ahzek Ahriman, from the precepts of the Corvidae

PROLOGUE

Haakon Grey Storm moved up the frozen slope of the ridge. His armour had once been the blue-grey of glacial ice, but that had been long ago. Now it was the dull grey of battered metal. Dents and gouges wound across its plates like ropes of scar tissue, and flecks of paint clung to pits and grooves, hinting in bright fragments at the past of the warrior within. Haakon felt the armour creak as he crouched behind the lip of the ridge. Every small movement felt stiff against his skin, as if the battle plate were protesting at the cold. He paused and drew a deep breath of cold air. He wore no helm, and the icy wind lifted the black hair from his face as he tilted his head back. The light of stars burning sun-bright in a clear blue sky met his yellow eyes. He let the breath out of his lungs.

He could smell the witch.

Slowly he unclamped the axe from his back. Its head spread in twin curves of polished metal, the golden bodies of dragons tangling across its faces. The leather-bound haft settled into his hand. He held the axe close to the throat, his thumb resting on the power field generator. Its edges glittered sharp against the crystal powder of the chemical snow.

Beyond the ridge the ground dropped away to a road of cold-cracked stone. The witch was approaching along that road. Haakon sniffed again. Her stink was strong even over the fumes that hung above the ice. Sweat, dried blood, and a scent like crushed roses and fresh faeces: the scent of the corruption, the scent of the warp. The warp changed everything it touched, and once touched, nothing was pure again. Not this world, not the stars shining in a sunlit sky, not Haakon himself. He had once asked a rune priest if he was changing, if the hunt through the worlds on the edge of the Eye had tainted him. The rune priest had not been able to answer, but Haakon knew the truth. He had changed. His sense of smell, always keen, now seemed to reach through matter to detect the flavours of the soul. It was as if his purpose had found an echo in the warp, the hunter’s desire answered with the means to find the prey. The warp had touched him. He was tainted and he always would be, but his purpose was pure, and that was enough.

The witch was close now, her scent growing stronger with each slow pulse of his hearts. She had guards with her, followers of her vile cult. He had their scents too. There were ten of them. He could smell the grease on their guns, and the edges on their knives. He began to move. Snow powder fell away from him as he padded forwards. He took a last breath and let its calm soak into his muscles. His mind and body became one, became a single blade-tip of focused intent. He was close now. Kill the witch, and the witch’s knowledge would lead him to the exile. He could smell the knowledge in her. She might have only glimpsed his ultimate prey once, but it was enough. The exile’s scent was on her, and he would follow it to the end. And then Fenris would have vengeance.

Haakon came over the top of the ridge in a leaping bound. For a paused heartbeat the scene was still beneath him: ten figures in a loose circle, silver masks in the shapes of reptile beasts glinting with polished light. At their centre a figure, hunched under a cloak of tanned skin. He could see the patterns of angular tattoos ripple across the cloak as a breeze caught its edge.

Then Haakon landed. Some of the guards turned and raised weapons. Some scattered. Two became crushed flesh beneath his boots. Haakon’s first axe-cut was lateral, from left to right, backhanded, his muscles uncoiling into the movement. Blood scattered through the air. Gunfire rang against his armour. He spun and cut down, opening a man from bronze collar to groin. Wet liquid sprayed Haakon’s face. He was not seeing what he was killing, not really. Each enemy was a brief blur of movement: an impression of dented armour, a face hidden by a beast mask, a lasweapon worked in bronze. The axe split a skull and pulped the meat inside. At his feet the blood was melting the chemical ice. Fumes rose around him. The stink of ruptured intestines coiled amidst the thickening fog. He cut again.

Something smacked into his right cheek. He felt his flesh burning, and then nothing, as his body numbed the injury. The witch stood, a bronze-cased laspistol in her hand, its barrel levelled at him. Her skin hung in grey sags from her gaunt skull, and the cloak of flayed faces did not hide the twisted body beneath. The arm holding the pistol shook. Haakon looked into her eyes; they were the yellow of fat. Haakon snarled, and the wound in his cheek opened like a second mouth. The witch’s finger tightened on the trigger.

Haakon’s foot slammed into her chest. The impact shattered her ribs and spun her through the air. The axe severed her neck as she fell back to the ground. Haakon paused, slow breaths sucking between his canines. Hacked meat and slick offal lay around him, heaped in piles, steaming into the cold air. His armour glistened, scarred grey hidden beneath crimson. For a moment his mind was free of the fatigue that had consumed him body and soul. For a moment he felt joy. Then the feeling drained from him, and the needs of the hunt returned like the ache of tired muscles. He must take what he came for now, before the dead flesh cooled.

He bent down and picked the witch’s head from the ground. Lank hair tangled in his fingers as he held it level with his own face. He closed his hand. The skull held its shape for a second, and then it cracked like an egg. Yellow sores and clotted black fluid riddled the flesh within. He brought the bloody mass to his teeth and bit down. The flesh was warm and tasted of memories. Impressions, ghost sensations and broken words filled his mind with every bite. He ate until the skull was an empty shell, and he had what he needed.

His skin prickled as he dropped the skull. There was someone behind him.

His axe was a razor blur as he turned.

‘It is I, brother,’ growled a voice.

Haakon held his blow, but did not lower the axe. A lone figure stood a blade-swing from his shoulder. It looked back at him with familiar blue eyes. Serpentine marks of aversion crawled across the figure’s grey armour, and thick rows of sharp teeth hung from the red pauldrons. In places the serpentine marks glowed with a pale light. Haakon knew the voice and the face that spoke. He knew that he should lower the axe, but part of him wanted to swing and watch the blood flow fresh into the snow.

‘Haakon,’ said the figure in grey. ‘Lower your weapon.’

Haakon did not lower the axe.

‘Oulf?’ said Haakon slowly. The name was thick on his tongue, as if the numbness of the hole in his cheek had spread to his jaw.

‘It is I,’ said the figure. Haakon shifted his grip on his axe.

‘You died on the world of sand and thirst,’ said Haakon.

‘No, brother,’ said the figure. ‘The kill has taken your mind. I did not die. Remember.’ Haakon’s gaze wavered, and he shook his head as if flies were buzzing over his skin. Oulf was dead; Haakon could remember the rune priest’s blood soaking into the white sand. But here he was standing alive before him…

‘No,’ said Haakon, swaying as he spoke. The witch’s blood memories still filled his head, clotting his thoughts with fading images. Perhaps Oulf was not dead? Perhaps that had been a dream. Perhaps the warp was taking his memory.

The figure that looked and spoke like Oulf moved past Haakon and picked up the witch’s empty skull.

‘What did she know?’ said the figure, looking into the witch’s lifeless eyes, and then to Haakon. ‘Did she know where to find the exile?’

Haakon closed his eyes. The wound on his cheek had begun to burn with pain. His head ached in dull throbs.

‘Haakon,’ said the figure carefully. ‘What did she know?’

‘She met him,’ said Haakon. His eyes were stinging and the words were heavy as they came from his mouth. ‘But she did not realise who he was. He was part of a warband…’ He breathed, trying to steady himself. The witch’s memory was fading in his mind: a glance across a battlefield, a chance glance back, a pair of sky-blue eyes.

‘What warband?’ asked the figure, and stepped closer. Haakon shook his head again. ‘Brother, what warband? Where did she see him?’

Haakon’s eyes snapped open, and his hand gripped the haft of his axe.

‘You died,’ he said softly. ‘You died long ago, and I am alone.’ The axe came up fast, slicing at the figure that wore the face of Oulf. The figure stepped back faster than anything should move. Haakon cut again and the axe sliced into its chest. Smoke and black blood spilled from the cut. He could suddenly smell ash and burned flesh. The figure went down into a foetal crouch, and Haakon brought the axe around for a kill-stroke.

The figure’s face snapped upwards. A third eye burned red in the middle of its forehead. Haakon felt the air leave his lungs. He was burning from the inside. The ice, blood and sky were vanishing at the edge of his sight. He raised the axe but it was not there; there was just dust in his hand, and a sensation of falling. A wind was spiralling around him, and the world was dissolving into grains of dust.

Pain filled Haakon’s skull. The figure in front of him no longer looked like Oulf; it was an outline of black-edged fire. Two points of green light burned where its eyes had been. Haakon stepped forwards, a howl of rage and hate ripping from between his teeth. His hands dissolved into the cyclone wind as he reached for the figure’s eyes. Pain stabbed into his head again, and exploded in white brilliance inside his skull.

Haakon opened his eyes. He was still howling, the sound echoing around the chamber’s crystal-covered walls. He was lying on a stone table, angled so that his head was higher than his feet. Chains held him at the wrist, throat and ankle. His armour was gone, and spiralling marks in blue ink covered his skin. Gore and bile ran down his chin and chest in thick rivulets.

‘You will tell me what you learned from the witch.’ A figure walked into view. Its skin was golden, its eyes green without white or pupil. Silver scarabs, birds and jackal-headed half-men crawled across the red lacquer of its armour. Strips of closely written parchment fluttered from the pauldrons as it stepped forwards, a black glass knife in its hand. Behind it two suits of armour stood immobile, their eyes shining with ghost light from high-crested helms.

A sorcerer, thought Haakon. His muscles bunched against the restraints. The sorcerer looked down at Haakon and shook his head. ‘You will tell me,’ said the sorcerer, and Haakon felt the soft words shake his thoughts. He stared back and spat. The acid in the blood-laced phlegm sizzled on the sorcerer’s chestplate.

‘You cannot stop us,’ growled Haakon. ‘My brothers will find him and then we will come for the rest of you. We will hunt you until you tire, and when you are weak we will split you open and feed your hearts to the crows.’ Haakon was breathing heavily, his muscles straining against the chains.

The sorcerer shook his head as if in sympathy.

‘You will not find him, wolf. Nor will any of your breed.’ The sorcerer paused, looking at the point of the black glass dagger in his hand. ‘You will not find him because we will find him first. We who were his brothers will find him.’ He looked up from the dagger, and Haakon saw something in those blank green eyes that made him bare his fangs. ‘His fate is ours, not yours.’

‘You lie.’

‘I do not lie. Your prey is our prey, and the greater cause is ours. You dogs hate us all, but we, we Brothers of Dust, we were his brothers, his followers, his friends. He deceived us, destroyed us and forced us into exile.’ The sorcerer put the point of the dagger to Haakon’s throat. ‘You will give me what I need to find Ahriman. I will not allow you to deny me.’

‘The dark tides will swallow you, and the ice will freeze over your corpse,’ snarled Haakon, his muscles bunching against the point of the dagger. Blood welled up and trickled down his neck.

‘You are resistant to our craft, your kind always were. But I do not need to break your mind.’ The sorcerer shook his head slowly. ‘I must thank you for reminding me that there are other, less refined paths to knowledge.’

Haakon’s pupils went wide and he roared as he realised what was going to happen. He was still roaring as the dagger punched into his neck. The sorcerer sawed the blade across Haakon’s throat just under the jaw. Blood ran in a red sheet over the stone table. Haakon kept roaring as the sorcerer reached into the grinning wound and pulled the soft white gland from his neck.

For a second, the sorcerer looked at the blood-covered meat in his hand. The gland was a progenoid, the root of the genetic miracle that had created the Space Marines. They held blood memory more surely than a human’s brain. Slowly the sorcerer tipped his head back, opened his mouth and ate the gland. As they had for Haakon, memories unfolded in the sorcerer’s mind like blood tipped into clear water. For a moment he swayed. Then his mind found what it sought: the memory of another blood feast, of the warm flesh from the witch’s skull between Haakon’s jaws. The sorcerer’s mind reached out and grasped the memory as it formed.

‘Har…’ The sorcerer’s mouth struggled to form the word as it solidified in his mind. ‘Harrowing,’ he said, and spat a thick splatter of blood onto the floor. It was what he needed. It was a name, and names held power. With this name he could track its bearers through the aether, and that would take him a step closer to finding his quarry, his prey, as Haakon would have said. He would send word to his master and the rest of the Brotherhood of Dust. The trail of the exile was clear, and they moved a step closer to their end.

On the stone table Haakon twitched, alive despite his slit throat. The sorcerer drew his sword, and looked into Haakon’s eyes.

‘Thank you, Haakon Grey Storm.’ He raised the sword above his head. ‘Our brotherhood thanks you,’ said the sorcerer, and brought the sword down on Haakon’s neck.

PART ONE

FATE’S EMISSARY

I
THE HARROWING

Please don’t take her. I am weak, but please don’t take her from me.

The deck shook beneath Carmenta’s feet as she hurried through the silence of the Titan Child.

I am too weak, she thought. I deserve this, but please let me return to my child. The deck shook again. She stumbled, hit a bare metal wall and slid to the floor. Her polished brass hands shook as she tried to pull herself up. The deck bucked and sent her sprawling. She lay for a second, watching data scroll across her green-tinted vision: the Titan Child was taking damage. Half of the outer belly compartments were open to the void. Fires were burning along the spinal weapon decks. Had she been on the bridge, linked to the ship, she would have felt each injury as if it were to her own body. Instead she watched the Titan Child’s pain in a screed of impersonal data. Even then, she felt a ghost of pain in her torso as she assimilated the information.

She is bleeding, and alone. For a second she thought she felt tears run from her eyes, but her eyes had gone long ago. When separated from the ship she looked at the world through two lenses of luminous green crystal. More data scrolled across her vision. The enemy ship was close, bearing down on them like a jackal on a wounded animal.

I am going to lose you, the thought echoed through her mind. I should not have left you. I am sorry. I am sorry. I am weak. I deserve this.

Another part of her mind, a part that still ran with mechanical coolness, processed the data. The attacker was moving into boarding range. Their troops would be inside the hull within twenty-eight minutes.

I must get to the bridge. She extended the mechadendrites from her back and clawed her way up the passage wall until she was standing. The cybernetic tentacles whined as she steadied herself. Something warm and wet was running down the flesh of her neck. She brought her brass hand up and ran it across her skin. Sensors in her fingers tasted the liquid: blood and oil. She moved her hand up, and found the crack running down the red lacquered ceramic of her right cheek. She felt no pain, but then the nerves in what remained of her face were long dead. This is how a half-machine must weep, she thought.

She took a breath, the air sucking into her lungs with a clicking of clockwork. It was an old flesh-bound habit, a sign that she was tired. She was tired, tired of running, tired of the life of an outcast. It had not been a good life. Too many lies and betrayals had marked her path. Part of her wanted to shut down, to let the ship die, and herself with it. She shut the thought down instead, with a snarl of anger.

You will not kill us, she shouted to herself. You will not end this, not now. You will not take her from me.

She dropped her hands and took an unsteady step. Sharp pain ran up her spine. She felt so tired, and a dull grey cloud was choking her senses. She had to keep moving, she had to reach the bridge. For a second she wondered where Astraeos was. She had tried to raise him but the comms link had failed. It was irrelevant anyway; if the enemy got aboard, four Space Marines would not be enough.

Slowly Carmenta began to limp down the passage, her ragged black robe trailing in her wake.

Ahzek Ahriman watched from the Blood Crescent’s bridge as scabs of cooling armour peeled away from the silent ship’s hull. The image flickered on the cracked screen, before snapping back into focus. Dozens more screens hung beside it, each showing an equally imperfect picture of the ship they were closing on. The screens gave almost the only light on the bridge, making the vast vaulted space seem small, like a cave shrunk to the sphere of light cast by a single fire. A curtain of bruise-coloured gas clouds hung across darkness in the background of each screen, and a black rift ran through those clouds like a slit pupil in a snake’s eye. The stars around its edge shone with a dimmed, angry light. As he watched the ship, he could not help but feel his eyes drawn to stare into that gulf that hung in the distance. Many had given it names, but only one persisted: the Eye of Terror.

They had found the ship by chance on the edge of an uncharted system, the energy of the warp still clinging to its hull. They had been cautious at first and fired a long-range salvo into the silent ship’s flank. No answering salvo had come, no shields had ignited, and the ship’s engines had remained cool. She was a warrior, a six-kilometre-long finger of granite and steel. Gun batteries nested along her flanks and jutted from her spine. But her guns had remained silent, as if she had lost the will to fight. The ship was alive, though; the Blood Crescent’s sensors could see the brightness of her reactors still beating within her hull. They had fired one more salvo before they approached. No reply had come, and the Harrowing’s hunger for the kill had begun to grow.

Machine-rigged beasts bellowed as they walked up and down the lines of slaves chained to the ship’s control systems. Here and there Space Marines of the Harrowing clustered in circles around spiked altars raised in crude iron from the bridge’s floor. They called themselves ‘initiates’, as if they had gained something by their allegiance to savagery. They were a mongrel force, the colours of a dozen forsaken identities lost under flaking layers of rust and dried blood. Strings of human teeth and finger bones rattled against their armour as they moved in time with their growled chants.

Blood pooled on the deck in places, and he heard the screams as the Harrowing impaled sacrifices on their iron altars. A few paces in front of him, Ahriman noticed one of the initiates grinning in anticipation. The Space Marine had iron hooks for teeth. The other initiates started to howl. Once, Ahriman would have felt sickened by what these Space Marines had become. Now, watching them, he felt nothing. Was he so different after all? Was he any less of a slave and betrayer than they were?

‘Horkos.’ The word pulled Ahriman from his thoughts. The voice was deep, a gut-rumbling purr edged with contempt. It fitted the speaker perfectly. As Ahriman looked up, he saw Gzrel stalking towards him. The lord of the Harrowing clicked and wheezed with every step, and his face was a dry mask of skin sunk into the collar of his rust-red armour. The noise on the bridge grew as the Harrowing shouted their lord’s name.

Behind Gzrel came his court. He liked to collect sorcerers, weighing and valuing them as others might jewels. There was Xiatsis in his mirror-fronted helm; Cottadaron, his body and armour so melded that he shambled; and, of course, Maroth. The Harrowing’s self-styled soothsayer gave a lipless smile as his hands stroked the flayed skin covering his chestplate. Maroth was Gzrel’s High Magister, a title that might once have made Ahriman laugh at the presumption. There was, however, nothing amusing about Maroth.

Ahriman knelt as Gzrel halted in front of him. His armour ground and hissed as he bent his knees. It, like everything else, fitted what he had become. Studded pauldrons covered his shoulders and a mottled grey tabard hung from his torso. He held a beak-snouted helm in the crook of his arm, its surface scorched black. He had taken it, still smoking, from a burned corpse, and never repainted it. In the Imperium that mark of helm had a designation: Corvus, the crow. A black crow helm for a carrion warrior, he had thought when he first held it in his hand. It was the only piece of symbolism he allowed himself, and only then to remind him of what he had been and what he had become.

‘I have an honour for you, Horkos.’ Red steam breathed from funnels on Gzrel’s back in time with his words.

‘My lord,’ said Ahriman, looking at the deck. Once armies had bowed to him, and primarchs had heeded his word. But that was a past he had broken with his own hand. Now he was nothing more than a shadow cast by the light of his memory. So Ahriman, once Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons, answered to a false name and knelt to an unworthy lord.

‘See,’ said Gzrel, and Ahriman could tell that the lord was gesturing to his other sorcerers. ‘So submissive, so pliant to the hand.’ Ahriman could see the bladed tips of Gzrel’s fingers flexing on the edge of his sight. ‘I could not bend you to meekness so easily, could I, Maroth?’

‘Not so easily, my lord,’ purred Maroth. Gzrel chuckled.

Maroth means to kill him, thought Ahriman. Not now, but soon, he plans to take Gzrel’s life and then his throne. Ahriman could read the soothsayer’s intent as if he had shouted it to the chamber. None of the other sorcerers seemed to notice. Had Maroth already turned them, or could they simply not see what Ahriman could?

‘But not you, Horkos. You take what falls from my hand and lick my fingers.’ Gzrel paused, and raised Ahriman’s chin with a bladed digit. ‘Do you think your meekness pleases me? I thought you might rise to better, but no. You are a whipped dog among wolves, Horkos.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ Ahriman did not meet Gzrel’s eyes. He would have to flee soon. There would be no place for him under Maroth’s rule, except as a skull hanging from a champion’s armour. Once he could have stopped Maroth, could have taken the Harrowing from Gzrel and taught them the limits of their knowledge. It would be a simple matter for Ahriman. But he was not Ahriman. He was Horkos: the penitent, the exile. He would have to flee and find another place to shelter. He was not even sure if he could wield the powers that had once been as much a part of him as his own flesh. It was as if a portion of his soul had shrunk to a wasted shell.

Perhaps that is why they do not see me for what I am, thought Ahriman. He had not used his powers to their full extent for many years, lifetimes to some; at first it had been a denial, but now he wondered if they had died as the memory of Ahriman died. He could still feel and touch the warp, but it was an ember remaining as the sign of a smothered blaze. They do not see transcendent power because it is not there. The shell of my weakness hides my past; they see only a half-broken creature and do not ask what it once was.

‘Yet, I keep you,’ said Gzrel. ‘Why do I keep you, Horkos?’

‘For my service, lord,’ replied Ahriman. He could smell the offal and iron reek that gathered around his lord.

‘For your service,’ repeated Gzrel carefully. ‘And now I give you the honour of paying me with that coin. We have prey, and you are to help me take it.’ Gzrel paused. ‘You will be part of the opening assault. You will join Karoz’s pack in the first wave.’

Ahriman thought of Karoz, of the Harrowing champion chained in one of Maroth’s cells, mewling to himself, unable to remove his armour. Maroth had seeded something in Karoz’s soul, something that was eating him from within. Ahriman glanced at Maroth. The soothsayer smiled back.

My fate is to die in this battle, thought Ahriman.

‘A great honour,’ said Maroth. The soothsayer’s aura was red with malice in Ahriman’s eyes.

‘Thank you, my lord.’

Gzrel let go of Ahriman’s chin.

‘I give this honour to you, Horkos. Repay my kindness well.’ Gzrel turned and walked away through the parting ranks of slaves and the clamour of the Harrowing readying for war.

‘I will, my lord,’ said Ahriman, but no one was there to hear.

‘We have to find her. We owe her that. Our oaths still stand.’ Astraeos looked at each of his brothers in turn. They stood in a loose circle at a junction of five passages close to the Titan Child’s engine decks. The light was so scarce Astraeos’s eyes saw the three warriors as monochrome statues, their bronze armour reduced to grey, the lines and scars of their faces valleys of shadow. They stared back, their eyes moon-white discs of light. Kadin shook his head, and looked away. Thidias kept his face impassive. Cadar looked like he was stopping himself from saying something. Astraeos noticed Thidias’s hand move to brush the scarred ceramite where the aquila had once spread its wings across his chest.

Break one oath and the rest crumble, thought Astraeos. He remembered Hadar, the old Chaplain, speaking those words. ‘The hearts of warriors hold as one,’ he had said, ‘or they break one splinter at a time.’ The Chaplain had died in the fires of treachery a year later.

They are lost, thought Astraeos as he stared at the last of his Chapter. And I am no Chaplain. I do not know how to lead them out of the dark. He opened his mouth to speak, but the deck heaved, and the metal walls rang like a struck bell. Rust fell from the ceiling, spicing the air with a gritty iron tang.

‘The witch has finally killed us,’ snarled Kadin.

‘Another hit, lower port towards the bow,’ said Cadar. Thidias nodded.

‘Low yield. Whoever it is, they are just testing, seeing if we are as dead as we seem.’ Thidias paused. ‘They will board the ship to take it.’

They all looked back to Astraeos.

They look to me, he thought, but I have no answers. Inside he muttered his own curse on Carmenta. The tech-witch must have left the bridge after they exited the warp. She had left them defenceless, floating in the void on the edge of an unknown star system. After the first strike he had tried to reach her. Static had filled the vox, and when he reached into the warp, a wind that had seemed to laugh had been his only answer. Kadin was right, she had killed them, but she still held their oaths.

‘We make for the bridge,’ said Astraeos. ‘If the mistress is still alive, that is where she will go.’ He clamped his helmet over his head, and his eyes lit with the familiar glow of tactical and environmental data. He reached over his shoulder and drew his sword. The crystal at the blade’s core sang in his mind at the touch. For a second he felt a deep, familiar stillness as he connected with the blade. This remains true at least, he thought.

‘And if whoever is out there targets the bridge as a beachhead?’ asked Cadar. Astraeos looked at them again. They all had their weapons drawn, bolters held loose in their hands, the blunt snouts of their helmets hiding their faces. For a second, it was possible to remember what they had all once been.

‘Then we die with one oath unbroken, brother.’

Thirty of the Harrowing filled the boarding torpedo’s cramped compartment. Ahriman could smell a reek of rotten meat and sweat. He checked the fill of his boltgun and clamped it to his thigh. He looked up. Locked to the walls by snaking cables, the Harrowing stared back at him with glowing eyes. Fresh-spilled blood glistened on the armour of some, tar-black in the pulsing red light. At the far end of the compartment, hunched slave beasts growled and tugged at their iron collars and chains. Larger than a Space Marine, each of the beasts had once been one of the Harrowing’s slaves before mutation had twisted their bodies. Maroth’s cruelty had wrought further changes. Jagged tattoos crawled over their sweat-slick skin, and Ahriman thought he could see their muscles and bones changing shape even as he looked at them. Their presence made him want to put a bolt shell into each of them.

The metal frame of the torpedo creaked. Ahriman could hear the rattle of chains lifting them into the launching breech. The torpedo rang like a gong as the breech closed behind them. He wondered whether they would survive the brief run through the void to the target. For a second he could feel the answer opening in his mind, like something glimpsed through a crack in a closed door. Then he slammed it shut with a snarl of will. All the predictions of the past, all the lore he had learned, had been a lie which brought him nothing but ashes.

Ahriman blinked. He had felt something shift in the warp around him, something vast, like a shark gliding through dark water. He realised he was shivering inside his armour. Suddenly he wanted to be out of the close, red-lit space of the boarding torpedo. He looked around at the rest of the Harrowing. They were still, frozen in mid-movement. He felt a chill spread across his skin. The warp was screaming around him, roaring and churning like a cyclone. Frost was spreading across the compartment. Karoz was staring at him, his eyepieces glowing blue in his horned helm. The Harrowing warrior was pushing against his restraints, hands clenching and unclenching on the grip of a chainglaive. Runnels of thick, blood-spotted mucus seeped from the snout of his helm.

+Ahriman.+ The voice was distant, like a shout echoing down a cave to its lightless depths. Ahriman felt cold. He could not move. Silence filled the inside of the torpedo. The pulsing red light had frozen. Every one of the Harrowing was utterly still, all except Karoz.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, and regretted the question as soon as he had spoken.

Something chuckled with Karoz’s voice inside his mind. Ahriman could feel his heart rate rising uncontrollably.

+Fate, Ahriman,+ said the distant voice. The light in Karoz’s eyes was the blue of a new-born sun. +I am fate come round at last.+

Then, total darkness and the weightless sensation of gliding through the void.

The boarding torpedo hit the Titan Child close to its spine. The melta-charge at its tip fired, turning armour to slag just before impact. The torpedo hit the molten hole and rammed through the outer hull and into the ship’s guts. Ahriman’s vision swam for a second as his ears filled with the shriek of shearing metal.

I am fate come round at last. The words sounded again and again in his mind. The sound stopped, and he braced himself against the snake-like restraints. Assault doors unfolded at the torpedo’s tip like an iron flower. Smoke flooded into the compartment as the restraints whipped back into the walls. The mutants moved first, ripping free in a shower of chain links. They sprinted away, clawed feet shaking the deck as they ran. Karoz and his pack followed. The growl of revving chainblades filled the air. Ahriman paused, trying to calm his mind, then followed.

A chamber spread out before his eyes. He could see vast drums wound with chains extending to the ceiling far above. The torpedo had punctured one of the chamber’s walls, flinging the semi-molten remains of the ship’s hull across the floor. Fires burned amongst hummocks of wreckage. There were corpses, too: servitors scrabbling on broken mechanical legs.

The Harrowing pack was moving ahead of him, firing into the smoke. Ahriman followed, his bolter covering angles in precise arcs. He forced his mind into a pattern of calm and extended his senses through the warp. As ever, the once so easy act made him feel sick. He allowed his mind to flow down ducts and passages, like a light reaching out into the darkness, building an image of the ship around him. The boarding torpedo had struck true; they were close to the bridge, as intended. Others had struck further down the hull, spilling the rest of the first wave into the deeper spaces of the ship. He pulled his attention back to his immediate surroundings.

+Horkos,+ Maroth’s thoughts breathed into Ahriman’s. +Our lord wishes to know your cadre’s disposition.+

+Beachhead achieved three decks below the bridge. No significant resistance at present, but likely to increase closer to target.+

+Advance.+

Ahriman paused, his mind unsure of what it had just heard. For a moment while Maroth had spoken, he had thought he had heard another voice whisper in his thoughts. For a moment, he thought it had told him to turn back.

+Horkos!+ The thought shouted into his mind.

+It will be done,+ replied Ahriman. A crude thought form of contempt and disgust was Maroth’s only reply.

Ahriman did not give the order to the warriors with him; they were already scrambling over debris towards half-glimpsed doorways. He remembered the mind whisper telling him to turn back. Ahriman shook his head and ran after the howls of the pack.

Carmenta stopped running. The beast turned its head towards her. Its shoulders bunched and she saw muscle gather across the ribs of its torso. The doors to the bridge waited in the distance, at the far end of the half-kilometre-long antechamber. She had been running towards the doors when the beast had walked out in front of her. It had paced slowly into the centre of the chamber, broken chains rattling behind it.

Where its face should have been, a blank plate of metal stared at her. A spiked iron collar circled its neck. It straightened to twice her height. Tattoos writhed across its body, changing shape and colour. Her vision pixellated as she looked at the patterns. The beast’s body began to quiver. Carmenta thought that it looked as if it were trying to scream.

It brought a shaking limb up to its masked face. Its hand opened with a clatter of sharp edges. Slowly, almost delicately, it pulled its clawed fingers down its faceplate. Deep scratches wept blood. Carmenta glanced behind her. She could see other figures sprinting down the wide passage towards them. Guttural howls filled the air as gunfire lit the long chamber. Explosions blossomed on the deck by her feet. She felt shrapnel patter off the metal of her limbs.

She looked back at the beast. In her mind, something changed. She felt suddenly calm, rational, as if the panic of before had belonged to another person. This was it. It was over, finally. She would not reach the bridge. She heard a cry inside her to keep running, to reach her ship, to reach her child. Part of her was screaming at herself, cursing herself for weakness, but she remained still. It was as if the panicked need to reunite with the ship belonged to someone else, as if a door in her mind had closed on the voice of another mind trapped within. Listening to the shouts inside half of her skull, she felt relief that it was all over, that she would be free of the Titan Child at last.

The beast charged. It made no sound, but she imagined it howling as its steps sang on the metal floor.

You have killed us, said a voice in her head. She felt her arms trembling. She could feel something within her willing her feet to run. She held still. You have killed us both, screamed the voice.

No, she thought to herself. I will be free now. She drew a breath to speak. Her voice was one of the few things she had never wanted replaced by machine components. Her father had said she had a beautiful voice. It was the only thing she could remember him saying.

‘Thank you,’ she said to the beast as it charged to meet her.

Lightning struck the beast as it reached for Carmenta. It touched the tips of the beast’s fingers and leapt up its arm. The beast stumbled, caged in jagged lines so bright that Carmenta’s eyes had to dim to near blackness. Its skin blistered and peeled. Its metal mask glowed, flesh cooking around its edge. It swung its arms as if trying to swat away a swarm of stinging insects. Three explosive shells hit it at the same moment and pulled the muscle from its torso. The next volley hammered through its faceplate and turned its head to bone splinters and red vapour. It collapsed, its muscles shivering to stillness as its blood spread.

She looked to her side where a passage mouth opened. Astraeos was striding towards her, his three brothers following in his wake. Glowing cables and crystal nodes haloed his face. Frost covered the shoulders of his armour and ran down his arm to the tip of his sword. His brothers were still firing, hammering volleys into figures approaching across the chamber. She could see fatigue on his blunt face, and the drop of blood crusting at the corner of his mouth. He was muttering. A veil of cold light shimmered in front of him. Beside Astraeos, his brothers had locked into firing postures, lacing the approach with bolter fire.

‘Go,’ called Astraeos. Fatigue and effort edged his voice. She looked to him; his eyes remained on the spectral veil of energy at the tip of his sword and the closing shapes beyond.

She thought of his face when she had first seen it: coated in ice, the aura of the stasis field leaching all colour from his skin. It had been an impulse to take the survivors from the wreck of their ship, and a risk to release them. They could have tried to take the ship from her, but Astraeos and his three brothers had rewarded her whim with an oath. She never asked what doom they fled from, and they had kept their oath. In all her life, it was one of the few promises to her that remained unbroken.

‘Go,’ shouted Astraeos again. ‘There are others coming. I can sense them getting closer. If you cannot do something, then there is no way out of this.’

She felt her mouth open to say that it was over, that there was no way back. Then her vision fizzed with static and a screaming wave of panic flooded her mind.

I cannot fail, she thought. I will not let us die. Not now. Somewhere behind the rolling wave of emotion, another voice cried in denied anger. She did not listen to it. She began to run towards the bridge.

Something struck Ahriman’s shoulder and exploded. He was falling, his head filled with a high-pitched whine. His armour rang as he hit the floor. The helmet systems cut out, leaving him in darkness with the sound of his own breath. He could feel blood, thick and sticky, rolling down the inside of his right arm. Sound crackled in his ear and the noise of the battle returned. Somewhere close to him, Karoz was howling. There was another burst of fire, a familiar sound of a serrated stream of detonations.

Bolt-rounds. Ahriman extended his mind and felt the psyches of their attackers burning like an iron-shackled sun. Space Marines, he thought. Not the Harrowing, but the minds of true Space Marines. Maroth has his wish; I will die here.

And why not let it end here? He had fled and hidden, falling into darkness for a lifetime since his banishment, and for what? He had nothing beside the dust of his ideals and the shell of his life. He should have let himself fade to nothing long before now.

I am fate, come round at last. The words echoed in his mind, and he suddenly felt cold, as if he had looked into a dark doorway and seen eyes staring back.

His helmet display cut back in, strobing with the flash of gunfire. Damage icons glowed red at the corners of his sight. He picked himself up from the deck and looked at the unfolding battle. A long chamber extended in front of and above him. Bronze plating covered its walls and ceiling, stained by verdigris. Starlight shone down in thin ropes from narrow windows high above. Twenty of the Harrowing and their slave beasts were advancing towards the high doors at the far end of the chamber. Fire bloomed around their silhouettes. In the distance, he could see the muzzle flash of bolters. As Ahriman watched, a cluster of rounds hit one of the Harrowing. The warrior fell, his chestplate cracked open, his hearts beating blood into the air.

Karoz let out a howl from the middle of the pack and bounded forwards. Explosions traced his steps but the champion did not slow. Black coils of living smoke rose from his armour as he moved. Ahriman could taste the iron reek of it through his helmet seals. A Space Marine crouched behind the corpse of a dead slave beast, still firing as the champion charged. The rounds opened Karoz’s chest in a spray of meat and armour.

Karoz did not stop. The Space Marine was still firing when Karoz leapt over the slave beast’s corpse and cut downwards. The Space Marine swayed to one side and the chainglaive’s teeth sprayed sparks from the deck. Blood fell from Karoz, smoking in the air. He straightened, and Ahriman could see his lacerated hearts still beating in the wet cavity of his chest. He reached up and peeled off his helm, and the face beneath had too many eyes and mouths for anything born a human.

The Space Marine took a slow step back, dropping his bolter, and drew a blade from his waist. Karoz laughed with all the mouths of his changed face. He raised the glaive in mocking salute. The Space Marine lunged. Karoz punched the tip of the glaive into the Space Marine’s breastplate and rammed it forwards until the chain teeth chewed through the warrior’s chest.

A flare of light hit Karoz from the side. It was so bright that it scored into Ahriman’s retinas and mind. Psy-fire. Karoz reeled, his armour and the skin of his face dribbling to the deck like tar. Ahriman looked again at the Space Marines, opened his senses and saw what he had missed before. A psyker, a battle psyker, with a mind so focused that it was like a blade. How had he not seen it before? It reminded him of something, something he had lost long ago. Something was about to happen, something that he could feel press against his mind even as he tried to shut it out. He started forwards.

In front of him, Karoz’s pack charged after their champion. The psyker facing Karoz drew a blade and sliced Karoz from throat to hip. Ahriman could taste that blow: cold wind and bitter iron. The Harrowing initiate fell. The two remaining Space Marines flanked the psyker, firing into the charging pack. Two more of the Harrowing fell. Ahriman was a dozen paces away. He could feel it now, a rising beat in the warp like a monstrous heart pounding to life.

Then Karoz stood. He lifted from the deck, as if pulled by strings. Black fluid fell from him in thick ropes. A mouth opened in the charred lump of his head. It grinned with needle teeth. Something pink and mucus-covered twitched in the open wound of his chest. An eye blinked open on the pulsing heart. Its iris was the blue of a noon sky.

The creature that had been Karoz roared and a thousand mouths and eyes opened across its body. Its shadow spread across the floor, eating the thin starlight, as Karoz towered towards the ceiling. Ahriman felt the physical details of the chamber blur, as if fading into the background behind a growing fire. He could see frost clotting the blood on the deck. Some of the Harrowing kept running, but more dropped to the deck, their bodies spasming. Then the shadow met them and swallowed them down without a cry. The daemon that had been Karoz loomed over the chamber. Beneath it, the light of the psyker’s sword guttered out like a blown candle. He saw the psyker’s face, pale, surrounded by a psy-hood, his failing blade still gripped in his hand.

The daemon turned towards Ahriman and looked at him with a thousand eyes.

‘Ahriman,’ it said, in a voice of whispers and laughter.

No, cried a voice inside his mind. But the voice fell away as power rushed through him, carrying the colours of memories. He could smell the dust of the plain beneath the Tower of Magnus, could see his brothers in a thousand flickering glimpses: their flesh bursting from their armour, their bodies dissolving into liquid and hardening into nightmare. He saw Ohrmuzd, his true brother, lost long ago. Then he saw a face, a face he did not know, a face in a horned helm with eyes that burned like dying stars.

Ahriman’s hand was rising, light dancing on his fingers. His mind ascended through patterns he had tried to forget.

The daemon reached towards Ahriman.

+No.+ A tongue of white flame burst from Ahriman’s hand. Dead words and occult formulae flickered at the fire’s edges like the flutter of wings. It cut through the daemon in a single bright line. For a second the daemon reeled, and then the flames leapt across its shadowed body. It shrieked and cried in voices from Ahriman’s memory: Ohrmuzd, Lemuel, Amon. The shrieks rose higher and higher as the shadow dissolved with a sound like the chuckle of wind blowing across a plain of dust.

II
TITAN CHILD

Ahriman smelt what they had done to the prisoner before he saw it with his eyes. The stink of blood and raw meat had met his nose as soon as the cell door had opened. They had hung the prisoner by his skin. A wire-covered lamp soaked his dangling body in yellow light. Rusted hooks punctured his back and arms and the skin of his hands was gone. The exposed flesh wept pale fluid as it tried to heal. A bloodshot eye fixed on Ahriman as he stepped into the cell. They had taken the other eye, he noted. Blood streaked the right cheek under the empty eye socket, and two wounds clotted on the prisoner’s forehead. Ahriman saw two metal studs glinting on the spattered floor.

Gzrel had given the prisoner and his brother Space Marines to Maroth. Clearly, the soothsayer had decided to try and break the Space Marine’s body before he started on his will. No doubt the skin of the prisoner’s hands now hung from Maroth’s armour.

‘Why did you come?’ asked the prisoner, his voice a rasping growl. For a moment Ahriman did not reply. Why had he come? Gzrel had been reluctant to let Ahriman near his latest prize, but Ahriman had persisted and Gzrel had relented. That had taken subtlety and was not without danger. Why had he taken that risk? He had thought it was to find out what the prisoner recalled of the battle. Looking into the Space Marine’s maimed and bloody face, he wondered if he had another motive.

‘What do you remember?’ asked Ahriman. After the daemonic manifestation, Gzrel and the rest of the Harrowing had descended on them. Some of the survivors of Karoz’s pack had told of the shadow that had taken the champion, and of the fire that had banished it. Gzrel had presumed that it had been the prisoner who had burned the daemon. That feat had impressed the lord of the Harrowing; he had decided to keep the prisoner and his brothers. He had asked the Space Marines to kneel to him, but they had remained unbowed. That defiance had led the prisoner to this chamber, and cost him an eye.

The prisoner curled his lip, pale teeth glinting from bloodstained flesh.

‘I remember my brother dying. I remember his chest splitting. I remember the stink of the warp. I remember a shadow.’ Ahriman saw a glint in the prisoner’s eye; his aura was fury-bright, rage and power chained behind fraying will. ‘I remember, sorcerer.’

Ahriman nodded.

He knows, thought Ahriman. He saw and knows what I truly am. He had not brought a weapon, but that would not stop him silencing the prisoner. His fingers twitched, and he felt the thought find an echo in the warp. It would be so easy. No, he thought. His mind relaxed, and the warp settled.

‘My lord wishes your service. He senses great power in you.’

‘Is that why you are here, sorcerer?’ Again, Ahriman heard the hate in the words.

‘I serve my lord,’ said Ahriman. ‘You are a psyker, trained for battle and destruction. He has a taste for the oaths of psykers, and you intrigue him much.’

The prisoner stirred his bared muscles and the chains clinked. Fresh blood ran from where the hooks looped through the skin.

‘Your lord is a slave to lies and ignorance.’ Red-flecked spit came out with the words. ‘My oath is my own, and I will not give it to him.’

‘There are worse things.’

‘Are there? To you, sorcerer, perhaps. You fear the truth, I see that without needing to see your face or hear you say it. I do not fear truth, though it will kill me.’

Words I would once have said myself, thought Ahriman. ‘Yet you live.’

The prisoner heaved up a bloody laugh, which shook the chains. ‘Yes, I live. Your lie bought me that. Do you wish thanks for it?’

Ahriman was silent for a moment, and then he reached up and pulled his helmet from his head. Blue eyes set in a face of smooth olive skin met the prisoner’s single eye and gouged socket.

‘My lord believes you are powerful, and you are,’ said Ahriman. Without his helm his voice was soft and resonant.

‘I am no traitor, and I will not serve your lord.’

‘You are no traitor, yet this is an outcast Imperial ship,’ said Ahriman, ‘and you have the mark of one who has already broken oaths.’ It was true the Titan Child at first glance was not a rotten renegade like the Blood Crescent, but it was no lost loyalist either.

‘I broke no oaths.’

‘But you are here, an outcast from the Imperium that created you. Is there a difference?’ asked Ahriman. The prisoner spat, the red-flecked phlegm hissing as it ate into the metal floor.

‘To you, sorcerer, maybe not.’ The prisoner let his head loll to his chest, his eyelids closed. Ahriman nodded; he would get nothing more. He turned and walked to the cell door, his hand rising to rap on the dark metal. He paused and turned back to look at the prisoner.

‘I am sorry for your brother,’ said Ahriman. ‘The other two live, though for how long I cannot say.’

The prisoner looked up. Ahriman saw the hard angles of his aura blur for a second before it snapped back into its diamond-like lines. The prisoner gave a small nod.

‘What is your name, sorcerer?’

Ahriman looked down at the black helm in his hand. Perhaps there were some that might still remember his name, but he was not Ahriman, and he would not be again.

‘I am Horkos,’ he said.

The prisoner gave a laugh that turned into a racking cough. ‘Another lie. Do not worry. You saved my life. That is a bond I would not have, but one I will honour. I will not break your lie.’ The prisoner paused and took a breath. ‘My name is Astraeos, sorcerer, and I place my silence on your conscience.’

Ahriman did not reply and left the prisoner hanging in the gloom.

The Harrowing were making the Titan Child their own. Ahriman’s path back to his quarters led almost the entire six-kilometre length of the ship. With every step and turn he saw another sign of the Harrowing’s fangs sinking deeper into the vessel. They had struggled to wake the Titan Child’s systems, but that had not stopped them marking their claim to its soul. Servitors and whipped slave gangs had cleared the slaughter done by the battle, but only so that the Harrowing could replace it with more. The stink of charring flesh and soot was thick on the air. On the open decks and wider passageways, Ahriman came across packs of the Harrowing clustered around crude braziers and heaped fires of corpses. Flesh burned on those fires, and the Harrowing howled beside them as the fat and skin boiled and smoke spread in greasy clouds. They shouted guttural chants and poured dark liquid on the deck in libation.

Ahriman skirted the baying packs, walking on the edge of the firelight, closing his ears to the howls and his eyes to the shapes which coiled in the pyre smoke. He changed his route through the ship, avoiding the hangars and cargo spaces where the Harrowing gathered. He wanted to clear his mind, to consider his words with Astraeos, to understand the half-formed inferences and fears that clustered on the margins of his thoughts. The mental disciplines that once were so much a part of him would have given him swift clarity, but they were tools he could not wield again. He would try and find quiet, and perhaps in that he would find peace.

Peace eluded him. Even in the side passages and walkways he saw the signs of the Titan Child’s changing fortune. It seemed to have no truly living human crew, only servitors, and the Harrowing had marked all those that he saw. Those which still had human faces had been flayed of skin, so that they grinned at Ahriman with wet faces of sinew. Those without true faces had skins hammered over their visors so that their eye-sensors gazed from stretched eye-holes and gaping mouths. They had brought slaves from the Blood Crescent, too. They shambled past in long lines, pus weeping from the brands on their grey skin. Most had laboured on the Blood Crescent for their entire lives. Crammed into living spaces, breathing pollution-fogged air, never seeing the light of a true sun, they existed to toil. It was a pitiful life and one that would grow no lighter on the Titan Child. Already the mutant overseers stalked the walkways and lower decks, their beaten armour glistening with blood and hung with the skin of those who had in some way displeased their masters.

Ahriman had seen such things many times, as if there were a limit to the imagination of atrocity. It was a truth he had observed time and time again in the fate of those who fell to the powers of the warp. The lowest and most basic natures surfaced first and most strongly, like impurities rising to the white-hot surface of a smelting crucible.

And what of me? he thought, as he hurried through a column-lined hold. Pyres burned here too and chants cackled through the air. I have fallen as far as these wretches, further perhaps; how can I consider myself unchanged? I am no better than them; their spirits run with rage, mine with pride. We are the same, only the path of our fall was different.

‘Did you like my work?’ The voice purred from the shadows. Ahriman stopped, realising that he had allowed his awareness of where he was to wander. Maroth stepped out from beside a metal-sided column. The soothsayer was showing his filed teeth, but no one would have called the expression a smile. One of his hands rested on the pommel of a sheathed sword, the other ran a string of knucklebones through his fingers. The bones clicked against the armour of his gauntlet. Ahriman could smell power on him, rank and thick like the breath of a daemon.

‘Your work?’ said Ahriman, though he knew that Maroth meant Astraeos. The soothsayer smiled and again the bones clicked through his fingers.

‘I ate the eye,’ he said. ‘Did you know, Horkos, it was once thought that to eat an eye would grant wisdom?’ He shrugged, the tanned skins across his shoulders flapping against the plates of his armour. ‘We will have to see. Perhaps you should try the other, if we take it from him?’

Ahriman remained silent, his head bowed in respect.

The eating of an eye does not grant wisdom, you fool, he thought. The sacrificer of an eye is the one who gains the boon, not the taker.

‘Of the other two captives… Well, if they do not bow to us, then perhaps we can see what more than one eye will do.’

Once I would have taught you the depths of your ignorance. The thought snarled inside Ahriman’s mind, and he had to struggle to suppress it. He was Horkos, the oathbreaker, the lowest of renegades; he did not have such thoughts.

‘Yes, master,’ he said. Maroth chuckled, the sound like the rattle of dry scales.

‘Good. Come with me. There is something else I wish you to appreciate.’

Darkness folded around Ahriman as he followed Maroth. After a few minutes, Ahriman could tell they were making for the outer hull, as the passages got narrower and colder, and the blast doors thicker. Eventually the thin air gave way to hard vacuum, and they had to don their helmets. Ships like the Titan Child let parts of their outer hull drain of heat and atmosphere. Like layers of dead skin, these void-cold sections provided a buffer against damage and drew no power.

It was as they walked down a lightless passage towards a sealed door that he felt his skin prickle and smelt an impossible copper tang in the helmet’s air. He stopped, his eyes fixed on the door ahead. There was something behind that door, something that radiated malevolence and hunger like heat from a forge.

‘You feel it?’ said Maroth, turning to look back at Ahriman. The front of Maroth’s helm was shaped into the muzzle of a hound, its eyes glowing in the gloom. Behind the hound’s snarl, Ahriman was sure Maroth was smiling.

‘What is it?’ asked Ahriman, without moving. He had begun to close off portions of his mind, armouring his spirit with passive layers of protection.

‘Come and see,’ said Maroth, and stepped towards the closed door. It was small, and reinforced with thick spars of metal. In the red light of Maroth’s eyes the surface of the door sparkled. Smeared marks covered it: eyes, spirals, toothed letters and hooked lines, all daubed in dark frozen liquid. To Ahriman they were little more than childish scrawl. Maroth raised a hand, activated the lock, and pulled the door open.

Behind the door there was darkness so complete that it looked like a hole leading to oblivion. Ahriman could smell rotten flesh and dank water, the stench filling his mouth and nose though there was no air to convey it. Maroth looked back at him, raised a beckoning hand and stepped through. Ahriman paused. Every part of his being was screaming to run, to turn away from the waiting door, but he could not, he had to follow. Maroth would not let him escape this revelation. He stepped forwards and through the door.

Blackness. For a second he could see nothing except the icons pulsing on the edge of his helmet display. Then shapes appeared, outlined in pale light, though there was no illumination. He saw Maroth, the soothsayer’s face turned towards him, eyes dim coals in an iron hound face. The other shape floated in space, its splayed limbs tethered by a web of chains to unseen walls. Rags covered its body, though he could still see the bulk of muscle and definition of a Space Marine’s frame. The skin of its face and hands was death-white and hairless. Crude stitches walked across its chest, closing a ragged fissure in muscle and bone. Strips of tanned skin hung from pins in its flesh, each crawling with burned marks that twisted as the eye caught them. Ahriman tasted bile in his mouth. The suspended figure stared back at him with black holes that had been eyes.

‘Is it not magnificent?’ said Maroth, the transmission of his voice edged with static. The creature turned its head and fixed its empty eyes on the soothsayer.

Run. Run now, you fool. The thought screamed in Ahriman’s head. The creature opened its mouth in a grin that went too wide and showed too many teeth. A black tongue ran across the glinting needle-sharp points. It hissed: a noise that should have been impossible in the airless chamber.

‘The Space Marine that Karoz killed,’ breathed Ahriman.

‘Its name was Cadar, I think. Yes. It was grievously injured, but its final thread of life had not been cut when it came to me. Very strong.’ Maroth nodded as if in approval. ‘The near-dead flesh made a pleasing vessel.’

Ahriman could see it: the Space Marine’s body was a sleeve of flesh, its spirit scooped out and its form a mask of skin. A daemon coiled in the husk that remained, its essence night-black, oozing hunger and malevolence. It was not intelligent; it was pure instinct and desire. The bindings Maroth had placed on it pinned it in place like an insect to a table. Ahriman had misjudged the soothsayer; he was ignorant and crude, but he had acquired and applied lore Ahriman did not believe him capable of grasping. The fruit of that achievement was an abomination.

He looked away from the creature and saw that Maroth was watching him.

‘It is mine, and answers to me alone,’ said Maroth.

He wanted me to see this, Ahriman thought, to see the power he commands. It is not enough that he wields it; others must witness it and be awed. He bowed low, knowing it was what was expected. Above him the creature hissed. This will be the weapon he uses to destroy Gzrel and take the Harrowing. Did he bring me here to test its potency? Am I to be its first victim?

Maroth let Ahriman kneel for a long moment.

‘Rise, Horkos.’

Ahriman stood and looked into Maroth’s red eyes. No, he thought. I am his first ally.

‘Now you see,’ said Maroth, and turned to leave. Behind him Ahriman followed, feeling the empty gaze of the creature on the back of his skull.

Ahriman returned to his new quarters alone. Gzrel had given the space to him, but it was as much a calculated insult as a reward for service. At once vast and cramped, it was not so much a chamber as a void left in the structure of the ship. One wall towered into the darkness above, its surface covered with rivets and weld seams. The other walls met it at different angles and heights. Pipes ran through the space as if hurrying to other more vital areas. Some were as tall as a man, others no thicker than a finger; they snaked in bundles across the floor and spanned the space like vines. Thick, red-edged light oozed from the flames he had lit in bowls of machine oil. The room reeked of warm metal, oil smoke and stagnant air. Grey grease and dust covered the floor in a thick layer, muffling the sounds of his steps as he walked through the circular hatch. He looked up, his eyes reaching into the gloom beyond the tangled canopy of pipes. Air, coolant, fuel, water and waste, all rushing through this forgotten fissure in a ship that stretched to six kilometres and could house thirty thousand souls. He stood at the heart of the ship, yet in a forgotten place. It was supposed to be a mark of his place within the Harrowing, but the isolation was almost pleasing.

He closed the hatch and turned, the barest hint of fatigue in his movements. His head ached, the presence of the bound creature lingering like a bruise on his mind. He thought for a moment of Astraeos; would he keep his silence?

If he told Gzrel…

The lord of the Harrowing would not believe him.

Perhaps.

It would have been better to silence him.

He shook his head again. He needed to think, to reflect, and to remember.

Quietly he began to speak the formulae, feeling the syllables resonate in his mouth, tasting the subtle shifts in the aether around him. He walked as he whispered, his feet tracing a spiralling pattern with his steps. He had already placed the lamps in the correct positions and left them burning to prepare the way. Anyone looking at them would not have realised their significance. The pattern they formed, the steps he took and the focus of his mind built a structure within the warp that would close the chamber to all observation. The ritual pulled on memories from a place inside him that he had long ago walled off, but he needed privacy.

The air took on a dense, charged quality; the chamber swam in front of his eyes, and he could hear a sound like sand skittering over dry stone. Then, with a final step and a final word, the chamber snapped back into focus and silence fell.

He nodded to himself, as if to fix the conviction in place, and turned to a sealed chest that stood in a corner. The smell of dust filled his nose as he opened the pressed metal lid. Within lay skeins of pale fabric layered over bulky objects, their shapes lost beneath the material like buildings under thick winter snow. He pulled the fabric out and looked at what lay beneath.

It was not much. Anyone looking at them would have thought them battered trinkets taken from a battlefield or burned temple. There was a hook-topped rod, its surface blackened and blistered, its shaft splintered; a carved scarab the size of a human hand, its polished stone chipped and worn; a fragment of polished metal in the shape of an oak leaf. Beside them lay the helmet, the faceplate looking up at Ahriman with blank eyes. It was red. A plate of tarnished bronze extended from above the eyeline to beneath the chin, forming a plough-like muzzle broken by two red crystal eyes. Two flowing lines of black lacquer ran beneath the left eye like tracks of tears. A forked bronze crest rose from the forehead. It was grimy and battered, as if it had been pulled off after battle and left to fade under a layer of dust.

Ahriman looked down at the face of the helmet for a second, then reached in and lifted it out of the chest. He held it, staring into its dirt-clouded eyes. He had wondered many times why he kept it and the other flotsam of another life. It was a risk; there might be some who remembered the Thousand Sons, who might recognise the helm, the scarab and the broken rod. There might even be some who remembered the name Ahriman. More, they were a reminder to himself of who he had been and what he had done.

That, of course, was also why he kept them.

He was an exile many times over, a betrayer and destroyer of everything that had given his existence meaning. The Thousand Sons Legion had broken the decree of the Emperor against the use of psychic powers. They had done so believing they served the Imperium that had created them, and for that transgression their home world had burned. A few had survived, plucked out of the inferno by the will of their primarch, Magnus the Red. But it had been the power of daemons that had saved them, and the world they had fled to was deep in the Eye of Terror. On that world of dust, reality and the power of the warp mingled and blurred. The barrier between wish and truth had vanished. Magnus, having ascended to something beyond flesh, had called their new home the Planet of the Sorcerers. The occult powers of the Thousand Sons had flourished, but so had the mutation and corruption of their flesh.

The Thousand Sons had begun to devolve into creatures of inhuman form, the instability of their genetic heritage given new potency by the powers of the warp. Armour had become flesh which blinked with lidless eyes. Hands and limbs dissolved into claws or boneless tentacles. Minds of refined thought and purpose became cauldrons of insanity, boiling with storms made of waking dreams. Some had seen it as a blessing, as a gift from the Great Powers which dwelt within the warp, or as a stage in their evolution towards demigodhood. Ahriman had seen the change for what it was: the slow death of everything they had been and the denial of everything they had aspired to be.

In his flame-lit chambers, Ahriman could see his Legion brothers as if they were standing in front of him. He had tried to save them. He found others that agreed that their Legion was on the brink of destruction. Together they had formed a cabal and began their work hidden from the eye of Magnus. Amongst the conspirators had been the most powerful psykers from a Legion of warlocks. Their end, as was always the way of the Thousand Sons, was to overthrow darkness with knowledge. Under Ahriman’s guidance, they had created a cure for the mutation which was consuming the Legion. They had called it the Rubric.

The Rubric. He ran the phrase around his mind. A monolith to hubris.

He had believed it would work, that it would undo the change that was destroying his Legion. Instead he had simply destroyed his brothers with his own hand. Some had survived. The others had become spirit and dust bound inside their armour, little more than automata, echoes remaining to remind him of his own failure. They had become the Rubricae. Magnus had banished Ahriman and his cabal from the Planet of the Sorcerers. From that moment he was no longer a Thousand Son, no longer Ahzek Ahriman. He was nothing, a ghost living out his penance on the margins of hell.

He had not seen any of his brothers since, though he had heard tales of sorcerers or warlords that could only be Thousand Sons. He knew of only one who might still live, and then only in the loosest sense. He might be the last, the rest fallen to battle or madness, or worse. Looking into the face of the dust-covered helm, Ahriman shuddered. One day he would die, and time would finally bury his existence.

No. He thought of the daemon speaking his name as it loomed above him. No. I am not free yet. Something remembers that I exist. Something is coming for me after all this time.

He was not breathing. Inside his armour his skin suddenly prickled with cold. He let the helmet drop from his hand back into the chest and stood. Something was coming. The warp was millpond-still, but he knew. The certainty was like the touch of a hand on his back in the dark. Something had found him, something in the great ocean of the warp. It was coming for him. He thought of the Planet of the Sorcerers, of the light of the ninth sun spilling across his open grimoires, of the presence behind him that should not have been there. The memory formed in his mind. No, not that, he thought, and the thought iced his breath into cold mist. Frost had formed on his fingertips.

I am fate come round at last. He started, looking round the chamber. His eyes flicked between the twisting pipes and the coiling shadows cast by the oil flames. Nothing.

‘Speak.’ His voice was thin, and the space seemed to swallow the word. ‘By the bindings upon this place, I command you to speak.’

Silence.

The flames seemed to flutter and dim. The sound of the ship, so like a heart, grew louder in his ears. He took a step back. He was muttering, the phrases coming to his lips from the depths of memory. All thought about the past, penitence and punishment faded. He was in the grip of an instinct more ancient than any legend or lore, the instinct of a man in a forest alone with the darkness and the sound of wolves.

The wheel handle on the circular entrance hatch began to turn. He could hear something scratching on the metal of the hatch.

Let me return to dust, he thought. Let me drift to the bottom and fade to nothing. Let that be my fate. But another voice, clear and cynically precise, spoke in his mind: Yet you still cling to life. Have you ever considered why?

The wheel handle stopped turning. The hatch began to open, grating on unoiled hinges. His hands and body were still, the chained storms of aetheric energy foaming about him, waiting to be unleashed.

‘You are the one they call Horkos?’ The voice was female and came from a slot in a cracked mask of red lacquer. Ahriman was silent, watching the figure that stepped through the hatch. She was tall and moved with a precise smoothness that reminded him of a pair of callipers tracing arcs across parchment. A hooded robe of ragged black fabric covered her form, dragging on the floor as she stepped closer. Mechadendrites attached to her back released the hatch’s outer handle and coiled to her back like metal-scaled snakes. Her eyes were glowing green augmetics.

‘I have been sent by your master,’ she said, and he could not miss the bitterness in the words. Still he did not move. Shape and form were not binding on those who knew the mysteries of the warp, or the creatures it spawned. ‘He sent me to summon you to his presence.’

She stepped closer, and now he realised that she wore no mask; the cracked red lacquer was her face. He also saw the collar of beaten iron circling her neck. Jagged runes ran across its surface, their shapes shadowed by the blood that had dried in their recesses. It was a slave collar, sealed around the neck while still hot. The runes were Maroth’s work, crude channels for pain and coercion. Ahriman let his mind brush hers, felt the hard lines of implanted logic and the rage simmering beneath.

‘I was sent to bring you,’ she said. There was a note of defiance in her voice. She would be no easy slave for the Harrowing. There was an imperious poise to her, a quality that made him fancy that he could see a glimmer of scorn in her artificial gaze. She was no tech-priest of Mars, though, he could tell that at a glance. She was something else, another outcast or renegade. Fragmented facts assembled in his mind and he realised what she was, at least in part.

‘You are the tech-priest, Carmenta. This was your ship, was it not?’ She did not reply. At her back her mechadendrites spasmed briefly, as if responding to a suddenly repressed impulse. ‘You should be careful,’ he said as he bent down to repack and seal the crate. ‘Gzrel does not like defiance that does not serve him. He likes his slaves broken and obedient.’

‘I see why you survived so long.’ He almost laughed, but instead shook his head and picked up his black beak-fronted helm. Most humans looked on Space Marines with awe and fear; she showed no such reaction. Amongst creatures like Gzrel and his Harrowing, any other response was dangerous. She would learn, or die before she did.

‘Do you know why my lord summons me?’ he asked as he walked to the open hatch.

‘Another ship has found us,’ she said. He almost stopped in surprise. If the ship had come from the warp then he should have felt the psychic bow wave as it ripped back into reality. Also there were no alarms, no shaking of the Titan Child as it fired its weapons. When ships met in these regions, the outcome was always written in blood.

Carmenta filled the silence, as if sensing part of his questions. ‘It is a warship,’ she said.

Gzrel must be nervous, he thought. The Harrowing were still struggling to wake the Titan Child, even with its former mistress as a slave, and the Blood Crescent was a carrion thief rather than a warrior. Gzrel would not want to risk his prize in a fight he could not be sure of winning.

‘The ship has hailed us and requested that they send an emissary to speak with your lord,’ continued Carmenta.

‘They wish to treat with us?’

‘They say they are seeking something and are willing to give great rewards if aided.’ Ahriman felt suddenly chill, but could not say why.

‘He has called us to discuss whether to receive this emissary, then?’ he asked as he stepped through the hatch after Carmenta. She made a low sound that might have been a laugh.

‘No. Your lord has agreed. The emissary is already here.’

For a moment Ahriman thought he heard a chuckle fading in the gloom of his chamber before the hatch clanged shut.

III
VISITATION

They were waiting for Ahriman. Gzrel had decided to meet the emissary in a high vaulted chamber in the Titan Child’s jutting bridge tower. Perhaps it had once been a forum or gathering hall, but the Harrowing had made it a throne room. Candles of human tallow burned at the foot of the walls, dribbling melted pools of fat across the black stone floor. The light they cast was spluttering, smoke-edged, and stank of cooking meat. The dead hung from the ceiling on hooks and rusted chains: dried corpses, their skin shrunk over screaming skulls; fresh heads still thick with clotted blood and flies; pale torsos, their limbs and heads severed by neat cuts. The symbol of a fang-lipped chalice covered the floor, hacked into the stone with heavy blows. At the far end of the chamber sat the throne. Raised on tiers of black iron, it had been the command seat of an Imperial warship, but its systems had been stripped and its metal frame draped with tanned hides of a dozen species. Skulls of those same species lined the plinth it sat on, their yellowed domes spattered with script and arcane patterns.

Ahriman entered from a side door, and Gzrel flicked a bladed finger to indicate a place at the foot of the throne. The lord was nervous and tension hung in the air like the static before the arrival of a storm.

‘Come and stand with us, Horkos,’ Gzrel growled, and fumes coughed from his armour. The rest were already there. Xiatsis and Cottadaron stood one step below Gzrel, flanking the approach to their lord. Two champions also stood next to the throne, their chainblades resting point-down at their feet. Maroth stood beside Gzrel, one step down so that he could lean across the massive arm of the throne to whisper in his lord’s ear. Ahriman was the last and the least of Gzrel’s circle and so stood the furthest from the lord.

Gzrel nodded, satisfaction and impatience gliding over his features. All his vassals were in place, a blunt show of power and majesty to the unknown emissary.

‘Be aware of any trickery,’ growled Gzrel. ‘This emissary is a sorcerer.’

‘And he knew we were here,’ said Maroth. ‘That concerns me, my lord.’

‘Did they come for us, or is it a chance meeting?’ croaked Cottadaron.

‘We must learn the answers from this audience,’ said Gzrel, and raised a clawed hand to the two Harrowing that flanked the bronze doors.

Ahriman was suddenly aware of a presence beyond those doors, a presence that burned in the warp like a bound star. It had a shape and structure, an outline formed by disciplines that were as familiar to him as his own hands.

The guards were moving to the doors, their movements dream-slow to Ahriman’s eyes. He blinked…

…A raven rising from a plain of dust, red drops falling from its feathers, its wings swallowing the sunlight…

The doors were opening. He looked down at his hands, the vision still swimming through his mind. A sickly warmth was spreading through his body, prickling his skin, filling his mouth with the taste of nausea.

No, he thought, and the word was a desperate scream in his head. I am not that man. I failed. He wanted to run but he could not move. He looked up, as the high doors swung wide…

…The raven turned on the wind, looking at him with sapphire eyes…

A figure stepped through the door. He wore robes the white of dried bone, his armour deep red and silver-edged. Green eyes shone from a mask of bronze beneath a striped crest of crimson and white. A sword hung at his waist. Two figures followed the first. Their armour, too, was red and silver. Lapis and ivory spiralled over the casings of the boltguns held across their chests. They moved with machine-like precision, stopping a pace behind the emissary and becoming utterly still. Ahriman heard a low whispering, like words spoken just out of hearing.

Ahriman felt ice run across his skin. He knew the armour, the craft that had gone into its making, and the symbolism that had guided the maker’s hand. The emissary was a sorcerer of the Thousand Sons, and his two followers were not living warriors but Rubricae. Not alive, but denied death, they were ghost-driven shells. Seeing the blank stare of their helmet eyes, Ahriman felt his world blink to blackness…

…The chamber vanished, and for a heartbeat he saw again the raven flying in a burning sky. The raven’s cries laughed in his ears. ‘I am fate, Ahriman. I am the turning of stars, and the death of time…’

Ahriman stilled his breath, fighting to keep his mind clear. His gaze locked on the trio. Inside his mind he could feel the presence of the emissary gliding over the chamber, tasting each mind for intent and type. He forced his mind to ascend through levels of control and focus, cooling his surface thoughts to a meaningless static. He felt the emissary’s mind touch his, and almost cried out; he was seeing the face of a friend thought long dead.

Tolbek. The name sprang into his mind, and now as he looked again he recognised the subtle details of posture and stance. An adept of the Pyrae in the long-broken traditions of Prospero, Tolbek had been one of the first to join Ahriman’s cabal. Tolbek had played his part in the Rubric that destroyed their Legion and shared in their banishment. Ahriman had not seen him since.

He is alive. The thought rose in his mind with a rush of emotion. I am not alone. Inside his helm, his mouth opened and words began to form on his tongue.

But why is he here? How is he here? The questions were suddenly sharp splinters in his thoughts, and his words died in his throat. He blinked and the image came again…

…An unkindness of ravens spiralling around him, their cries rising louder and louder…

Ahriman tried to remain still, as his mind screamed. He was breathing hard. The vision had slipped into his mind like a razor. He had not experienced anything like it since his exile. And it was not over. He could feel pressure building inside his head. He heard snatches of voices, and vague images smudged his sight.

‘I come with greetings.’ Tolbek’s voice was deep and resonant, filled with authority, but Ahriman heard the edge of contempt in the tone. Gzrel must have heard it too, or noted the absence of title and obeisance. The lord of the Harrowing stirred, the blades of his claws clicking on the throne’s arms.

‘From whom do you come?’ asked Gzrel.

‘I speak for the Brotherhood of Dust,’ said Tolbek, and Ahriman glanced up to see Maroth whispering frantically in Gzrel’s ear.

‘A name I do not know,’ said Gzrel. Ahriman’s mind was racing, drawing together possibilities, memories and fears. He thought of the glowing eyes of Karoz, of the snatches of vision glimpsed in the taking of the Titan Child. He had spent lifetimes of mortal men hiding from what he had been, not knowing what became of his brothers. Now the past had found him and he could feel its threat as if it were a sword above his head.

Why not let it fall? Why not let fate end here? he thought.

Because you do not believe in that fate, Ahriman, said a voice in his mind, and he could not tell if it was his own.

‘If you can help us find what we seek, then the rewards will be great,’ said Tolbek.

‘What could you reward me with?’ Gzrel gestured to his throne and attendants.

‘Things you could not grasp in your dreams,’ said Tolbek softly, and Ahriman could see the hunger in Gzrel at the words.

‘What is it that you seek?’ asked Gzrel, and Ahriman felt the answer appear in his mind with complete certainty. It was not a trick of prophecy or a truth seized from the warp, but he knew, and the truth was a cold hand around his hearts.

‘We seek a sorcerer,’ said Tolbek.

Without considering why, Ahriman brought his mind to a point of complete focus. He felt calm, the old battle calm that he had not felt for a lifetime of exile. He felt the warp align with his thoughts. Long ago, in a time that seemed so far removed from the present as to seem a dream, he had learned the Spiral of the Corvidae. It was a discipline of future prediction, physical precision and mental control as much as it was of the blade. It was an art of killing.

Beside him, Gzrel chuckled and gestured again at his attendants.

‘Of those I have enough, but they serve me alone.’

Ahriman drew the warp to him, subtly aligning thought in patterns he had believed forgotten. He felt doors he had sealed off in his mind open. It felt like the first breath after coming to the surface of a deep sea.

No, he thought. No, I will not. But he did not stop. Senses he had kept closed opened; denied powers and possibilities sprang into his mind. He felt the warp overlay his perceptions.

Stop now before it is too late. He heard the warning in his own voice.

‘We seek the sorcerer called Ahriman,’ said Tolbek. Ahriman felt his mind register his name. His senses were alive, seeing the small movements of Tolbek’s fingers on the pommel of his sword, hearing the dull roar of the warp around him like the pounding of ocean waves.

‘For what?’ asked Gzrel, a dangerous smile splitting his face. Ahriman’s eyes settled on Tolbek, seeing his physical form overlaid with his aetheric aura. Power, a lot of power, held back like water behind a dam. Tolbek remained silent for a heartbeat; Ahriman saw his aura flicker.

‘For the settling of fates and tallies of betrayal,’ said Tolbek. Gzrel nodded slowly, Maroth whispering in his ear. Ahriman could feel the minds of the others in the room: Gzrel bloated with hunger, Maroth a tangled mess of fear and pride, the other two Harrowing sorcerers murky lumps of exaggerated emotion and vestigial power. He noted each.

‘What can you tell us of him?’ It was Maroth that spoke, his rasping voice ringing hollow in the gloom-filled air. Tolbek fixed the soothsayer with an emerald stare.

‘I see that you have nothing I seek.’ Tolbek turned and took a step towards the door.

‘I have many sorcerers in my service,’ called Gzrel, and Ahriman could hear the desire and the angered pride in the lord’s voice. ‘Perhaps you would hear the rewards that your service would earn from me.’

‘Do not be foolish,’ said Tolbek, half turning to look at Gzrel. ‘I have searched across the stars and void. I have spoken with those who would grind you to nothing with a thought. You do not have what I need, and so I go.’

A lie, thought Ahriman. He could feel Tolbek’s mind unfolding into the ship, tasting minds, searching. He fought to make his mind a mirror, his thoughts blank.

…The flicker of black feathers, and a red sun rolling through a starless sky…

Gzrel was rising from his throne. Chainblades spun to life in the hands of the guards by the door. Ahriman felt a sudden surge in the warp, a ragged wind coiling around Maroth as the soothsayer muttered guttural phrases. A second later Xiatsis and Cottadaron were also the centre of growing spirals of invisible power. Tolbek was still and silent, but to Ahriman’s eyes he was a towering shape of diamond and spreading flame. The floor began to glow around Tolbek. The candles melted to pools of pale liquid. Ahriman could feel his hearts beat inside his chest. The vision pressed against his mind. An impression of a red sun and black wings flicked across his sight. He fought the image down. His head felt like it was about to explode.

‘Do not let your pride guide you down a path you could not return from,’ said Tolbek and his voice was the soft roar of an inferno. ‘Have your sorcerers look down those future tracks – if they can. They will tell you that this meeting has ended in your favour.’ Maroth’s enchantment vanished from his lips; he was shaking, and sweat beaded on his face. He was afraid; Ahriman could tell that without looking at him. Gzrel remained standing, his fingers flexing, but he said nothing. The firestorm around Tolbek faded from the warp. The floor cracked as the stone began to cool.

Ahriman kept his gaze steady on Tolbek. He held his mind in the poised focus of battle readiness. An image of Tolbek standing on the plains of the red planet flashed in front of his mind. He remembered Tolbek turning to him as the dust settled under the rising sun. In that remembered moment, there had been fear in Tolbek’s eyes.

Tolbek paused, and then turned to look at Ahriman. The beaked front of Ahriman’s black helm hid his face, but he felt Tolbek’s gaze as if it were the barrel of a gun.

‘You,’ said Tolbek.

He knows, thought Ahriman, and felt a stab of hatred and suspicion bloom from Tolbek and then vanish as it was suppressed.

‘What is your name, crow helm?’

The question hung in the air. Gzrel was turning to look at Ahriman, words forming on his lips. Maroth was watching Tolbek, his hand moving towards his weapons. Above them, the chains stirred and clinked. Ahriman could feel the warp become suddenly still and calm.

+Brother,+ sent Ahriman.

+It is truly you,+ replied Tolbek, and Ahriman felt the surprise in the sending.

+Why have you come?+

Ahriman felt Tolbek’s mind harden, his thoughts hiding behind walls of protection.

+You must come with me.+

+To what end?+

Tolbek did not reply. Ahriman could see a glimmer of the truth through the fortress of Tolbek’s mind. There was anger, and sorrow, and bitterness. The emotions blazed like multi-coloured lights and tasted like ashes.

+I will not go with you,+ he sent. +I am not what I was and I will never allow myself to be again.+

+That choice is not yours.+

‘I am sorry, brother,’ said Ahriman.

The flame leapt from Tolbek’s hand. Ahriman froze as shock washed through him in a cold wave. For a fraction of a heartbeat, he could not believe the suddenness of Tolbek’s attack.

He is my brother, he thought, and felt the warp coiling around him, held taut, waiting for his will to give it form. It was like regaining feeling in a forgotten limb. There will be no way back after this, he thought, and felt paths of cause and effect skitter at the edge of his awareness: the old divinations of the Corvidae, so long sealed off, returning like insects drawn to light.

Ahriman was still as the fire reached for him.

He raised a hand.

Tolbek was moving, his blade in his hand, its edge blinding bright.

The flame hit Ahriman’s palm and exploded outwards.

Ahriman’s mind was a still point at the centre of a storm. Beside him Xiatsis raised his hand, energy flowing to the gesture. Ahriman felt the threat and shifted the shape of his thoughts. Xiatsis came off the floor and split apart into armour fragments and tatters of flesh. One of the Harrowing initiates beside Gzrel had taken a step towards Ahriman, the teeth of his chainsword starting to spin. With a thought, Ahriman flung the bloody cloud of bone splinters at the champion. A shard found an eyepiece and the champion went down, his chainsword shrieking to life in his dead man’s grip.

Tolbek had taken two paces towards Ahriman, fire still spraying from his hand. Ahriman’s mind reached across the warp, grasped the flame and pulled with his will. It felt like sinking his teeth into soft meat. Tolbek cried out in surprise and pain. The fire curled around Ahriman, spinning in a cyclone, turning faster and faster, roaring as it fed on the chamber’s air.

Ahriman wanted to laugh. He had refused this power for so long, had feared the doors it opened and the future it would draw him to, but now fate had found him and fear vanished. The sensation of battle and power surged through him in euphoric waves. He felt the aether respond to his mind, forming to his emotions and intellect. He could see the next few moments playing out in exact detail: the gasp of air from Maroth’s lips, Tolbek’s sword rising, the blood of the door guards bright on the floor. And through it all, he could see his actions sliding through these moments, like a razor slicing flesh. How could he have ever put this aside? The years of fear and doubt shrank in his mind as he soared above them on a god’s wings. The pressure in his head exploded and, for a blink, the chamber vanished…

…and the raven laughed, and the ground spiralled beneath him as he rose into the red sun…

Reality blinked back into place. Tolbek was charging, sword rising in a glowing crescent. At the chamber door, the two Harrowing guards had started forwards. Maroth gasped, shaking where he stood, and Ahriman could taste the fear fuming from him in black clouds. Ahriman reshaped his thoughts and the fire storm enveloped Tolbek. Tolbek was burning, his robes charring, his armour glowing with heat. Tolbek spoke a word and the flame sucked into his body like water draining into sand.

Gzrel was fast, despite his bulk. His claws reached for Ahriman, lightning coating their tips. Ahriman turned to look at Gzrel and the claws sparked across a wall of invisible force.

The Harrowing initiate on Gzrel’s right began to move, his thoughts a feral babble of instinct and rage. A part of Ahriman’s mind locked around the champion’s thoughts and squeezed. The champion began to spasm…

…‘Higher, higher,’ called the raven, and he could feel the heat of the red sun on his body as the ground vanished beneath him…

One of the Harrowing by the door fired. The bolt-round skimmed Tolbek’s shoulder and exploded. He did not stop moving. Ahriman heard the telepathic command flick from Tolbek’s mind, and saw the light in the eyes of the two Rubricae flicker. They turned towards the door and fired. The bolt shells glowed as they burrowed through the air and hit the Harrowing guard. Suddenly there was blood splattering the floor. The guard screamed, blue flames spreading across his body from his shattered chest. The Rubricae fired again and fire swallowed the second guard’s head. Ahriman could feel the hunger in the flames as they burned the guards to grey ash.

Gzrel’s claws raked across Ahriman’s kine-shield, each blow shaking the sorcerer’s focus. He turned and looked at Gzrel, seeing the pulsing blood flowing beneath armour and flesh. Warp-twisted molecules spun in the dark liquid. Ahriman broke their bonds with a thought. Gzrel began to shake, then to howl. He scrabbled at the air, claws trailing blue sparks. His face bloated, black blood boiling from his mouth. The vents in his armour coughed and vomited foul liquid. The flesh sloughed from his face, but his skull continued to scream as he fell.

Cottadaron finally reacted. The twisted sorcerer sent a forked tongue of black lightning from his hand which cut through Ahriman’s kine-shield with a detonation of unlight. Pain bored into him, running up his nerves and across his skin. For an instant his focus almost slipped. He had misjudged Cottadaron; he would not make that mistake twice. Just behind Cottadaron, the remaining Harrowing initiate was convulsing on the floor. Ahriman still held the warrior’s mind in his own, and he willed the other to rise. The effort made him shake and he felt a cry rising to his own lips. The champion came to his feet, swayed, and cut Cottadaron’s head from his shoulders. Ahriman ripped his mind out of the champion’s, and then the lifeless body was falling.

Tolbek took another pace closer, and all Ahriman could see was red, the red of death, the red of a bloated sun…

…the sun filled the sky. The ground was a memory forgotten beneath his feet. The raven was a silhouette of shadows against the sun. ‘Look,’ said the raven…

Tolbek was three strides from Ahriman, footsteps scattering blood drops from the floor. The sword in his hand was blue with heat. Arcs of lightning crackled across his scorched armour.

Ahriman was dimly aware of Maroth, still alive, cowering behind the throne. He reached out with his own mind, felt the soothsayer’s psyche like a cracked sphere in his mind’s grip. He squeezed and somewhere he heard Maroth shriek.

Pain filled Ahriman, sudden and bright. It felt as if a door long shut in his soul were straining at its locks. Images of raven feathers and dying suns pressed into his mind, trying to pull him back. He shut them out. Raised his hands with palms open, waiting for Tolbek…

…the surface of the red sun cracked, and flowed, and he realised that the molten fire was a sea of faces, and that each one was screaming…

The sword shimmered as it cut down towards Ahriman’s head.

The telekinetic blow was unrefined and desperate, but it worked. Tolbek’s sword twitched to the side, and Ahriman felt Tolbek’s focus break. Ahriman moved forwards, his open hands clamping over Tolbek’s grip on the sword as he pivoted. Tolbek flipped through the air, and Ahriman caught the movement with his mind and slammed his brother into the floor. He stamped down on Tolbek’s chest and felt something crack. Tolbek’s sword was in his hand, its sigil-etched blade still crawling with fire. On the floor Tolbek tried to come to his feet. Ahriman hammered his mind into Tolbek’s, breaking wards and mental shields with raw power.

+Who sent you, brother? How did you find me?+ Tolbek’s mind slid out of his grasp. Ahriman could feel something forming in Tolbek’s mind, even as he bored deeper trying to find truth. He punched through walls of thoughts and cut through dream structures. He was angry, and the anger gave his power a vicious strength. Tolbek retreated, vanishing into the darkness of his unconscious, taking the truth with him. In the stopped-clock reality of the throne room, the chase was a space between heartbeats.

+To dust returned, brother,+ called Tolbek’s voice, and suddenly Ahriman was drowning in a sea of ashes. Tolbek’s mind was immolating, pulling itself apart as it retreated from Ahriman’s telepathic invasion. Tolbek’s laugh was the howl of the inferno.

Ahriman barely had time to pull his mind back. Tolbek’s armour cracked, glowing lines running over its surface. Then it flared with eye-searing light and crumpled to molten slag and black powder. Ahriman shook, a bitter taste of bile and blood filling his mouth. He could feel the power he had wielded washing through him, draining through his mind, and the image of the raven and the red sun beat on him and he could not close it out. The barriers in his mind and soul shattered. His mind, so long blunted to the call of the future, flooded with sights of the impossible. The vision took him and he rose on raven wings into a sky the colour of blood.

‘Look, look, you must see,’ called the raven, and it was flying into the red sun, and Ahriman was following, his wings burning to smoke. He saw.

He saw a warrior robed in blue and armoured in gold and sapphire standing beneath a white sky. The warrior reached up and pulled his helm from his head. Ahriman felt the idea of a breath catch in his throat. The eyes that looked back at Ahriman were blue, and they were his own. The image smiled with his mouth.

+You see,+ said the warrior, but it was the raven’s voice that spoke.

‘I know you, daemon,’ growled Ahriman.

+Daemon,+ laughed the warrior, but Ahriman heard the sound in his mind. +Once you would have said that such a word was a sign of ignorance.+

‘I remember,’ he snarled. ‘Your lies will fail, as they did before.’

+Are you so sure?+ said the warrior, its chuckle the call of carrion. +You call me daemon, yet what do you know of such things?+ The image in front of Ahriman changed, the features melting, the crystal blue armour splintering and reforming as the flesh beneath burst into a new form. Wings spread from the creature’s shoulders, the feathers fluttering between colours. The body grew taller, its back bending into a hunch, the limbs splitting. Delicate claws extended from fingers, and the fragments of the sapphire armour flowed across the towering form. The head that looked back at Ahriman was a mass of eyes without a mouth.

+You see,+ said the creature. +You remember this path even though you shunned it.+

‘No. Never,’ said Ahriman, his voice a shaking whisper. ‘It is a lie.’ The creature laughed in his head and he felt rage. He had seen the truth of the warp and the daemons that called themselves gods. They were lies, lies and temptation, and the ruin of everything. They were corrupters of truth.

His Legion had fallen, his father had fallen. He would sink, he would become less than a slave, but he would not fall to the lie as he had before. His fist lashed out before he realised what he was doing. It struck the creature and cracks radiated from the impact. Mirrored splinters cascaded down in a rain of fragmented images. Ahriman raised his head to shout but he had no mouth, only eyes. The raven’s laugh filled his mind and he was spinning through space, his body broken into countless pieces of mirror.

He was standing above a plain of black glass. Beneath him a thousand figures knelt. Some still had features of humanity: a head above shoulders, a face with eyes and mouth. But most were shaped by nightmare. Drooling mouths opened and closed across bodies that were at once glass and flesh. Arms sprouted, clutched and withered. Hooting calls filled the air.

Ahriman had to look, his eyes moving from figure to figure, searching for what he knew must be there. When he found it he stared. The mark of the Thousand Sons was clear on the shoulders of every figure.

+Your brothers,+ said the crow voice from behind Ahriman. +Or are they your sons?+

Ahriman said nothing. His eyes were still fixed on the serpentine sun symbol etched onto the shoulder of one of the figures.

‘This is a lie,’ whispered Ahriman.

+Is it?+ said the voice behind him. +Time is not fixed, nor is flesh, nor is fate.+ The voice paused and Ahriman looked down. His hands were claws. A shiver passed through him and he felt the feathers of his wings rustle at his back. +You could rule over all this,+ said the voice. +You could cast down your father and undo what you have done.+

‘The Rubric…’

+Can be undone.+

‘No,’ said Ahriman. You cannot listen, he thought to himself. He had opened the door to powers he had long shunned and the warp and its lies had found him. This is a lie, I must not listen.

+Yes, all can be changed, even the fate you created for your brothers, but in the undoing…+ The voice trailed away, as Ahriman looked over the things that had been his brothers, his Legion.

‘No, better dust.’

+But this will be. Can you not see?+ asked the voice, and the world turned. He was standing amongst the creatures that had been his brothers. The wet stink of their flesh filled his gorge with bile. He felt his limbs distorting, bone softening to clay, flesh to slime. He tried to speak again, to call the vision a lie, to deny the daemon’s claim, but he had no mouth. He was less than a beast, less than dust.

+Others will act, Ahriman,+ said the crow voice in his head. Above him and his brothers a figure in bone robes and red armour stood on a pillar of jade. Horns rose from the red figure’s temples and jutted from the jaws of its helm. +Others will tread the paths you do not. It is fated.+ The voice paused, and the scene began to whirl into colour and fading sensation. +But who walks those paths, who is the master of fate and who its victim: that is unknown.+

He was shivering. Somewhere he was shivering, and blood was running from his mouth and nose.

+Fate has come for you, Ahriman, as you feared it would and knew it must.+ The crow’s voice became fainter, and he could feel the hard inner surface of his armour. He was lying on the floor of the throne room. He could taste acid and blood on his tongue, and a blinding pain throbbed behind his eyes.

+Remember,+ chuckled the raven’s voice, as blood spread across the throne room floor and ash fell as silent snow.

IV
OATHS

His dead brothers watched him. The two Rubricae were silent and still. Charred flakes of debris drifted down to cover the red of their armour. The light in their eyes had dimmed to pale green in their helms. Ahriman watched them as he stood, waiting for a movement, for a sign of awareness. There was none. He could hear the spirits trapped inside the armour, confused and half-blind, searching for direction. Without Tolbek to guide them, they were little more than statues.

He glanced around the chamber. Fresh blood was still seeping from heaps of hacked flesh and armour. The battle with Tolbek and the slaughter of Gzrel and his vassals had taken fewer than five beats of a human heart. He needed to make decisions and make them quickly. There were at least a hundred more of the Harrowing on the Titan Child, and many more on the Blood Crescent. It would not be long before they discovered what had happened to their lord, and when they did… There was also Tolbek’s ship hanging close in the void, its crew waiting for their master’s word.

The pain in Ahriman’s head was growing, and his muscles were shivering with the after-effects of the vision. He tried to focus. The memory of what he had seen and heard boiled through his thoughts. He pulled his helmet off and spat a gobbet of blood and bile onto the floor. The air tasted of corruption, charred meat and exposed guts. He was alone on a ship of enemies with more enemies waiting in the void; he was exhausted, his mind and spirit drained. The only advantage he had was that no one knew what had happened here. Not yet.

A low gurgling and a gasp made him turn. Ahriman tensed, suddenly aware of another living presence in the chamber. It was close to the tangle of armoured corpses heaped over the throne. He moved closer, trying to ready his exhausted mind. When he was a step away from the throne, he saw the figure and remembered that he had not killed every member of the Harrowing in the chamber.

Maroth lay curled on the floor behind the throne. His face was streaked with tracks of blood that had run from his eyes. He had drawn his legs up under him, his gauntleted hands clasped to his chest. Ahriman stepped closer and Maroth’s head twitched up. A blood-rimmed eye met Ahriman’s gaze and Maroth let out a hissing yelp. Ahriman did not need to read the sorcerer’s tattered aura to tell that something had snapped inside him and what remained was fractured and broken.

Space Marines were creatures made from men but forged to be weapons. They were made to endure in mind and body what mortal men could not, but Maroth had cut away at that strength, selling himself for petty power and lies. He had sacrificed too much and not understood what he had given. Ahriman’s invasion of Maroth’s mind had snapped what strength remained, and he felt brief pity at what this demigod warrior had allowed himself to become.

Then he remembered the creature held in one of the Titan Child’s cold vaults, and the empty pit of Astraeos’s eye. He raised his hand, gathering strains of emotion to his will. Crackling blue light arced around his fingers. It would be a kindness. The power built, and he remembered the raven’s laughter and the vision the battle had induced in his mind. He hesitated.

Maroth snarled, but Ahriman could see the fear in the broken sorcerer’s eyes.

The energy crackled to nothing on Ahriman’s fingers. Maroth’s wide eyes blinked and he began to shake. After a second the shake became a low gurgling chuckle.

‘Get up,’ said Ahriman quietly. Maroth continued to laugh from the floor. Ahriman lifted his hand and extended a fraction of his will. Tolbek’s sigil-etched sword leapt from the floor to his hand. He caught it and suddenly its point was at Maroth’s neck. The last sorcerer of the Harrowing went still, the choked-off laugh spluttering in his throat. ‘You do not want to die,’ said Ahriman. ‘Now stand or I will take your eyes and give you to your nightmares.’

Maroth stood, somehow looking withered and hunched despite his armour. He kept his blood-rimmed eyes on Ahriman.

‘I can keep my eyes?’ he said, and there was a tremble of madness in the words.

‘I will not take them, and you will live,’ said Ahriman. He glanced towards the immobile Rubricae and the sealed doors to the chamber. ‘But now you will follow me and do as I command.’ Maroth looked as if he were about to sneer, as if a fragment of his pride had surfaced in his mind. Then he met Ahriman’s gaze again and gave a smile that showed his filed teeth; they were pink with blood.

‘Where are we going,’ Maroth hesitated, and his tongue flicked across his teeth, ‘master?’

‘I am not your master,’ said Ahriman, walking towards the chamber doors. ‘And we are going to take this ship.’

They moved quickly through the Titan Child. Ahriman walked behind Maroth, so that anyone looking would see him in his normal place. Maroth twitched and murmured as he walked, and Ahriman had to growl threats into his mind so that he moved with his usual imperiousness when they passed others of the Harrowing. Fatigue pulsed at Ahriman’s temples whenever he psychically nudged Maroth.

He glanced at the soothsayer as they passed through an access hatch into a deserted tunnel. Maroth had started to drool, his spit flecked with green fluid. Ahriman quickened his pace and pushed Maroth in front of him. He wondered whether anyone would think to enter the throne room. Most would be too terrified of displeasing Gzrel, but someone might wonder why Maroth walked the decks but his master was nowhere to be seen. Every moment made discovery by the rest of the Harrowing more likely, and when they did uncover what had happened, there would be carnage. Some of the Harrowing would assume that Maroth had decided to oust Gzrel and try to revenge their dead lord. Others would assume the same but see the opportunity to seize power themselves. Factions would form in seconds and the blood would flow. Ahriman had seen it happen in many warbands. If Gzrel had died at any other time, Ahriman doubted that any of the Harrowing would have survived at all.

They slowed when they reached the compartment of the ship Gzrel had made his gaol. The corridors and small rooms already reeked of faeces, open flesh and fear. There the Harrowing, and a clutch of hunched mutant slave masters, stood close to the sealed blast doors. Ahriman barked telepathic orders at Maroth and he approached them with his usual air of contempt. Ahriman followed, Tolbek’s sword held loose in his hand. The Harrowing growled words of respect and the slaves abased themselves as they passed.

At the entrance to the cells another of the Harrowing stood. Hagos was his name, remembered Ahriman. He was massively built, and his chainaxe rested at his feet, its motor silent. Unhelmed, Ahriman could see the chewed and twisted flesh of Hagos’s head; he had lost half of it to a rival’s teeth. He watched them come, and Ahriman could sense the caution in the gaze. Uncomplicated, reliable and brutally disciplined, Hagos was the only one Gzrel had trusted to guard this door. He was also mute, and had a mind like a lump of iron.

Ahriman felt Maroth’s mind jump suddenly, and the soothsayer staggered, a high-pitched whine escaping his lips. Ahriman went still. By the door, Hagos had brought his chainaxe up. The weapon’s teeth remained motionless.

Ahriman had no choice. He reached his mind out and enveloped Maroth’s crippled psyche. The effort made lights dance in front of his eyes and he had to fight down sharp pain. He straightened Maroth, pulling his mouth open and breathing words into his mind.

‘Do you dare threaten me?’ spat Maroth, and pointed to Hagos’s collapsed lump of a face. ‘I will flay the skin from you, and feed the rest to the nether creatures of the warp.’ Hagos lowered his chainaxe. Ahriman made Maroth spit at Hagos’s feet, and the guard bowed his head as they passed through the sealed hatch.

The chamber stank. Without his helmet Ahriman could taste the congealing blood and stagnant air. Astraeos looked up as they entered, and the pupil of his remaining eye narrowed to a pinprick of hate as he saw Maroth. Ahriman heard the hatch seal behind them and let go of his hold on Maroth’s mind. The soothsayer slumped to the floor, and began to mewl and twitch. Ahriman felt a wave of nausea and fatigue bubble up as he broke the link. There was a sweat on his skin and he had to take a deliberate breath to balance his thoughts.

Astraeos was looking at him, his expression stony and his mind a caution-clad fortress.

‘I can free you,’ said Ahriman. Astraeos was silent, his eye still fixed on Ahriman as if weighing the possibility of the offer being true.

‘How?’

‘The leaders of the Harrowing are dead,’ said Ahriman, and saw Astraeos’s eye flare with surprise.

‘At whose hand?’

‘Mine,’ said Ahriman. Astraeos shook his head, the chains holding him clinking at the movement.

‘You did not do that to free me.’

‘No.’ Ahriman held Astraeos’s gaze. ‘But I will free you.’

‘To what end?’ growled Astraeos and there was laughter in his voice. ‘To be another lord’s pet? To be yours?’

‘To save yourself, and your brothers,’ said Ahriman, and he watched Astraeos’s aura flare and churn with conflicting emotion. He hoped he had the measure of the renegade Librarian, and that this gambit would work. If it did not…

‘But what is the price, Horkos?’ snarled Astraeos, loading Ahriman’s false name with contempt.

‘You will give me your oath, and follow my word,’ said Ahriman levelly. Astraeos did laugh at that, a full snarling laugh that hacked from his lungs and shook the chains.

‘You say you have slain your masters, so you will have few allies and less time.’

‘I need this ship, and the Harrowing on board must die. For that I need you and your brothers.’ Ahriman could see Astraeos struggling to contain warring instincts. ‘I can give you more,’ he said, and paused. ‘I can give you vengeance.’

Astraeos gave him a long hard look.

‘My oath and the oaths of my brothers are not goods to be bartered for.’

Ahriman nodded slowly. He had thought it might come to this, that he would have to take this step. He did not want to; Astraeos’s loyalty and defiance were qualities he admired, but there was no choice.

‘Very well.’ Ahriman raised Tolbek’s sword. He could feel the crystal at its core sing in tune with his mind. A thought drove cold light down the blade’s edge. He raised the sword and Astraeos followed with his eye, defiance hardening his face to pale stone in the sword’s light.

Ahriman cut, the movement and his mind flowing as one. Astraeos fell to the floor. Maroth yelped from the corner at the sound of shearing metal.

‘Now you are free,’ said Ahriman, looking down at the figure at his feet.

‘Curse you,’ whispered Astraeos, anger making his voice shake. He remained on the floor, kneeling, with the remains of his chains hanging from his wrists. ‘Curse you to the end of all things.’ Ahriman nodded, swallowing a breath. The sword’s glow reflected from his eyes, and he turned towards the hatch.

‘Come,’ he said quietly. ‘I need your repayment for the life I give you.’ Astraeos did not move. He was breathing hard and Ahriman could feel the Librarian struggling to contain his rage.

‘You have my oath, sorcerer. But give me one thing in return for its theft.’ Astraeos looked up. ‘What is your name?’

‘My name is Ahzek Ahriman.’

Astraeos nodded, without emotion or recognition.

‘We will need the ship’s mistress. If this insanity is to work we need her,’ said Astraeos and turned back to Maroth. The soothsayer was a hunched and foetal shape, clad in armour and tanned skin. Maroth’s jaw twitched as if he were going to speak but he said nothing, his black eyes jumping at every movement.

‘You can have him,’ said Ahriman, glancing from Astraeos to Maroth. ‘You may not demand vengeance but I give it to you.’ Astraeos got to his feet and flexed the scabbed skin of his healing hands.

‘No! You said I would live,’ yelled Maroth as Astraeos stepped forwards.

‘I did. You will live, and I will not take your eyes.’ Ahriman looked at Astraeos. Maroth went still, and then smiled up as Astraeos’s shadow fell over him.

‘Your eye tasted of the dung you are, and those of your brothers too,’ hissed Maroth, and licked his teeth. ‘You are a brotherhood of the half-blind.’ He laughed. Astraeos’s sudden rage filled the room. He bent down, his bare hands reaching for Maroth’s head.

Ahriman turned to the door. He closed his eyes briefly, seeing the raven soaring against the red sun, and the robed figure looking down on a Legion that was less than dust. He had hoped for so long that it would fade to a memory and then to nothing. Perhaps he had kept himself alive to live that punishment. Now he had chosen a different path. Someone was hunting him and fate had him in its claw. He had to know who and why. There were choices and possibilities ahead of him; he saw that even through the daemon’s lies. ‘If you do not tread those paths, others will,’ the daemon had said. Daemons lied, but he felt the truth of those words as if he had always believed them. There was no choice.

He opened his eyes and pushed his will into Tolbek’s blade again. He rapped on the hatch and cut down into the space beyond as it opened. Behind him, Maroth screamed.

Carmenta stopped in the darkness and let the silence surround her. Slowly she extended a hand and placed it against one of the pipes that ran along the narrow passage wall. The pipe vibrated under the brass of her fingers.

Hush, she thought. I will find a way to return soon. I will. I promise.

She had been so close to linking with the ship when they took her. So close, another second and she could have purged them from her and reduced their ship to molten wreckage. Instead she had watched as the Harrowing tried to claim her ship. They had turned the decks and holds into entrail-littered caves filled with smoke and the cries of the dying. Their feral enginseers swarmed through her ship’s innards like rats. But for all their defilement they had not succeeded in wakening the Titan Child. The ship remained silent, its systems sleeping. Carmenta felt a brief sensation that might have been the memory of a smile. It would never waken for them, not without her, and they had yet to realise that fact. The Harrowing had forged the slave collar around her neck, but had accepted that she simply maintained the ship for Astraeos and his brothers. If they considered her at all it was only as a creature whose knowledge of their new prize might be useful. She was grateful for their stupidity. They had had the wit to seal and guard the bridge, though.

The clinking of metal on metal broke her thought. She looked around and then realised that her brass hand was shaking, the fingers rattling on the metal pipe. She snatched her hand away. The shaking was getting worse with every passing hour.

A squall of angry data blinked across her vision. She still had a link to the ship in a sense, a thin thread of crude data fed directly to her implants. Through this link, she could feel the slow dreams of the Titan Child and feel its pain. Every crude attempt by the Harrowing to wake the ship had sent pain stabbing through her body. At first that connection had been comforting, but now it seemed only to make the lack of true connection worse; it was enough for her to share its pain but not enough to soothe it. She was also not certain how clearly her mind was working.

Bright light bloomed in her skull. She stopped and steadied herself against the wall.

She could not focus her thoughts. For a split second she panicked, her mind and memory suddenly a blank void. Then processes of sensation and thought returned. She looked around herself. She was standing in a narrow, pipe-lined corridor.

Behind her cracked mask her face was aching. She wondered whether it was the ghostly sensation of a smile, but she could not remember why. She reached a hand out to the wall of the passage. The metal was quiet under her touch, and then shivered as somewhere a system protested. For a second she had a sense that she had done this before, but she could not remember and it did not matter. All that mattered was that someone was hurting her. Again the metal vibrated under the touch of her fingers.

They will die, she thought. All of them. I promise.

‘Mistress Carmenta.’ The voice crackled into her ear. She went still. The voice had spoken directly to her using the vox-system implanted into her cranium. The ciphers for that system were known by very few.

She registered and identified the voice. It was Astraeos, but that made no sense. The Harrowing had him chained in a cell, and his brothers with him.

‘Astraeos,’ she said, the word passing from mind to vox without leaving her lips. For a second she wondered if his voice was real, or just a ghost of sound caught in her memory. Static hissed in her head, and then the reply came.

‘We are free, and we will take back the ship.’

Silence and static returned, and then she heard laughter ringing over the vox and down the passage. It took another beat of her machine heart to realise that the laughter was hers.

They took the ship by murder rather than battle. The Harrowing were scattered through the Titan Child and they took those they found by swift bloodletting. They worked through the dark, Thidias and Kadin moving ahead of Ahriman and Astraeos. They had taken armour and weapons from the Harrowing after Ahriman and Astraeos had silenced the guards. The armour was mismatched, poorly maintained and stank, but it worked. At a glance they were Harrowing initiates, but it was a disguise that would never stand more than one look. Just by looking at them Ahriman could tell the difference. Astraeos, Kadin, and Thidias might look like Harrowing, but they did not move like them. There was a ragged intensity in every Harrowing gesture, as if every twitch were a suppressed blow. Astraeos and his brothers moved with precise discipline, every turn and gesture formed from practice and focus.

When they encountered Harrowing or their slaves, Ahriman would whisper confusion into their minds. Thidias, Kadin and Astraeos would then come out of the shadows, moving like wolves running silent towards prey. The damage done to their bodies was still healing, but it took away none of their killing edge. They slew with combat knives, ramming the points through neck joints down into the chest or through eye sockets. Blood would splutter from the wounds as the trio pulled the convulsing corpses into the shadows. The three one-eyed brothers said nothing all the while, but Ahriman noticed that they paused for a second to scoop out the eyes of every Harrowing they killed. Twelve Harrowing and six slave masters had died that way by the time they reached the antechamber to the Titan Child’s bridge.

Scorches from Ahriman’s banishment of the daemon still marked the brass-inlaid floor. There were five Harrowing pacing in front of the high arched doors. Ahriman knew them. Like the gaoler Hagos, they were mute, their flesh chewed by scars and their minds of dull iron. Gzrel had never trusted most of his followers, and the mute brutes were the only ones he allowed to guard what he valued. Ahriman mused briefly that Gzrel’s arrogance had meant that he had never extended that guard to his own life.

Ahriman stepped towards the guards. The space in front of the doors to the bridge was a semicircle of black metal that crawled with spiralling patterns inlaid in brass. Its ceiling arched to a shadow dome of armourcrys. The stars beyond glowed dimly alongside the dirty light of the Great Eye, its shape and colour a curdling whirl against black. In the dim light, the guards took a moment to see Ahriman. He had Tolbek’s sword in his hand, its crystal core quiet, but his mind and body ready. Fatigue pulsed through him, but he had used the time since breaking Astraeos from the cells to pull himself into a state of calm focus. He would pay later, he knew, but only if they survived.

The guards turned to look at him. Ahriman kept walking.

One of the guards must have sensed something was wrong because the chainsword in his hands growled to life. Ahriman could see doubt and brute instinct flicker amongst the guards’ minds. They began to move, closing to the side and behind him. He formed a thought, let it multiply and take form in the aether. After years of denying such power it almost made him lightheaded.

‘Open the doors,’ he said quietly. The head of the mute guard directly in front of him twitched in what might have been a denial.

The sound of revving chainblades filled the air. He felt time slow as if it were his own heartbeat. His mind was like mirror-still water. He breathed out and, with that breath, the sword lit in his hand.

The first blow came from the front, an overhead cut with a chainaxe aimed at Ahriman’s head. It was fast, but nowhere close to fast enough. Ahriman pivoted to the side. The chain teeth roared within an inch of his face. The tip of Ahriman’s sword punched through the guard’s neck. Bright red blood spat from the wound as he pulled the sword free to meet the next blow. He could see the fight unfolding in front of him, a net of possibilities, and his own movements meshed perfectly together.

The sword in Ahriman’s hand shook as it met the turning teeth of a chainsword. He willed fury into the sword’s core, and felt the chainsword shear in two. He stepped and turned, slicing low to cut the leg from beneath one guard. A broad-headed axe hacked at his head but he was already moving. He did not need to see his enemies; he had watched each movement already. He kicked backwards, and felt his foot slam into a chest that he knew would be there. He cut to his left. The sword shuddered as it ended a life. A shape moved in front of him, the muzzle of a pistol rising. He took a step forwards and cut off the hand holding the weapon, turned back and rammed the point of the blade into the groin of a guard rising from the floor. He cut again, blind but still finding a join in the armour. He stepped to his right, and a blow missed him, and he gave a backhanded cut that parted a skull to red ruin, and…

…the webbed-strands of the future dissolved into the present. For a second he felt nothing, and then his hand began to shake. He blinked and the chamber drifted back into focus. He was kneeling; on the ground around him, the dead lay still. Astraeos was walking towards him, unease dancing in his eyes.

‘We need the tech-witch now,’ said Ahriman between deep breaths. ‘Will she come?’

‘She is here already,’ said Carmenta.

It was like returning to the embrace of the mother she had never known. The cradle of cables snaked around her, and lifted her from the deck of the bridge. Her awareness of her body faded. Mind-links opened her to the systems of her ship. She was dimly aware of gasping as the beat of the plasma reactors became her own, as her skin became asteroid-pitted iron, her gaze the sweep of sensors through the void. Her mind and instinct briefly rebelled, fighting the alien instincts and sensations of the Titan Child. Then they were one, the ship and its mistress, their wills and senses bound together. It was like dying and coming to life, like plunging into ice water only to find you could breathe. You were not supposed to control a starship like this; its spirit was too large and too powerful, the intellect of a controller too weak to do anything but break in the grasp of such a machine. Blasphemy, they had called it, the crowning sin in a life of sins. To Carmenta, it was the most precious thing she had ever known.

She felt the familiar touch of servitor feedback, and the grumble of waking systems. The background hum of countless signals filled her thoughts. She saw her corridors, chambers and launch bays through a thousand machine eyes. Looking out through pict-capture lenses, she saw the bridge around her, the tiered banks of servitors and cogitators wrapped in red-tinged shadow. She saw the one she had called Horkos standing and looking up at the knotted cradle of cables that held her body. Her human body, at least. He was a creature of lies. She flicked between views of his face. Emotionless, smooth-skinned and bright-eyed. He was dangerous, and a liar. Astraeos called him Ahriman, and he was not the weakling she had thought. She had watched him kill five Harrowing in a handful of seconds, As if he could hear what she thought, he tilted his head; but of course he could not hear her thoughts. He was a thing of flesh, and she… she was a goddess of iron.

She refocused on preparing herself, cleaving off parts of her mind to ready her systems. Slowly, the output of her reactors began to rise. Power flushed into her field generators. She was nearly ready, and then she would be truly free. She watched the other two ships hanging close to her in the void. Their shackled spirits made her want to weep in sympathy and laugh in contempt. The Blood Crescent was a dying wolf, its insides rotting, its spirit reduced to base instincts. The ship that had brought the emissary was a blade-like presence. Its weapons and engines were already armed, she noticed. A blunt statement and challenge. So obvious, so arrogant. She spread her consciousness through her systems, preparing dozens of subtle and gross actions.

There was one final matter to address.

‘Egion,’ she said in a voice that was a pulse of data. ‘Egion, wake. It is time again.’ Within the sensations of data she felt another psyche unfold. It was not her but it connected to her, brushing her thoughts like a hand touching hers.

‘I dreamed, mistress,’ came the reply. To her, the voice sounded like the boom of ocean waves against cliffs. ‘I dreamed we were becalmed and taken by enemies. I dreamed of blood, and death, and fire across the stars.’

‘It was no dream, and now we must flee,’ she said.

‘Flight again,’ came the voice, and it was fainter as if already tired of speaking.

‘Yes, and you must guide me again.’ She could not see Egion as they spoke, there were no sensors or pict-eyes in his tower, but she could imagine him as she had last seen him: a stretched body of grey flesh, suspended in a lattice of brass, tubes feeding his failing flesh. He had no true eyes any more, and a tube filled his mouth and plunged down his throat. He dreamed more and more, his sense of time and place failing every time she woke him. He was her Navigator, however, and he had never failed her before. He had led her through the warp with the wrathful Mechanicus at her heels. When the rip tides at the edge of the Great Eye had caught her, he had steered her through the storms.

‘Very well,’ he said, and she could feel the fatigue bleeding from him into the mind-impulse link.

‘Thank you,’ she said. Egion did not reply, but she felt his psyche connecting to the controls that he would use to guide the ship when it was in the warp.

Somewhere out in the world of flesh and air she took a breath. Weapons, shields and engines waited, ready for her will to guide them. Her forge fathers had made the Titan Child as a warship, and she now shuddered with anticipation. The power built, held in check by her will alone. She spent an instant watching the Harrowing within her, the slavers and the tech-wrights scrabbling at her systems. In the void the emissary vessel held station, a spear shape of red iron. The Blood Crescent flanked her, so close she could feel the ragged output of its reactors like hot breath on her skin.

Burn, she thought, and the thought became reality.

Lines of plasma spat from her flank. She felt its release like air screaming from her lungs as she howled her anger into the void. Blast doors shut throughout the hull, sealing the Harrowing and their slaves into holds and corridors. Her engines lit in eruptions of glowing gas.

The plasma hit the emissary ship’s shields in a wash of blue-hot energy. The Blood Crescent remained immobile as if shocked to dumb stillness. Carmenta released the signal she had prepared. It was an order screamed in simple code.

‘We are betrayed,’ it said.

For an instant, after there was no response, she wondered if the Harrowing on board the Blood Crescent had seen through the lie. Then the Blood Crescent began to fire, its batteries roaring at the emissary’s ship.

The Titan Child was already moving, sliding away from the Blood Crescent. The plasma ducts inside her vented, spewing gas into the chambers and spaces holding the Harrowing. Part of her mind watched them die, screaming within their melting armour. The Harrowing enginseers that were interfering with her systems died as one. Lightning whipped through them from her machinery, fusing bionics and cooking flesh. She felt joy at the deaths.

The emissary ship came around, ramming through the debris which spilled from its collapsing shields. The Blood Crescent pushed forwards, a scattered wave of torpedoes spitting from its prow. The Titan Child began to curve behind the Blood Crescent whilst still firing on the emissary ship. Carmenta watched as the Blood Crescent’s torpedoes hit the emissary ship in a line across its flank. The red iron hull twisted and bulged with explosions. It began to list, its course an uncontrolled spiral. The Blood Crescent shed assault pods and boarding craft in a growing swarm.

The Titan Child continued to fire on the listing emissary ship until it was sliding past the Blood Crescent’s engines. Carmenta switched fire with a thought. The rolling broadside collapsed the shield envelope over the Blood Crescent’s engines, and her turbolasers lanced into the engine vents. For a moment the Blood Crescent slid on, and then fire bloomed along the back third of its hull. It went into a spiral, shouting surprise and rage at the Titan Child. Carmenta was not listening; the rush of plasma filled her senses as the Titan Child boosted away.

Once the battle was a speck of fading energy against the stars, she activated her warp engines. As the psychic energies embraced the Titan Child, she allowed her focus to weaken. She felt Egion take control of their course, and let her thoughts become the dreaming hum of Geller fields and life-support systems. She was running again, but she was free, and that was enough.

PART TWO

PATH OF LIES

V
SONS OF DUST

Clouds of psychic energy boiled around the Titan Child. Towering faces, fangs, claws and eyes formed for an instant before dissolving back into the surge. The Titan Child rode the tides, unable to break from them and fighting not to be pulled deeper into the storm’s heart. Wrapped in its sparking Geller field, its engines drove it on.

Kadin and Thidias argued with Astraeos as the storm raged beyond the hull of the ship. As was the way of their gene-ancestors, they argued with blades. It was the test of a leader, as it had been since the founding of their Chapter. The challenge was word to word, blade to blade, without armour and with only the challenged leader’s own mind and skill at arms to aid him. What use were words if they failed in battle, or if they came from one too weak to defend his beliefs?

Astraeos blocked the slash to his throat with his sword. The blades met with a scream of sharp edges, and he let Thidias’s combat knife grind down his sword to catch against his crossguard. Thidias hammered his other fist up under Astraeos’s arms and into his gut. The Librarian felt something crack. Thidias hit him twice more, each blow striking the same point with hammer force. Astraeos could taste blood on his own breath. He slammed his forehead into Thidias’s face. Thidias staggered, recovered and rammed his weight forwards, trying to free his knife. Astraeos twisted his sword and the force flicked Thidias from his feet as he gripped the knife. He hit the metal floor then began to rise. Astraeos let the tip of his sword raise a droplet of blood from Thidias’s neck, and looked into his brother’s face. A cold grey eye looked back at him from beside a glowing indigo lens set in a moulded brass fitting.

‘Mine is the failing,’ said Thidias, his voice a low rasp. Blood trickled down the warrior’s face, following the old pattern of scars that crossed his lean features. Astraeos nodded slowly, and moved the sword tip from Thidias’s throat.

From the gloomy margin of the chamber, Kadin gave a mirthless chuckle as he paced forwards. Like Astraeos and Thidias, Kadin wore a loose tabard of grey fabric, the exposed flesh of his arms flowing with muscle beneath a network of scars. He was younger than Astraeos, but the scar tissue that covered his skin made him seem weathered and old, like a tree that has survived many storms. His face was broad, his features lost under the glossy skin of burn tissue. Kadin held a short sword loose in his left hand, the edges of its broad blade glinting with fresh sharpness. It was a blade for fighting close, where you could see the fear and fury in an enemy’s eye, and smell his blood as he died. A green lens shone from Kadin’s left eye socket, its setting clicking as it narrowed its focus. Carmenta had given each of them a machine eye to replace those taken by Maroth. Astraeos had been strangely reluctant to accept, as if part of him wanted to leave the empty hole as a reminder.

Astraeos took a breath. They had been keeping the council of blades for six hours. The fighting chamber was a long, low-ceilinged hold crammed between the engine and weapon decks. Weapons and armour lined the walls; some had been smashed to ruin by the Harrowing, others gleamed as new. Huge cages of coals burned at the hold corners, filling the hold with heat, smoke and a dim red light.

‘You wish for rest, brother,’ said Kadin. He might have been smiling, but old scars twisted his mouth and his voice was as cold as snowfall. Astraeos shook his head. Kadin nodded.

Kadin lunged, whip-fast. Astraeos was not even aware of raising his blade but somehow he deflected the blow. Kadin was already out and circling. Two more cuts lashed out, low and fast, and Astraeos had to step back as the broad blade slit the air where his leg had been.

‘You trust him?’ said Kadin as he circled. Astraeos watched his brother’s green eyes, one true and one false, ignoring the fluid movements of the blade in Kadin’s left hand.

‘No,’ said Astraeos, trying to focus on angles of cut as the words of the debate boiled through his mind. The image in his own new augmetic was almost perfect.

Almost. Kadin’s blow whipped across from the right and he barely caught the movement in time. He flinched back and the blade ripped open his right shoulder.

‘You gave him our oaths but you do not trust him,’ growled Kadin. Astraeos focused on Kadin’s constantly moving shape. His right arm felt slow and weak as he raised his sword.

‘He gave us our lives,’ Astraeos said levelly, and cut as he spoke. The blow would have opened Kadin from neck to thigh but he was already spinning past the descending sword. Blood ran down Astraeos’s right arm. He had not even seen the cut. If it had been battle he would have sensed the blow without needing to see it, but the council of blades denied him his powers as it denied him his armour. ‘He freed us. It is the way of things. Salvation demands loyalty.’ Kadin lunged, his face twisted into a wolf snarl. Astraeos flicked his sword out to parry, but the scarred warrior had switched the blade between his hands as he moved. The true cut opened a red grin across his left thigh. Numbness spread down Astraeos’s leg.

‘He is a sorcerer,’ spat Kadin, ‘a witch in the service of false powers, a renegade to his own oaths.’

‘And what are we, brother?’ said Astraeos. And what should I have done, brother? The question flicked through his mind, silent and unspoken. He gave me life, and I must repay that gift the only way I can. We are nothing without the oaths we swear. We are the last of a brotherhood all but destroyed because others broke their word while we kept ours.

‘We broke no oaths,’ said Kadin, and Astraeos could see anger in his brother’s eye.

‘And we will not now,’ said Astraeos, but there was no fire in his voice. His broad head had started to dip, and his shoulders slumped. Blood streaked his arm and leg. He looked like a wounded bear, its strength leaking from it as the wolf circled.

‘He is an outcast,’ said Kadin.

‘Are we so different?’ Astraeos tried to cut as he spoke but the blow was too slow and Kadin was already pivoting past the point to slice at Astraeos’s unwounded arm. Astraeos suddenly swivelled and cut low, the false fatigue vanishing from him in an eyeblink. The flat of Astraeos’s sword scythed Kadin’s legs from under him. Kadin fell, and felt the point of Astraeos’s sword prick his chest before he could rise.

‘The decision is mine,’ said Astraeos. Kadin nodded once and Astraeos looked up to where Thidias watched from the chamber’s edge. ‘Ahriman has our oath, and that binds us.’ But to what end, Ahriman? What do you flee and what are you hurrying to find?

‘And if he proves unworthy to bear our loyalty?’ said Kadin, but Astraeos had turned his back, and stalked to where his bronze armour hung from brackets on the wall. In the glow of the fire cages, he could see where the emblems and honours had been ground from the dull surface.

‘This council is over, the blades have spoken,’ said Astraeos, as he hung the sword on the wall and took down the first plate of his armour.

‘What of the one who took our eyes?’ asked Kadin, rising from the floor. Astraeos put his hand to his right eye socket, felt the silver and black that held the pale crystal of his new eye. He thought of Maroth curled on the floor, blind, weeping blood. How could a Space Marine become such a broken creature? Maroth was no longer a human, no longer a warrior; he was a mewling creature, too vicious and spiteful even to pity.

‘Ahriman holds the strings of his life,’ said Astraeos. Thidias glanced at Kadin but both remained silent. Astraeos did not look at them.

In truth he agreed with them. He knew nothing of Ahriman besides his power and that other renegades hunted him. Oaths did not require trust, though; that was a truth the Imperium had taught him. He began to armour himself, locking plates together, building a second skin of metal over his flesh. Once he would have had serfs to aid him, but they belonged to a past long dead. The three Space Marines were silent while the only sound was the scrape of ceramic and metal. Astraeos finally straightened, bronze-plated once again, and began to walk to the chamber’s sealed doors.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Kadin from behind him.

I do not know, brother. I do not know where our oath will lead us. The thought formed in his mind but he left it unspoken as he walked from the chamber.

The throne chamber was silent and stank of decay and ashes. The candles had long burned to pools of fat, and the only light came from a cracked glow-globe held by a hunched servitor that stood just behind Ahriman. Gzrel’s corpse lay slumped across his throne. A grey fungus had sprouted from his flesh and armour, reducing him to a formless heap. A carpet of fine white stalks had spread across the other bodies. Ahriman thought he saw the long strands twitch and sway as the light fell on them.

Ahriman’s eyes lingered for a moment on the pile of soft ash at the floor’s centre. It still lay as it had fallen, the outline of a human form in grey powder. He thought of Tolbek and, for a second, he closed his eyes.

The guilt and anger had begun as the Titan Child dived into the warp. Perhaps it had been there before, blotted out by the drive for survival, numbed by the euphoria of wielding powers he had so long denied to himself. He had walked from the bridge and lost himself in the tangle of the ship’s passages, letting his mind play through what had happened, the vision, the emissary, what he had done and why. As the intoxication had failed, the guilt had come, pouring into his thoughts like a black cloud. He had failed, he had been weak.

I should have let it play out, he thought. As he watched the servitor take more clicking steps into the chamber, the yellow light of the glow-globe clasped in its hand revealed more signs of violence and decay. The light reflected back from something amongst the ruin that glinted like polished crystal. He took a step closer, and bent down. Then he realised it was a pair of eyes, glassy and dead, staring from Gzrel’s fungus-masked face.

I am a sorcerer, he thought, looking into the eyes. The powers that I wield are the powers of daemons and cruel gods. There is no higher ideal, no redemption by knowledge. He let out a shaking breath. Anger rolled through him, feeding on his guilt and feeding it in turn. I have failed again, I am weak and I did not have the strength to let my fate take me. For an instant, he thought of walking to an airlock and letting the storms swallow him.

He looked up from Gzrel’s empty stare into the eyes that he had been avoiding since he entered the chamber. The two Rubricae stood where they had been. He could feel the ghost essences within each suit of armour whispering at the edge of his mind. Anger hissed in those whispers, like shouts of frustrated rage caught and scattered by the wind. He stood and walked until he was standing in front of them, his eyes level with theirs.

Rubricae battle plate was deep crimson, edged in silver and hung with strips of papyrus. Ahriman’s eyes flicked over the armour of one, picking out small marks and signs that spoke of the warrior who had been the flesh within the metal. They were few, but enough for him to name who the Rubricae had been in life. With the name came a face, a tone of voice, and a memory of a quick laugh and wry smile. The Rubricae had been one amongst a Legion, but Ahriman could remember the names and faces of all his brothers.

He looked closer at the armour, seeing with his mind as well as his eyes. Sigils snaked through the armour, in places etched into the ceramite, in others woven invisibly into the deep substance of every plate and join. To Ahriman they looked like chains of blue fire. From within the armour, he felt the spirits thrash at their bindings, like caged predators smelling the blood of their captor.

Slowly, hesitantly, he raised his hand, and reached out with his armoured fingers. He touched one of the pauldrons.

A chill spread across his hand. Ahriman tried to pull his hand away, but not quickly enough. The Rubricae’s fist closed around his wrist. He felt the plates of his own armour buckle, and heat spread from the grip. The Rubricae’s eyes blazed at him. He tried to pull away, but it drew him close.

+Ahriman,+ hissed a voice in his mind. He could feel the pleading and anger in the voice, grating together like iron and stone.

‘I…’ He began to speak, but the grip grew tighter. The binding sigils on the Rubricae’s armour shone brighter and brighter. Ahriman’s arm was burning with heat as the ceramite under the Rubricae’s grip buckled. A second hand gripped his neck and lifted him off the floor. The iron fingers began to close slowly on his throat.

+Ahriman,+ said the voice again, and its whisper overwhelmed his thoughts.

He was drowning, he could not breathe, he could not feel, he was blind. He was tumbling through a universe of darkness and shadow, of glimpsed futures and broken memories. He could not remember where he had been, or why he had been. He remembered a figure in red armour, a blue sky streaked with purple as the sun set. There was battle, an axe slicing towards his head and he was twisting with the blow, ramming his own blade up under the beard of the warrior that would have killed him. There was blood so bright and vivid he thought he could feel it spatter his cheek.

The image faded.

Where had the image gone? What had it been? Was it a memory of his past? Had he been the killer or had he died, his blood glistening in the sun? He tried to remember the image, to hold onto it, but… What image? There had been an image, a memory, it had been… But he could not grasp it again.

Darkness.

He tried to breathe, but could not. He was drowning and the darkness wrapped him tighter as he spun on, falling, falling without end.

Where was he? His name, what was his name? He wanted to shout, but he was drowning in the blind dark. His name…

‘I am Ahzek Ahriman.’ He felt the words heave from his own throat. The darkness blinked away, and he was looking back into glowing green eyes set in a high-crested helm. The fingers around his throat were still closing. He remembered an axe falling, and blood in the sun. He remembered searching for something to cling on to as he drowned in forgetfulness. He remembered reaching for his name.

He looked into the eyes of the Rubricae, and spoke the name of the warrior it had once been.

‘Helio Isidorus.’ The Rubricae went still, and Ahriman gasped in its grip. He understood; he had not just reduced his brothers to spirit and dust, he had shattered their identities. Over time the touch of the warp would have changed their flesh and dissolved their minds into madness, but Ahriman had broken everything they were and everything they had been at a single stroke. The armoured figures in front of him were shells around empty spaces, like a human silhouette scorched onto a wall by a bomb blast. These sons of the Rubric were worse than dead; their existence had been annihilated.

I did this, he thought. I thought I was saving them, and I did worse than destroy them. A black wall of emotion washed back through him. He had fallen and taken his brothers with him. Knowledge did not set the mind free, but chained it with pride and dragged it into darkness. He looked at the ashen remains of Tolbek on the deck.

Your brother’s fate is your fate, the daemon in the vision had said.

I have to know, he thought. He could have closed his eyes to the past and to the fate of what remained of his brothers, but not now. Something was reaching from Ahriman’s past to pull him into a future he did not want to see. He had to find out who and why. The decision was heavy with anger. Someone had forced him to this, and was twisting his fate. He would not submit to that.

He looked up at the Rubricae that held him, and willed it to release him as his mind spoke its name.

+Release me, Helio Isidorus. Release me, my brother.+

The arm let him down slowly, the fingers opening one after another. He looked at the second suit, his eyes taking in identifying details, his mind tasting the spirit within. It had remained immobile but he could feel its spirit pressing against its bindings. Its true name came to mind and he whispered it along with its brother’s.

+Helio Isidorus. Mabius Ro.+

Both suits turned towards him as one.

I will not bind them to me, he thought. They were once my brothers, and they will never be my slaves.

+Remain here,+ he sent. He backed to the bronze doors. The light-bearing servitor followed him with shambling steps. When he reached the door he raised a hand as if in farewell. Flame sprang from the corpses, spreading from one of the dead to another until the throne chamber was ablaze. The two Rubricae stood amongst the spreading flames, the red paint blistering and peeling from their armour. Ahriman stepped through the thick metal doors and placed his hands on either side, ready to push them shut on the burning room. He looked back at the two suits of armour that were becoming blackened statues amongst the rising flame.

+Dream, my brothers,+ said Ahriman, as he pushed the doors closed. They stared at him unmoving as the doors sealed and the room became a furnace.

‘He will betray us.’ Kadin paused after the words, watching Thidias for any reaction. There was none. Thidias knelt over the disassembled components of his bolter, his lips moving in a silent stream of words, his eyes closed. He wore no armour, just a robe of ash-grey fabric, held at the waist by a knotted length of rope. The guts of his bolter glistened with fresh oil in the light of a half-burned candle which floated on a brass suspensor disc. The chamber was small, barely long enough for Kadin to have lain down in. Its ceiling was low and its hatch narrow. The paint and rust on the walls had been stripped back to the bare metal. Strips of parchment hung from rivets across the wall. There was no bed or pallet, just the hard metal of the floor and the wargear stacked in one corner. Kadin could smell gun oil and incense in the thickly circulating air. He shifted uncomfortably. He did not like Thidias’s chamber; it was like walking into a memory he would rather forget.

Thidias’s lips went still, and he opened his one good eye. The indigo lens of the bionic flickered and then shone bright and strong. Slowly he looked up at Kadin.

‘The blades have spoken, the matter is decided,’ said Thidias.

‘Astraeos–’

‘Leads us,’ said Thidias, his voice abruptly iron-hard. In the candlelight he suddenly looked old, as if the shadows pooled more deeply in his face. ‘Astraeos leads us, and I follow him as I swore to when he returned to take us from the fire.’ He paused. ‘As you swore, too.’

‘But you doubt this decision,’ said Kadin, his armour clicking as he gestured. ‘I saw it in the council.’

Thidias gave a small shrug and looked back down at the weapon components laid out in front of him. Carefully he reached down and picked up a part, then another, his hands moving together in an accelerative rhythm as the boltgun formed in a stream of metallic clicks. The final catch snapped into place, and Thidias mouthed another litany of silent words over the weapon and placed it down. He looked up.

‘I questioned, as was my place,’ said Thidias, and shook his head. ‘There is nothing more to say.’

Kadin spat, and turned away. He had never liked Thidias, not really. They were brothers, the last of a shrinking circle of brotherhood, but that was not enough.

‘You did not believe we should follow this course,’ said Kadin. He could feel his lips curling back from his teeth. He turned back and pointed down at Thidias. ‘I saw it. Do not lie to me.’

Thidias did not move, but Kadin felt something change, as if his brother’s stillness had hardened.

‘Ahriman stole our oaths, Thidias. He is a trickster and a thief of loyalty.’

‘The matter is decided,’ said Thidias, and there was ice in his voice.

‘Three, brother.’ Kadin nodded as he spoke, and his hand ran across the scoured chestplate of his armour. ‘Three out of a thousand. That is the fate our honour and words bought us.’ Thidias did not move, his true eye and glowing augmetic a blank mirror to Kadin’s stare. After a second, Kadin licked his lips and spoke. ‘You, of all of us, must see what will happen if we allow ourselves to follow–’

‘To follow the only things that are left to us,’ said Thidias.

‘If we trust Ahriman, it will destroy us!’ roared Kadin.

Thidias laughed, a loud cold laugh that filled the small chamber like a roll of thunder. Kadin froze as if struck.

‘No, my brother.’ Thidias shook his head, and there was no laughter in his voice. ‘We were destroyed a long time ago. We became nothing the moment we did not die in the pyre of our home world. We are enemies to everything we fought for.’ Thidias stood, and turned to set the bolter back on a wall bracket. Kadin stared at him, not knowing what to say. ‘There is nothing left of what we were, not truly. You want to break our vows, to flee again, but it will not save us, brother.’

Kadin’s mouth opened, but no words came.

‘We were born in the dark, but knew the light of the sun.’ Thidias’s voice stopped Kadin with his hand on the hatch. ‘Now we are falling, and the sun is a vanishing memory.’ Thidias paused, and Kadin turned back. His brother stood facing away, his right hand still resting on the case of the bolter in its bracket. For an eyeblink he remembered Thidias standing on the highest spire of the fortress-monastery, his cloak rippling in the wind as the night sky above burned with the fires of judgement. ‘I will never see that sun again,’ said Thidias, his voice low, ‘but I would die remembering that I knew its light for a time.’

Kadin looked away after a long minute, and left in silence.

Ahriman found Maroth lying curled in the dark before the door, his helmet sealed in place, the tatters of his skin cloak pale with frost. He had not been looking for the broken sorcerer, he had not even been intending to come to the bound daemon’s cell, but his feet had led him as if something hollow in his soul had drawn him into the quiet and the dark. When he had realised he was close to where Maroth had kept the bound daemon, he had almost turned back. Then he had heard the sound, a low murmur of pain carried to his mind as if by a breeze. For a second he had stood still, his mind straining to catch another scrap of the psychic noise. The sound came again, and he had followed it to find Maroth lying at the threshold of his creature’s prison.

Ahriman moved forwards and bent down next to Maroth.

‘I came back to it,’ said Maroth, his voice wet and lisping across the inter-armour vox. ‘I came, but I cannot see it.’

Ahriman starred into the red glow of Maroth’s eyepieces. Behind the glowing crystal there were no eyes, just the two ragged pits that Astraeos had left. Ahriman thought of the kilometres of corridors and passages he had walked to reach this point.

‘How did you find your way here?’

Maroth shook his head and pulled back, as if trying to shrug away the question. Ahriman began to extend his mind towards Maroth.

The growl filled Ahriman’s mind. He reeled back. It felt as if a mouth had opened on the inside of his skull. He could hear grating teeth, and feel the heat of a bloody breath on the skin of his thoughts. His mind snapped shut, his psychic senses recoiling back behind walls of will.

The sound was all around him now, rumbling louder. It was not a growl, he realised. It was a chuckle, the laugh of a predator at the sight of its prey. Ahriman looked to the rune-marked hatch above Maroth’s curled form. Maroth twitched and made a sound like a frightened animal but Ahriman did not even look at him. The lock on the hatch was shattered, and a sliver of darkness showed at its edge. The blood hammering in his ears suddenly seemed touched by ice.

The hatch swung outwards, the darkness within opening wide. The presence of the creature hit him in a wave of sensations: the taste of blood, the pain of ice burning flesh, the black of water in caves that have never been touched by the sun. Psychic fingers pawed across his thoughts, their touch like memories of nightmares, trying to pull him down into pain and blankness.

He forced his mind to stillness. The effort made him shiver, but the whispers faded, and the clammy presence became a weak scratching. His sword was in his hand without him realising he had drawn it, its runes blazing with cold light.

‘It did nothing,’ cried Maroth over the vox. ‘I came back to it, but I cannot see it.’

How did he find his way here with no eyes? The question echoed in his mind even through the rising tide of sensations flowing from the open hatch.

‘He wanted to see,’ cackled Maroth. ‘I told him what I had done to his brother, and he wanted to see it more than he wanted my blood. He saw for me, he led me and I him: his eyes were my eyes.’

Something moved in the yawning space beyond the hatch. Ahriman brought his mind into the sword, his will shaping to the blade’s edge. He stepped forwards and into the blackness. The dark folded over him. For a second he saw nothing; then shapes coalesced in the dark, lines and texture forming in the glow of his sword. The bound daemon was there. He could taste its presence without needing to look at it.

Astraeos stood looking up at the creature which wore the skin of his brother. He was armoured and a grille-mouthed helm hid his face. A bolter was clamped to his thighplate, and a sword hung in a knotworked leather scabbard at his waist. His hands were empty and hung at his sides, the fingers relaxed and open. Ahriman did not lower his sword.

‘Astraeos?’ said Ahriman into the vox.

Astraeos’s head turned to face Ahriman. In the darkness, the glow of his eyepieces seemed like holes cut in the night. Above him, the daemon bound into Cadar’s flesh twitched in its web of chains.

+You knew of this,+ sent Astraeos, and his thought voice was like the low, dangerous growl of a wolf. +You knew, and you kept it from me?+

Ahriman’s mind was arcing, tumbling through possibilities, extending his psychic senses as far as he dared to feel the shape of Astraeos’s mind, to see if there was something else where his soul had been. After a slow beat of his heart, he let out a breath and spoke into the vox.

+Yes.+ It was all he could say. +Maroth created it, but I kept it and I did not tell you of it.+

+What is it?+

+A daemon of a kind. Powerful, but its power is like the hunger of a starved predator, it thirsts only for destruction. The flesh is a host, a vessel for its bottled soul.+

+Cadar…+

+He is dead,+ sent Ahriman. +He was dead before this was done. I hope he was, at least.+

+There must be something of him left inside.+

Ahriman shook his head.

+Nothing that will want to live again.+

Astraeos looked up at the creature, and Ahriman followed his gaze. It was looking at them with silent malevolence.

+There must be a way.+

Ahriman felt something cold circle his spine, and remembered the dead eyes of the Rubricae looking at him from out of the spreading flames in the throne room.

‘This is no longer your brother. It is just a creature, just a weapon.’

Astraeos moved before Ahriman could form a thought. Astraeos was behind him, pulling him off his feet so that his weight hung on his neck above the edge of Astraeos’s sword. He felt Astraeos’s mind tighten around him, the force of his telekinetic grip raising sparks from their armour. Ahriman went still, shutting off his mind.

+Is that why you kept him?+ growled Astraeos, his thoughts biting into Ahriman’s psyche. +So that you had a weapon if we turned on you and your powers failed?+

Why did I not tell him? thought Ahriman. Why did I not tell Carmenta to cleave this portion of the ship’s hull off, and let it spin away into the void? His thoughts scrambled for answers. Nothing. It was as if he had not thought once about the creature since Maroth had first shown it to him, as if his mind had avoided the memory like water flowing around a stone. As if he had forgotten.

Astraeos tensed, and the blade-edge dug into Ahriman’s neck joint: he heard the hiss of escaping air. Ahriman’s thoughts spun apart, then snapped back together. He blinked. He could kill Astraeos, even now, even with the sword at his throat, but then he would have lost an ally who might yet be his again.

‘I would never use it as a weapon,’ said Ahriman. ‘It must never be free.’ Red atmosphere warnings lit in his eyes. Air and heat were venting around the edge of Astraeos’s blade like blood from a wound. ‘But if there is a way to undo what has been done to your brother I will find it. You have my oath.’

For a long moment nothing moved in the chamber, other than the gas hissing from the neck of Ahriman’s armour and the bound daemon’s chains flexing as if in rhythm with a slow-beating heart.

Ahriman felt Astraeos’s blade come away from his neck, and his grip relax. Ahriman straightened.

+Hope,+ sent Astraeos. Ahriman could feel anger seeping between the gaps in Astraeos’s mind. +The cruellest poison.+

Ahriman watched Astraeos turn and walk from the chamber in silence. After his silhouette had vanished, Ahriman looked up at the bound daemon, his eyes running across the lengths of chains and grey flesh up to the face that was still so like Astraeos’s. The creature stared back, a smile pulling at the corner of its mouth. It licked its lips. Ahriman turned after a long moment and walked after Astraeos.

Kadin and Thidias looked at Astraeos as he entered the fighting chamber. The coals had dimmed to red cinders in their black metal cages, and the glow-globes lit along the roof’s apex had spread cold light to the chamber’s corners.

‘Brother?’ said Thidias, looking up from a sheet of vellum spread over the floor. His hand held a silver-feathered quill, its tip wet and black. Astraeos could see Cadar’s name looping through the rows of verse on the parchment. He felt the skin of his face stiffen under Thidias’s gaze; he felt as if the old warrior were looking into him, as if what he had seen and said was screaming from his soul.

‘Brother?’ said Thidias again, the question softer, edged with concern. Kadin had been working his way down the length of the chamber, cutting the air with a deactivated chainsword.

They can see it in me; they can see the truth boiling to the surface, thought Astraeos. Cadar’s face, smiling at him with razor teeth, flashed through his mind, and he remembered the dead black of the empty eyes. He felt the anger and pain surge through him with the rising beat of his hearts. If I am going to tell them, it has to be now. I have to tell them. He felt his mouth open and his tongue curl to form words.

But they will not understand, said a voice in his head. They will not understand why you let the broken sorcerer live, why you hold to the thread of hope that Ahriman will keep his word.

Kadin stared at him for a second and then shook his head and turned away, raising his chainsword to begin his pattern of cuts again. Thidias stood, his gaze not moving from Astraeos’s face.

‘What has happened?’ said Thidias, taking a step forwards.

They must see. I must tell them. They are the last of my brothers.

But what if they think that there is no way of saving Cadar? asked his other voice. What if they say that Cadar’s remains should be purified by fire? What if they reject Ahriman’s promise?

He looked down at the parchment spread on the floor. Cadar’s life spread across it, his deeds, his virtues and a few of his failings: everything that made him.

Astraeos closed his mouth. He felt his face become calm, the beat of his hearts slowing, as if a mask of ice had formed over his skin and slipped into his veins. He felt his head shake and a hard-edged voice came from his mouth.

‘Maroth is not to be harmed, and Ahriman’s word is to be followed in all things without question.’

Thidias glanced at Kadin, a frown on his face. Kadin’s chainsword gave a final whisper as it cut the air, and he became still. They were both looking at Astraeos now; he could feel their confusion, and something else, another emotion buried deep under the surface thoughts of both.

‘This matter was settled.’ Thidias said carefully, looking back at Astraeos. ‘The blades have already spoken.’

‘You will swear this here and now,’ said Astraeos, and he could hear the cold iron in his own voice.

‘Brother…’ began Thidias.

‘Swear it.’ Astraeos’s voice rang through the long chamber. Kadin and Thidias watched him for a second, and then knelt. Astraeos heard the sounds that came from their mouths, but the words seemed to fade as he looked at their bowed heads. In his mind, the daemon was smiling at him with Cadar’s face.

She watched Ahriman as he entered through the round hatch. He had taken two steps before he looked at the corner where she waited. Had she made a noise? She thought she had been silent, but perhaps he could see and sense her in other ways. Perhaps he knew she would be here before he opened the hatch. She remained still even as his eyes fastened on her cracked face beneath the tattered hood of her robe.

She blinked, then realised he had moved from by the door. Then she remembered that she could not blink. Her optical systems must have briefly failed. When she separated from the Titan Child, she often experienced malfunctions in her augmented components. Recently, they had become worse and more frequent. He was looking at her; she processed the expression and identified it as puzzlement.

‘I see that you are not linked with your ship,’ he said. It was not what she had expected him to say. Humans, even Space Marines, did not react well to unexpected invasion of the spaces they saw as their own. She shook her head, then stopped the gesture.

‘Passing through the warp, it…’ She searched for a word but could find nothing that matched the fever-like sensation of being joined with the Titan Child as it rode the tides of the warp. Even the short periods of connection just after entering or before leaving the warp left her shaking or bleeding from her interface ports. ‘It is unpleasant,’ she finished.

‘It would be,’ he said, moving to fill and light a bowl of oil.

‘How–’ she began, but he chuckled humourlessly.

‘I see much that others cannot, and much that I do not wish to see.’ He waved his hand over the bowl of oil and flame licked up from the rippling surface. ‘What you do is an abomination to the spirit of such a vast machine. That is what your tech-priesthood would say, or at least it was when I knew them.’

‘They are not my priesthood,’ she spat. He glanced up at her, a quick flash of blue eyes, then he looked back to the flames that danced across the oil.

‘Of course not, otherwise you would not be slaving a warship to your will and travelling with a vagabond handful of renegades on the edge of the Great Eye.’ She heard a feline snarl, and then realised that it had come from her throat. Her mechadendrites had snapped out from her shoulders, rearing like snakes ready to strike.

What is happening? She felt detached, as if she were watching herself from afar. She felt her limbs vibrating with rage, but she was calm. No, came a thought. Part of you is calm. Another part is in the grip of anger.

‘I wish you no harm, mistress,’ he said slowly. His voice was perfectly composed. ‘I do not want to know why you are a renegade. I have seen enough and can deduce the rest. I will not take the ship from you.’ He paused. ‘But you are walking a dangerous path, and trying to grasp power that might destroy you. A mind cannot exist as yours does, split between two realms, and survive whole. The flesh or the machine, one must win.’

I am strong enough, she thought.

‘I am strong enough,’ she said, and realised that she controlled herself again.

‘Perhaps.’ Ahriman shrugged. ‘I do not judge you, mistress. There are limits to my hypocrisy.’ He looked away, an expression she did not understand passing over his face. ‘You are right, though, you have no reason to think I am strong enough.’ He was silent for a moment, then reached out and ran his armoured fingers through the oil flames, his eyes fixed on them as they blackened and the chipped paint blistered. ‘I will never take your ship from you. I swear that to you.’

She believed him, but was not sure why. There was a weariness to his words and bearing that reminded her of something she could not quite place.

Perhaps you just want someone to trust, said a voice at the back of her thoughts. Perhaps it’s that you need to believe him.

‘I am sorry,’ she said, then paused. ‘Without you I would not have my ship back.’

He nodded, and looked as if he were uncertain what to say.

‘You were running, weren’t you?’ she asked suddenly. He looked up at her. ‘Then whatever it was that you were running from found you.’

‘Yes,’ he said, and she thought she recognised a tired human smile on his face.

‘And now? What are you going to do now?’

He shrugged.

‘I will try to find out why.’

‘Why not keep running?’

He looked away, his mouth half open as if a reply had died on his lips.

‘Because I fear what might happen if I turn away again,’ he said at last. She looked at him for a long minute, the black-shrouded witch and the blue-eyed demigod.

‘I will take you where you need to go,’ she said at last. He bowed his head once.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

A chuckle bubbled from her throat. The sensation of it made her cold; she had not laughed for years and did not know why she did so now. ‘But where do you want to go? Do you even know where to start?’

‘Yes,’ he said, pausing to stare again into the fire. ‘I begin with the past.’

VI
MEMORY’S ASHES

Alone in his chambers, Ahriman closed his eyes and fell back into his memory. The sensations of his body dimmed in his awareness. His heartbeat and breathing slowed to almost nothing. His thoughts dropped away and quiet blackness filled him.

‘Memory is a machine.’ Ahriman remembered Pentheus tapping his ivory cane on the floor to emphasise each syllable. The old scholar had loved the sound of his own voice even though it had been dry with age. Pentheus had given Ahriman and his true brother their first lessons in logic, philosophy and rhetoric when they were still boys on Terra. Ahriman and Ohrmuzd had called him a desert lizard, but never to his face, and they had taken every word of his lectures to heart. ‘Most people treat it like something that is fixed in quality,’ Pentheus had continued, wiping sweat from the wrinkles of his face. ‘They forget and consider it natural. They remember useless details and do not understand why. They miss the fact that they have neglected one of the greatest devices of the human mind. Memory is knowledge, and knowledge is power.’

Ahriman smiled at the recalled words, and began to walk to the palace of his own memory. At first, it was like walking down a dark passageway, the light of the present growing dimmer in the distance. Then, the darkness vanished and he was standing on white marble steps under a blue sky and bright sun.

He turned away and looked up. The palace unfolded towards the sky above him, its white walls glittering in the light. Towers rose from its tiered floors, and its painted wooden shutters had been thrown open to allow the wind to blow through its halls. The palace had never existed in reality, of course. It was a construct, built from millions of memories layered together: the steps were his memory of the ascent to the White Temple of the Ionus plateau, the sky’s colour and heat had been Prospero’s, and the wind had stirred the air of his childhood.

At his back, the sun’s heat prickled sweat from his skin. He wore no armour here, just the memory of a simple white robe. He took a step forwards, noting the warmth of the stone beneath his feet. Such details were important. Memory was built on more than images or words, it was a web of sensations linked to a point in time. Remember the smell of a place and you would see it. Remember the exact shade of a flower’s petals and you would recall the name of its species.

Ahriman walked up the steps to the palace doors, and pushed them open. The corridor beyond was cool. Mirror-lined shafts opened in the roof every few metres. Rugs of red, white and blue softened the floor under Ahriman’s feet as he stepped forwards. Doors lined the corridors on both sides. Each was different: some were grimy plasteel and looked like they belonged on a starship or inside a bunker, others were painted wood, or glass, or burnished metal. There were hundreds of doors in this corridor alone and tens of thousands more in the rest of the palace. Once it had grown in size with every day, new floors and rooms layering on top of his oldest and deepest recollections. Now, his mind had added a thin layer of dust to every surface as a sign of his neglect.

As he walked down the corridor, he reflected that the palace was another mark of hypocrisy. He had spent so long hiding and forgetting, but the palace still stood, the memories within preserved. In truth, he had never considered dismantling it; though there were doors he had never opened since he had first sealed them.

Sounds filled his ears as he walked past each door. He heard voices of people long dead, snatches of conversations, and the muted rumble of battles. Part of him wanted to stop, to go through each door and relive the past contained within. He walked on.

The first door he sought was bare grey stone, unadorned except for a silver ring that hung from a loop. Ahriman looked at the door for a long time. It was the last door he had added to the palace. He took the ring in his hand and pulled. The door opened and he stepped into the space beyond.

The chamber was open to the sky. The light of two red suns touched Ahriman’s face and sweet, incense-perfumed air filled his lungs. Out beyond an arched window, the towers of the Planet of the Sorcerers marched away to the horizon. Shelves ran the circumference of the room, rising from the floor to where the wall gave way to the sky. White marble jars stood in neat rows on the shelves. Polished jet beast-heads capped each, and gilded script ran down their sides. At the chamber’s centre, a black-bound book lay on a silver and obsidian plinth.

For a long moment Ahriman did not move. Then he began looking along the shelves, his eyes taking in each name picked out in golden script. Once he had looked at every one, he came back to the first.

Nycteus, he read. As good a place to start as any. He reached out, picked up the jar and opened its lid. Fragments of sight and sound surrounded him, flickering like images fast-wound through a pict feed. First came the face, and he watched as it changed, ageing and scarring from the first moment he had met Nycteus as an aspirant to the last instant he had seen him. Then snatches of psychically exchanged thought, then times shared. He relived battles fought at the birth of the Imperium, and saw it fall into war while Nycteus stood beside him.

‘It must be done. I am with you, master,’ Nycteus had said as he bowed his head and joined the cabal. Then he saw his young adept friend bow in the dust beneath Magnus, and beg forgiveness for what they had done. Suddenly the memories became small fragments: a tale told by a renegade captain, a rumour of a sorcerer fighting alongside a warband of the Night Lords Legion, a name overheard in the slave stations of Naar.

Finally the memories ended and Ahriman looked to the rows of jars. Each one represented his memories of one of the Thousand Sons. Here they all lived in his mind, the past hoarded with any scraps he had chanced on during his years of exile. He had never examined the memories kept in each, only adding to them when he found a trace of what might have become of them. He supposed it had been a penance of sorts. After a long moment he moved on to the next.

When he was done he opened his eyes. He was trembling, but he had what he needed.

‘Nothing. Just like the others,’ said Astraeos.

Ahriman did not reply. A wind coiled through the broken tower, carrying the damp reek of rain. He turned around, allowing his eyes to take in the details while his mind soaked up what psychic traces lingered in the warp.

The tower was not a tower, of course, but the description sufficed. It had been a starship. Half a kilometre long and formed like an arrowhead, it now thrust up from the surface of the dank moon. Perhaps the moon had pulled the ship into its crust, or maybe the moon had grown from the ship like an uncontrolled cancer. The walls had become floors, ceilings walls, and the whole remade by the touch of the warp and the hands of those who called it home. Metre-thick blooms of turquoise rust submerged its buttresses and gunports. Pale curtains of fungus hung from its crenellations, glowing a sickly green in the perpetual gloom. The stranded ship’s spine had bent and twisted so that it looked like a crooked finger of coral growing from a weed-covered seabed.

The room they were in was the highest point of the tower. Looking at what remained of its structure, Ahriman thought it might have been a gathering chamber of sorts. Tiered steps ringed an open space whose floor was a wide circle of pitted copper. Rain fell in curtains across wide holes in the high walls. The gunship which had brought them from the Titan Child squatted on a wide ledge beyond one of the breaches. Thidias and Kadin moved amongst the wreckage, their boltguns held loose in their hands, eyes sweeping across the debris.

‘There was a battle,’ said Thidias, bending down to run a finger over the glassy edge of a tear in the wall. Ahriman nodded. He could feel the fading touch of death pooling in the warp around the tower. ‘No corpses, this time.’

‘They were burned to ash, and the rain washed it away,’ said Ahriman as his mind filtered through the psychic residue around them. The warp infected the tower as it did the dank moon, muddying his mind as he tried to pry meaning from his surroundings. He could taste the smoke of burning flesh, thick and greasy. A blurred image filled his mind’s eye: slow-moving figures in red armour and high-crested helmets. He twitched and opened his eyes to look at the holes punched in the walls. The echo of the detonation had prickled heat across his skin. Hundreds of warriors had dwelt here, building their strength before plunging back into the heart of the Eye. They had all died in under an hour.

Ahriman extended his hand and fragments of midnight-blue armour rose from the rain-splattered floor. He concentrated, feeling the edge of each sliver. He waved his hand and the fragments slid together, forming the shell of a Space Marine breastplate. A bat-winged skull grinned at him from between the web of cracks.

‘Night Lords,’ said Ahriman. ‘Or a splinter of them.’ His hand dropped to his side and the breastplate crumbled back to shards and fell to the floor. He turned and began to reach his mind through the rest of the wreckage, feeling for a trace of his brother. It was there, like a dull ache under the psychic skin of the tower. His name had been Memunim. He had been an adept of the Raptora, and the Seal Keeper of the Fifth House of Prospero. He had never been a friend but he had been loyal when Ahriman knew him.

He was also the twelfth of Ahriman’s brothers that he had tracked down only to find them gone. What had Memunim become after the banishment? Had he fallen into the service of petty and vicious masters, or had his path been darker?

‘How many more?’ said Astraeos.

Ahriman looked at Astraeos. They held each other’s gaze for a long minute. He had known that it would come to this eventually. They had circled the edge of the Eye for months, riding the storm’s edge until the Titan Child trembled and Egion the Navigator had pleaded for rest. They had yet to find a single one of Ahriman’s brothers. Some of the rumours he had stored in his memory had proved false, others had led them true, but always they arrived to find either slaughter or those they sought gone. Astraeos had followed Ahriman’s commands without question, but with every week that passed on board the Titan Child, the renegade’s frustration grew.

‘Until I find an answer,’ said Ahriman.

‘What answer?’ Astraeos gestured at the charred chamber and the rain blowing in through the holes in the wall. ‘There is nothing here to give any answers.’

Astraeos shook his head and turned away.

‘At least this one fought,’ said Thidias quietly. Ahriman looked towards him. Thidias caught the look and shrugged. ‘If it is the same hunters as came for you, then they must have given the same choice. Come with us, or fight.’ Thidias bent to pick a spent bolt shell-case from the floor.

‘Come with us or burn,’ growled Kadin from beside a melted wound in the chamber wall.

Ahriman withdrew his psychic senses. There was nothing here that he had not seen in all the other places he had been in these last months. Each of his brother Thousand Sons had received emissaries as Gzrel had Tolbek, and had either accepted the emissary’s offer or fought. He suspected that many had been taken rather than killed, but he could not be sure. He walked to the largest of the wall breaches and looked out. Cold rain dappled his armour and ran down the creases of his face. They could spend a mortal lifetime tracking down each of his fellow exiles, but he had a feeling that they would only find more cold ashes.

You knew what you would find before you began, he thought. He thought of the rumour he had heard again and again over the years of his exile, the one step he had hoped to avoid. Do you not want answers?

Ahriman watched as cloaks of grey rain dragged across the pools of the surrounding swamp. Behind him Astraeos, Kadin and Thidias watched him in silence. He did not like the decision he had reached; it was the choice he had resisted ever since he had begun his search.

‘One more,’ said Ahriman, and turned to see the three renegades exchange glances. ‘One more journey. But this journey will be deeper into the Eye than we have been before.’ He looked at Astraeos. ‘And you will need to help me if we are to reach where we go alive.’

Astraeos’s face remained unreadable, but distaste rippled through his surface thoughts. Kadin and Thidias watched their brother in silence. Finally he bowed his head.

‘Come,’ said Ahriman, and moved to where the gunship crouched under the falling rain.

‘Who are they?’ called Thidias. When Ahriman turned to look back at him the grey-haired warrior shrugged. ‘These sorcerers you are looking for. Who are they?’

Ahriman paused. He would have to tell them something of the truth; only a thread of loyalty bound them together.

‘They are the brothers I betrayed,’ said Ahriman and turned away.

+Again,+ sent Ahriman. Astraeos blinked the sweat from his human eye. His head felt heavy and a pain spread through his forehead from the metal of his augmetic. Across from him, Ahriman’s eyes stayed fixed on him, unblinking.

The chamber they occupied was a crystal- and brass-enclosed platform at the top of a tower high on the Titan Child’s spine. The only light was that of the stars and the angry, bruised-flesh glow of the Eye of Terror. They sat to either side of the floor’s centre. Circles traced in charcoal and oil surrounded them. Ahriman wore an off-white robe, Astraeos a grey tabard edged in crimson. They had not moved in nine days.

Astraeos let his gaze lock with Ahriman’s and let his mind form the image of a candle flame.

+Good,+ said Ahriman. Astraeos felt a stab of cold between his eyes. The image of the candle flame grew in his perception. +Now,+ sent Ahriman. The flame split and became two. Astraeos blinked and the two flames began to flicker, one dimming while the other brightened, then reversing. The flames split again. Now four flames each flickered to a different rhythm. Astraeos was not breathing, and the beat of blood was almost silent in his veins.

Suddenly the flames split again, and again and again until thousands of flames sparkled in his mind’s eye. Waves of rhythm flowed across the field of flames in increasingly rapid and complex patterns. Astraeos held the image firm in his thoughts. The patterns were not under his control, but that was not the lesson. He had to hold the image together as Ahriman changed it. They were learning to share their strengths, to become stronger by being of one mind. At least that was what Ahriman had said. Astraeos was still not sure that he believed him.

The flames were gone. In his mind’s eye there was only a field of golden thread that wove together, forming images from smoke and light: a bird beating its wings, a scarab eating the disc of the sun, a jackal-headed man with nine arms, each holding a bright symbol. He could not feel his body now. The division between what his mind saw and imagined it saw had vanished, but he knew that if his concentration slipped the vision would shatter. He felt his mind stretch, as if the architecture of his soul were realigning. He had trained his mind and powers for war and strength, and trained others to do the same, but he had never known anything like this. It felt like burning, like the joy of breathing after suffocating, like laughter and tears.

The image vanished. Astraeos’s eyes opened. Rage flashed through him. He wanted the sensation back; he wanted to feel the universe singing to the tune of his will. Ahriman’s eyes did not move from his; they seemed to glow like sunlight catching ice. Coolness spread through Astraeos, and the euphoria drained from him, leaving a cold emptiness and a taste like iron on his tongue.

‘What are you doing to me?’ said Astraeos. The words felt thick in his mouth. Ahriman gave a small shake of his head, stood and walked to a vox-horn mounted by the chamber’s only door.

‘Mistress Carmenta,’ said Ahriman. ‘Please wake Egion and bring the ship to warp transit readiness.’ Her reply was short, and Ahriman turned to look back at Astraeos.

‘I have done what I said I would do. I have trained you so that our minds can work in concert,’ said Ahriman. ‘We are about to steer deeper into the Eye of Terror, following a broken path. I will need to be in communion with Egion as he guides the ship. For that I need you to lend me your strength.’

‘No,’ said Astraeos without moving. ‘No, you were doing something else as well.’

Ahriman stared at him for a long moment.

‘Your mind was built to be a fortress, but here…’ Ahriman gestured to the jagged pupil of the Eye of Terror. ‘Here the warp is everywhere. We breathe it. We touch it when we dream. Your mind will not withstand that, not over time, not as we pass deeper into the Eye. Your mental defences are no proof against it: they are too blunt, too simple. To survive where we must go, you need to be able to ride the tide, not stand against it. What I am giving to you is only the beginning.’

‘I swore to obey you, not to become like you.’

‘You must, or you will fall.’ For a second, Astraeos said nothing. He thought he believed Ahriman, and part of his soul ached to ascend to the heights it had touched under Ahriman’s tutoring.

‘Tell me,’ said Astraeos, his voice cold. ‘Did the brothers you betrayed believe you?’

Ahriman stared at him for a long minute. Astraeos’s gaze did not waver. Then Ahriman let out a slow, controlled breath and walked slowly to the chamber’s door.

‘We have a few hours before our journey begins,’ said Ahriman without looking back at Astraeos. ‘Rest. You will need it.’

Ahriman walked the decks of the Titan Child alone. It had become a habit, he realised, a way of trying to release the pressures of worry. Its effectiveness was limited. Passages opened silently before him as his thoughts churned on. In places, the darkness was absolute; in others, the low arrhythmic pulse of a dying glow-globe lit his path. He passed lifeless servitors, slumped against walls or collapsed on the floor. An aura clung to everything he looked at, like a ragged layer of luminous green mist seeping from the edges of sight. It had a taste in his mind, as well: dust and grave soil. The passages went on; now narrow with rust-layered pipes running over walls, ceiling and floor, now wide and silent apart from a distant hum like a sleeping heartbeat.

It was his fault, of course. All of it. Ohrmuzd’s death, the banishment from the Planet of the Sorcerers, this doom that stalked him and his exiled brothers. He had set it all in motion without realising, the entire line of cause and effect that stretched back to before he had cast the Rubric. Intentions and ignorance of consequences did not matter. He would never escape it, and the only way of trying to solve anything was to pile another risk on the mistakes of the past. He would have to use more power to try and find answers, but then what?

No good can come from pursuing that question, he thought to himself, but knew that the thought was a weak protest. He had to know. His worry was just his mind accepting the inevitable.

All that I touch returns to dust, he thought. He had stopped noticing where he walked or what he saw. I am responsible. Not someone else, not a higher power, but me and me alone.

‘All heaped on the pyre of pride and left to become ash,’ he muttered to the shadows.

‘The truth,’ cackled a voice from behind him. ‘The truth, the truth. So easy to find, so difficult to hear.’

It was Maroth. The soothsayer shambled out of the shadows. His armour was hissing from lack of repair, and in places, Ahriman could see something wet staining the dark battle plate. Maroth wore no helm, and his hands moved continually over the surface of his own face, long nails pinching his skin. He was babbling and crooning to himself as if he were comforting a child that was not there. Inside the crushed shell of his mind, Maroth’s soul was rotting, but somehow, in all that had happened, he had survived.

Ahriman was about to turn away when Maroth sniffed, and turned his head from side to side.

‘Is that you, Horkos?’ The flesh around his empty eye sockets had flaked away to reveal yellow bone. ‘Yes. I see you. It is you. You will serve me, won’t you, when the time comes, when I take the Lordship. Yes?’ Maroth walked forwards, straightening himself, grinning a skull’s grin.

Ahriman considered saying something, then considered putting his sword through the creature’s neck. He shook his head and began to turn away.

‘It would be better to kill me, you know, Horkos. Yes?’ Ahriman shook his head. He had hoped the soothsayer dead many times over, but he would not murder something so pitiful.

‘Why not?’ called Maroth. ‘Is the delusion of nobility still so important to you that you must let me live because you promised?’ Maroth laughed, and kept laughing until the sound was a wet hacking from his throat. ‘Don’t you ever think of why you made such a promise, or how ridiculous it is? Your problem is pity. Pity combined with pride. What if I said that I want to die, that it would be a kindness?’

Ahriman took a stride forwards and pulled an inch of his blade from its scabbard.

‘Very good, very good.’ Maroth grinned wide. ‘Now all you have to do is cut. All you have to do is show that you are a betrayer and a liar.’

Ahriman shook his head and walked away. He had to clear his mind fully before he tried to guide the ship to the edge of the Imperium.

‘Be silent, and crawl away.’

‘See you again, my friend,’ laughed Maroth at Ahriman’s back.

‘Mistress, I cannot. Please. I cannot. Not again.’ There were tears in Egion’s voice. She did not like it any more than Egion, but Ahriman had told her it was the only way, and she believed him.

He won’t destroy us, she thought. He promised me.

‘Egion, my friend, you must. I have told Master Ahriman that we will go where he needs, and I cannot swim the Great Ocean without you.’

‘I have had dreams, mistress. Sometimes when I wake, I think my dreams have followed me. Sometimes I think they are here with me, standing where I cannot see.’ His voice stopped and for a moment Carmenta felt his fear bleed over the link; it felt warm, like an overheating machine. ‘I don’t want to go further into the Eye. It’s wrong, mistress. Can’t you feel it? None of us should go any further.’ He was quiet for a long minute, and when his voice returned it sounded as if he were talking to himself as much as to her. ‘It’s thinner here. Reality is like gauze. I can see the stars when we are in the warp, and I see the warp even when I close my eyes now. I see it when I dream.’

Carmenta paused. She had no idea what Egion was talking about. In the Titan Child’s embrace, she only felt the raw surge of power and the pulse of systems.

The dreams of the living are not those of machines, she thought.

‘You must do this, Egion. You must do this for me.’

A pulse of fatigue and fear shook the link, but after a moment he replied in a weak voice.

‘As you command, mistress.’

Six hours later, the Titan Child slid into the warp. Its engines and Geller fields filled Carmenta’s mind as they drew almost all the power from her reactors. She shut down her links one by one until the slow, patient roar of her ship was the only sound in her head. It sounded comforting.

The last thing Carmenta heard before she cut the direct link to Egion was the Navigator muttering to himself.

‘Like fire,’ said the Navigator. ‘Like a million candles.’

VII
ORACLE

‘It is beautiful,’ said Carmenta, her voice echoing from speakers high in the roof of the Titan Child’s bridge. Astraeos turned to look at the tangled lump of cables hanging above the command dais. He could see the tech-witch’s hand, limp and unmoving amongst the oiled metal coils. He wondered if she had meant to speak out loud. Sometimes he wondered whether she was entirely aware of what she did. He frowned. The bundle of cables twitched as he looked at it, as if she had sensed his gaze and flinched away. He turned and looked back at the bank of pict screens that formed a pillar which rose to the arched roof high above.

Images of space flowed across the screens, showing them all what Ahriman had led them to. Astraeos saw a sun; bright blue, it burned at the system’s heart with a cold radiance. Curtains of pale gas filled the void. They folded and shifted as the Titan Child cut through them. Occasionally Astraeos thought he saw the outline of a watching face or figure, then the angle or flow of light would change and it would vanish. Static bloomed in the image from his augmetic eye. His skin was prickling. Tinnitus rang in his ears, rising and fading. They were deeper inside the Eye of Terror than he had ever been before. He felt as if something were crawling under his skin, seeping into his blood and thoughts. Had it always been like this, even on the Eye’s edge? Had he become dead to the warp’s touch?

He realised that someone had spoken, and turned sharply. Ahriman stood behind him gazing at the screens, a frown making ridges on his smooth forehead.

‘What?’ he said. The ringing in his ears rose in pitch. Ahriman looked at him.

+Look,+ Ahriman’s thought spoke inside Astraeos’s skull. He flinched at the telepathic intrusion, and then followed Ahriman’s gaze as he turned to look at one of the largest screens. A planet loomed out of the spills of gas. Astraeos did not know how he had not seen it before. It was massive, its surface flowing with spirals of ochre yellow and dark red. He could see other planets looming close beyond it, bloated spheres in the mist. They were far too close together for them to be in stable orbits. The planet was getting larger and larger and, for a second, he was not sure if it was swelling, or if they were moving closer.

We should not be moving that fast. He felt Ahriman chuckle in his thoughts, and slammed his mind shut with a snarl of will.

‘My apologies,’ said Ahriman. He turned and looked to Carmenta’s nest. ‘The moon, mistress. Bring us to a dead stop within shuttle range.’ Astraeos saw it then, a black sphere hanging above the yellow and red swirled surface of the planet, a lone moon orbiting its parent. He saw light glint where it touched the moon’s surface.

He stared at it.

He would go to it, he must go to it, he knew he must, as if the ringing within his ears were suddenly a voice, just on the edge of hearing, calling for him to come and see. Ahriman turned to leave the bridge and Astraeos moved to follow. Ahriman stopped and looked at the Librarian.

‘I need no bodyguard for this, Astraeos. I will go alone. No harm will come to me.’ Astraeos glanced at the crowded planets and the billows of gas. For a second he saw an eye, larger than a gas giant, the black moon forming its pupil. Then he shuddered and it was gone.

‘How can you be sure?’ he asked, but Ahriman gave no answer.

The shuttle settled onto the cavern floor in a whirl of venting gas. It was a small, blunt-winged and box-sided vehicle, its grey fuselage chipped and streaked with rust. In the meagre crew compartment, Ahriman heard the servitor pilot blurt a string of code, and felt the vehicle’s frame shake as the seals unlocked and the rear hatch descended to reveal the gas-fogged world beyond. He stepped out. A dim blue light shone from within the fog. Atmosphere safety runes pulsed green for a second, blinked out, and then returned in unresolved amber.

The cavern floor was black and as smooth as polished glass. He could see reflections slide across it as he moved forwards. The whole moon was a black crystal orb hanging in space, its surface smooth and unbroken except for a kilometre-wide circular opening. The shuttle had descended into that opening, and had kept descending for over an hour. At least it had seemed an hour to Ahriman. He was not naive enough to believe that such things as time were absolute here.

He began to walk, his footsteps clicking on the black crystal. After a few moments the fog swallowed the shuttle behind him. Other shapes appeared in the thin light. He saw walls of the same black glass as the surface he walked on. White stone statues appeared from the fog. Some had their arms raised as if in greeting, others looked terrified. One appeared to be weeping. Carved images of eyes looked back at him, and he thought their stare followed him. The flow of the warp was so strong that he was not sure what he was seeing with his eyes, and what with his mind.

I am a pilgrim, he realised. As the ancients ascended the steps of Parnassus, so I come here hoping for a revelation.

‘History is the turning of a circle’, Magnus the Red had once said. ‘Nothing dies, not truly. The symbols of old change and are reborn, and the new paths turn out to be already well worn by time.’

After a while, Ahriman realised that he must have passed into a tunnel. When he glimpsed walls, they seemed closer and curved up to some point lost in the fog. He was also not alone.

He saw the first of them as he looked up into a break in the fog. The figure was walking on the ceiling. It was spindle-limbed, its legs back-jointed like those of a bird. Half-formed quills covered the skin visible between the plates of its sapphire armour. It carried a halberd, the blade polished to a silver edge.

Ahriman felt his hand go to the hilt of his sword without thinking. The creature stopped and bent its head back to look at him. Clusters of blue and yellow eyes glittered across its face. It did not move and, after a second, he took his hand from his sword and walked on. He saw others: tall creatures with helms like long-beaked birds, hunched figures swathed in yellow robes, squat things in silver scale armour with many arms. Some followed him, trailing him through the mist, walking on the walls, or floor, or ceiling as they pleased. None approached him, nor spoke a word. He walked on for what felt like days, never knowing if he was closer to his goal. All the while the winds of the warp blew over him, carrying a taste of dry sand and lightning.

At last, when he had wondered if he was walking an eternal circle, he took a step and the fog vanished. He blinked. He stood at the base of a spherical chamber that could have swallowed a battle Titan. The light was stark and bright, but had no source and seemed to come from every angle. The black walls were featureless and mirror-smooth but reflected nothing. He could see no doors, and when he turned, there was no sign of how he had entered. The warp was utterly calm. That, more than anything, sent his hand back to his sword.

+There is no need for that.+ The voice filled Ahriman’s mind. He could feel the soothing notes in the sending, the surety and amusement. Ahriman kept his hand on his sword.

+I come for answers.+ A wall of sound hit him, shaking his flesh inside his armour. He heard his own voice repeating his words in fading snatches.

‘Answers to questions…’

‘To questions…

‘Questions….

+Of course,+ said the voice in his head. There was something behind him, not a presence but an absence in his mind, like a shadow cast by something he could not see. He turned, his sword in his hand, fire flaring from the sigils worked into its blade. The light of it shone out, reflecting off the black mirror walls.

The sword burned in his grip, pain spiralling from his hand into his mind. He screamed and dropped the hilt. +I said there was no need for that,+ said the oracle.

‘I don’t like the look of that,’ said Thidias. Astraeos followed his brother’s gaze to the images of the pict screen. Both Thidias and Kadin had joined him on the bridge while they waited for Ahriman’s return from the black moon.

‘No,’ agreed Kadin. ‘That looks less than positive.’

Astraeos frowned at the screens. The clouds of gas that filled the void had thickened and darkened, their colour shifting from pale blue to a cloudy green. He looked away. His head had been aching since they had arrived at whatever this place was. Looking at the screen just made the pain behind his eyes worse.

‘Are you well, brother?’ asked Thidias. Astraeos nodded, but risked another look at the screens. The gas clouds were now so thick that he could not see planets or stars. Something felt fundamentally wrong.

‘Mistress,’ he called, and heard the dryness in his own voice. ‘Mistress Carmenta.’

Static filled a long pause, and then Carmenta’s voice crackled across the bridge.

‘Yes, Astraeos?’

‘Do you see the change in the void?’

‘I do, but my sensors are…’ Her voice trailed off. ‘Are functioning less than satisfactorily. I am going to bring us closer to the moon.’

Astraeos nodded. His head was swimming and he felt as if he was going to vomit. A vibrating note ran through the ship and the image on the screens began to shift slowly as the Titan Child closed on the moon.

‘Look,’ said Kadin. Astraeos looked and felt the pain in his head spread down his neck.

The clouds were billowing across the void, fattening in sickly green folds. Impossible green lightning lit them from within and flashed across their surface. Astraeos felt as if someone were trying to force a fist through the back of his skull. The pain in his head had become a keening cry. He saw shapes move beneath the clouds’ skin. They grew larger and then faded, like fish swimming closer to the surface only to dive into the depths again. Astraeos felt his knees buckle and hit the deck. He could not hear. Lights danced in front of his eye. The cry rose higher and louder in his head. He tried to shut it out, but it grew stronger. He felt someone pulling him to his feet.

‘I can hear them,’ he heard himself say. ‘They are calling. They have come for us.’

The oracle hung in the air in front of Ahriman, its arms held at its sides, its palms open. It wore armour that might once have been made for a Space Marine, but it had long since become something else. Its surface flowed like quicksilver. Ahriman could see reflections of things that were not there in the rippling surface: hooded figures, dying suns, reaching hands. Robes fluttered around the oracle in streams of fabric that changed colour as they moved. A blank bronze helm without holes for eyes, mouth, or nose hid its face. Small white and blue orbs revolved around the oracle like planets around a sun. Ahriman looked at one of the spheres, and saw the blue iris and black pupil of an eye staring back at him.

+Did you find it? Did you understand it?+ asked the oracle. The thought voice was measured and uncoloured by emotion; it was almost musical. Ahriman shook his head, not understanding the questions, wondering whether he should.

‘Is it you, Menkaura?’ said Ahriman, his eyes moving across the oracle’s silvered form. He could feel the oracle’s psychic senses playing over his own thoughts. It would have been easier to talk in thought, but something made him shrink back from such contact with the being in front of him.

The oracle nodded its head once.

‘It has been a long time,’ said Ahriman.

+Since we saw each other? Since the banishment?+ Ahriman saw in his mind a sharp-faced young warrior in the robe of a Corvidae novitiate, then the Thousand Sons Epistolary in a serpent helm, then the hunched figure reading tomes by the light of the Planet of the Sorcerers’ nine suns. For a second, he saw the face of his memories reflected in the silver surface of Menkaura’s armour. +Do I look so different to your eyes?+ said the oracle.

‘You have changed.’

+A matter of perspective.+

‘I have questions.’

+Who does not?+ The oracle turned as if looking away with its blind face, its orbiting eyes swivelling to keep their gaze on Ahriman. +There will be a cost, of course. A tribute.+

Ahriman was silent. Menkaura, the Oracle of Many Eyes: he had heard the name several times during his exile, coughed from the lips of sorcerers and mewled by the daemon-touched. He had always wondered and feared if the Menkaura the tales spoke of was his one-time brother. Now he knew, but the creature in front of him was no longer his kin, not in any true sense; it was something beyond mortal, something to be feared before it was trusted. I could have taken this path, he thought. I could have extended my mind across time, stretching to see everything, even things that have not yet been. I could have traded myself for such knowledge. He shivered, and felt the reassuring taste of air fill his lungs.

+Once I have answered you, I will ask you one question of my own. You will answer with the truth. That is the price.+

Ahriman nodded once.

‘I will pay that tribute.’

The oracle turned back to him and floated to the ground. Its feet touched the smooth curve of the floor. It took two paces and stopped an arm’s reach away from Ahriman. The dropped sword lay on the floor between them.

+Ask and I will answer.+

Ahriman’s mouth opened but the question that came out was not the one he had intended.

‘What happened to you?’

The oracle’s laugh crinkled across Ahriman’s thoughts. He felt the weight of years that had passed as millennia, the millennia that had been lived as aeons.

+Time, my brother. Choices. Time and choices change all things. As you well know.+

Ahriman thought of the ninth sun rolling into the sky of the Planet of the Sorcerers, of the rest of the Legion surrounding him and his cabal in the dawn light. He had last seen Menkaura then, standing amongst those he had not trusted to be a part of his conspiracy.

‘I am sorry, for what I did to you, for what I did to all of you.’

The oracle tilted its featureless head.

+Are you sorry, or are you sorry that you failed?+ The oracle shook its head. +What I am is not your doing, Ahriman. Your sin is that you cannot see the limits of your power. Even in despair, you gather all woes and faults to you, and claim more than is your due.+

‘I destroyed the Legion.’

+Did you? Was that your choice?+

‘It was no other’s.’

Again Ahriman felt the oracle’s chuckle shiver across his mind.

+Fate is a web that catches all, Ahriman. Each choice spawns thousands of possibilities, those possibilities birth more, until what began and what ends cannot be told so easily.+

Ahriman felt patterns form in his mind’s eye as he absorbed the message. He saw golden strands, thousands, tens of thousands, millions of strands burrowing through black time, overlapping and branching even as he watched. He felt his mind reel, then kindle with awe. It was magnificent. He was seeing the consequence of actions small and great, all connected, all tumbling like cards falling through air. It felt terrifying and beautiful. It felt like returning home. He plunged into the image, following strands of consequence, hungry to see ever finer connections. But even as he reached, the connections changed, broke, and multiplied. He spun on, unheeding of anything else. He must see, he must understand. As he spiralled through the golden web, he felt the brush of feathers and heard the laughter of ravens.

‘No!’ he shouted. The image dimmed until it was nothing but a lingering memory of a glowing web. The oracle nodded slowly.

+My fate could have been yours, my knowledge your curse. Perhaps if you had not enacted the Rubric, you would be as I am. Perhaps others would stand before you and ask what you see.+

‘You have fallen far.’

+We all fell, brother.+

‘I would not have made the same choices as you.’ The oracle shrugged, the gesture fluid and inhuman.

+But you did not come here to debate such matters.+

‘What will happen to our Legion?’

+Another question you did not come here to ask.+ Ahriman did not move, but held his gaze steady. After a second the oracle turned its head and looked up. The gesture was exactly as it would have been if it was looking into space while considering how to answer, and the movement of the featureless face made Ahriman’s skin crawl. +The Legion will die. It will become less than the dust. Those that remain will be as I am, creatures rather than the warriors we once were. Over time, no one will remember us, we will become a memory covered over by time.+

‘That is what you see?’

+Isn’t it what you see?+ The oracle’s thought voice paused. +You were our seer, Ahriman. You were master of the Corvidae. You taught us all. What can I tell you that you could not grasp for yourself if you wished? Why did you not read the tides of the future yourself? Do you mistrust yourself so much that you dare not?+ The eyes had stopped orbiting the oracle. Each one hung in the air, stationary, looking at Ahriman. +Or have you looked and fear to see more?+

‘Answer me.’

+It is as I said. Or it might be. The future is a diamond, each possibility a facet to be perceived by a different eye. The Legion may end as I have said, or in countless other ways. It may survive, it may rise. You know this. You have seen some of it for yourself.+ Ahriman remembered the vision, the whispers of the crow. ‘Time is not fixed, nor is flesh, nor is fate,’ it had said.

‘An uncertain prophecy is worthless.’

+That is their nature, my teacher. You asked only because you wished me to deny the truth you already knew.+

‘No part of my teachings remains in you,’ said Ahriman, his voice flat and cold.

+No? But you are here nonetheless. Ask yourself what you truly wish to know: the truth, or the lie that forgives you your choices?+

‘A question is no answer.’

+You know that is a lie.+ The oracle fell quiet, and the two stared at each other as the moment extended in buzzing silence. +Come. Ask the real question you came to ask.+

‘Firing,’ called Carmenta, and the Titan Child shook. The screens flashed white and dissolved into pixellated snow in front of Astraeos’s eyes. The view an instant before had been the curdling clouds rushing out to envelop them. The white and yellow vapour had brushed against the hull of the Titan Child as if caressing it. Carmenta had started to fire a second later, even though there was no target.

‘Show us what is happening,’ shouted Kadin.

The bridge shook again. No reply came from Carmenta. Howling voices tore through Astraeos’s mind, opening flares of multi-coloured pain behind his eyes. He felt as if he was going to fall again. The cries in his head broke into discordant shrieking. He had tried to close them out, but his will was sand trying to hold the tide.

The tide. He remembered Ahriman’s cool gaze and the days of training. He remembered the feeling of calm, of rising through deeper and deeper stillness, his mind floating above the flood.

He was still standing. The deck was vibrating now with a steady drumbeat as the Titan Child fired its weapons again and again. The pict screens had come back into focus and Kadin and Thidias were staring at them. The flare of the Titan Child’s weapons lit the darkness, rolling in discordance with the lightning that crawled through the vapour. There were shapes visible amongst the clouds, like patches of moving shadow cast by creatures with wings and bodies made of knives. One swooped close to the pict-eyes, and Astraeos heard the shriek rise in his mind.

‘Why are they not attacking?’ said Thidias.

‘What?’ growled Astraeos, glancing at his brother. His head was clearer but it was taking all his effort to keep his mind shielded from the shrieks. Thidias did not look away from the screen. Beside him Kadin nodded.

‘Whatever they are, they are not friendly, but they are just watching us,’ muttered Kadin.

Astraeos glanced back to the screen.

‘What are they doing?’ asked Thidias.

The Titan Child gave a great shudder and the pict screen flashed as a broadside turned the clouds into neon orange sheets. A shriek tore through Astraeos’s head and he growled in pain. This time it felt like a tortured laugh. It sounded like contempt.

He felt cold. The shrieks in his head felt suddenly familiar. He knew what they were. He had heard men give such cries, and listened as predators howled them into the night as they stalked through the trees.

‘They are waiting,’ he said quietly. His mouth felt very dry. ‘They are waiting for their prey.’

‘I am hunted,’ said Ahriman softly.

+A truth both deep and shallow.+

‘Tolbek came seeking me, to kill me or drag me to another’s knees.’ Ahriman paused, but the oracle did not move or speak. ‘Who did he serve? Who is hunting me?’

+Many hunt you, Ahriman,+ said the oracle, shaking its head. +I turn over a rock on any world, and I find another who would hound you to your death.+

‘Who did Tolbek serve?’

+You know. You have known since before they came. You knew at the moment they came for you. You knew when you were banished who would come after you.+

‘No,’ said Ahriman, but he could hear the tremor in the word. In his mind a face appeared. Grave, serious, lined by doubt and worry, the face of a friend he had persuaded to follow him into ruin.

+Tolbek served Amon.+

‘Amon.’ The word clung to his tongue as it slid into his mind, and he could not be sure if he had spoken at first. The oracle nodded slowly.

+Who else? The hardest to persuade, the most doubting, the one most loyal to the primarch besides yourself. He followed you, believed you, allowed himself to dream as you did. That trust bought him the destruction of everything he held dearest. He burned his hopes because he trusted you.+

Ahriman found that he was looking at the sword that lay on the black floor. His eyes moved across the flame-winged bird forming the crossguard, the red stone set in its pommel. It had been Tolbek’s sword, a brother’s sword wielded against him. ‘Vengeance,’ he said quietly.

+I cannot see his mind or predict his goals, but he dreams still. You gave him that ability, the arrogance to set knowledge against the decrees of fate. He has drawn knowledge and power to himself. He will storm the Planet of the Sorcerers if he has to, and challenge the Court of Change.+

‘Why?’ said Ahriman. ‘What does he intend? Why does he need me if not for simple vengeance?’

+You will have to find that answer for yourself.+

‘Do you not know the answer?’ asked Ahriman, but the oracle continued as if it had not heard.

+There is a choice. The future is fractured. I see lines of choice vanish into darkness and I cannot see their ends. The final death of the Legion may come to pass. I can see the paths that lead to that outcome with greater clarity than any others. But there are other ends, and other paths.+ Ahriman looked up. At his back, he heard a crow’s chuckling call echo in memory.

‘You know this? You have seen it?’

+It has been told to me.+

‘By whom?’

+I cannot say.+

‘Cannot, or will not?’

+Both.+ There was a finality to the thought, and the oracle began to rise into the air.

‘Wait,’ said Ahriman. ‘I have more questions.’

+No. Not yet.+

‘But there is another way, a way of saving the Legion?’

+Perhaps.+ In his mind Ahriman saw an image of Menkaura as a young novitiate looking up at him from the teaching circle, his handsome face split by a crooked smile. +All prophecy is the interaction of the probable and the paradoxical. All is uncertain even when it appears to have been fated.+

Ahriman smiled, in spite of himself. ‘My own words.’ In his mind, the memory image of Menkaura smiled more widely. ‘Thank you for the reminder.’ Ahriman nodded and picked up the sword from the floor. He sheathed it, his mind turning with thoughts and possibilities. He had renounced the dreams that he had used to destroy the Thousand Sons. He could not go back, not now, no matter the cost.

But, came a voice out of the jostle of thought and emotion. But it was you that set this in motion. It did not end with the Rubric. Your curse lives on, and yet you dare not face it. You run and let your Legion die because you were wrong once.

The mist was rising about him, hiding the spherical chamber. He began to walk into it, allowing it to fold over him.

+My tribute, Ahriman.+ The oracle’s voice was clear in his head, but distant as if being carried from far away. +I will have my tribute.+ Ahriman turned and looked up to the ascending figure that had once been his brother and his pupil.

‘Ask your question,’ said Ahriman. The oracle continued to rise, its form seeming to dissolve in the thickening mist.

+Why did you not allow yourself to die after your banishment?+

Ahriman’s skin prickled. He thought of the lifetimes he had spent on the edge of the Eye of Terror, never allowing himself to be as he was, always waiting for death that never came but never running to meet it. He thought of what he had to do now.

Fate is made of paths not taken, he thought to himself.

‘Because I still dream of hope, old friend,’ he called into the mist as it took the last sight of the oracle. Then he turned and strode away.

‘The shuttle,’ called Carmenta. ‘It’s returning.’

The bridge was silent. Kadin glanced at Astraeos. Thidias stood watching the screens that now showed just the roiling mass of sickly cloud outside the hull. The shrieks had vanished from Astraeos’s mind a second before Carmenta spoke.

‘Where is it?’ he asked.

‘It’s just broken the surface of the moon.’

Astraeos was already moving. Kadin and Thidias followed a second later.

The warp rose up to meet Ahriman. One second his mind was still and floating amidst the glassy calm of the oracle’s moon, and the next, he was reeling as waves of energy broke over him. The walls of the shuttle compartment shimmered and became translucent. Pale clouds boiled around him like milk curdling as it poured into bile. High shrieks filled his ears and stabbed into his thoughts. The image of the shuttle he sat in stuttered between solidity and transparency. He saw something amongst the clouds, something that was gliding on the storm winds.

Dark silhouettes appeared in the churning fog. The shrieking was all around him now, filling his mind and ears. He released his harness, and unfolded to his feet. The floor of the compartment felt solid beneath him, but he could see through the metal as if it were glass.

One of the shadow shapes swooped close. It reached towards him; he could see the shadow of its claws the instant before they punched through the skin of reality. Red and green light wept from the wound as the claws slashed it wide. Ahriman could see light and colour swirling in the space beyond the hole which hung in the rushing clouds. The shrieking was a single high, discordant note. Ahriman felt the hairs on his skin rise as if pulled by static.

Slowly, almost delicately, a creature pulled itself from beyond. It paused, crouching on the lip of reality, its head swaying from side to side. Armour plates shimmered with an oily rainbow of colours as it moved. Bulbous organic growths had sprouted across its body, like rust blooming on iron left in lightless water. Pale spines ran down the jump pack that hung from its shoulders.

Ahriman had heard of such creatures, Space Marines lost to the warp and the sharpness of their blades. If they had a name for themselves none knew it, but to those who knew how to call them, they were named warp talons.

It flexed its knife-blade claws. Pale green fire ignited in the jets on its back. It looked at Ahriman with red eyes and leapt, dragging a caul of the storm vapour in its wake. Behind it, four more wounds began to rip wide.

A cliff of pitted iron appeared out of the fog. The lips of blast doors opened wide to greet them. The shuttle’s engines roared and its hull snapped back into solidity, closing off the vision of the storm beyond.

And then the shuttle rang like a gong, and spun. Ahriman tumbled from his feet as the world turned over. Sparks showered around him as a flake of the hull peeled back. The creature looked down at Ahriman for a second, and then pounced.

The claws met Ahriman’s kine-shield with a burst of light and a sound like a lightning strike. The creature sprang back, hooking its hands and feet to the opposite wall. It hissed. Ahriman felt the shuttle tumbling around him. He could hear the noise of more claws raking the outside of the hull.

The creature leapt at him. Ahriman’s mind burned. A white-hot beam flashed from his eyes to meet its assault; it shrieked, and Ahriman felt the warp twist out of his grasp. Surprise was still forming in his mind when the claws met his stomach. They punched though his armour and into the soft flesh beneath. He had long enough to think that it felt cold, like swallowing ice. Then the bulk of the creature rammed into him and slammed him to the deck.

The shuttle spun and he felt his skin press against the inside of his armour as g-force tried to pull him away from the floor. The creature punched its free claw and hooked feet into the deck, pinning him in place. He looked up at it. The creature’s red eyepieces were looking back at him. It was so close he could see the fumes venting from slits in the snout of its helm.

I will not die here, he thought. He sank his mind into his body, forcing calm through his nerves and muscle. It felt like plunging into water. He could feel the claws in his guts. He saw the arrangement of molecules, bone and muscle fibre spin symbolically before his mind’s eye, and changed what he saw with a thought.

His skin tingled and went numb. In his guts, the blood stopped flowing, organs began to harden, bone became like metal. He felt his hearts stop. Above him the creature’s face split, a wide wet crack running across its faceplate. Ahriman could see sharp teeth in the red ruin of a mouth.

‘Alive,’ the creature hissed. ‘Alive. Yes.’ It licked its teeth with a black tongue. ‘Not whole. No.’ It pulled back, and tried to pull its claws from Ahriman’s guts. He did not even feel it. There was just the icy rush as the warp spun through his blood and bone. The creature howled and tried to rip its claws free. They held firm, as if it they were locked inside stone. Behind the faceplate of his helm, Ahriman smiled. He did not have long; he could not maintain the alteration to the substance of his body indefinitely.

The creature opened its mouth to roar again. Ahriman struck upwards, his fingers splayed as they punched into the open maw. The creature reeled. Ahriman closed his hand, his armoured grip digging into the soft meat of the creature’s throat. He split his mind into two streams of thought; one half continued to breathe stone and steel into his flesh, while the second began to burn. The creature thrashed, glowing cracks running across its armour from its mouth. Ahriman felt his mind brush against what remained of the creature’s soul; it felt withered and rotten, like blood turned to black jelly in a dead heart. Out of the corner of his eye, Ahriman saw the toothed blast door loom into view. He did not have time to move before the impact.

Astraeos was ten paces into the hangar bay when the shuttle clipped the blast doors. He saw the scene unfold in delicate slowness, as he and his brothers ran forwards. The shuttle flipped over, its stabiliser fins shearing off. Shreds of armour plating spun in all directions. Fuel sprayed in its wake, burning for an instant in the cloud of air from the ruptured cabin. Astraeos saw shapes fling themselves from the shuttle just before the impact. They had been Space Marines once. Lines of power armour could be seen under layers of growth, like polluted coral. Green jets of flame pushed them up into the darkness above. A third fell away with the rest of the wreckage, its body scattering globules of black fluid as it fell to the deck.

Another jumped too late. A chunk of the shuttle’s wing spun towards it faster than it could move, and mashed it into two ragged portions.

He is dead. The thought slipped into his mind with a cold certainty. The largest piece of debris was skidding across the deck in a slew of sparks. Part of his mind identified it as a section of the passenger compartment. It looked as if a Titan had stamped on it. Nothing could be alive inside that.

Above them, the two surviving creatures turned and dived. Kadin and Thidias knelt, raised their bolters as one and fired. Explosions burst in the air, trailing the foremost creature as it spun and jinked downwards. It shrieked as it dived, its true voice mingled with the scream of its hungering soul.

A stride ahead of his brothers, Astraeos drew his sword and ran towards the wreckage. The second creature crashed into the twisted fuselage and began to tear through the metal plating as if trying to dig down to something buried within.

Astraeos heard a cry from behind him and glanced over his shoulder. The first creature was climbing back into the air on a column of white-green fire. Kadin thrashed in its claws. Thidias was on the ground, the muzzle of his bolter twitching as he searched for a clear shot. Astraeos’s stride faltered.

The creature holding Kadin flew higher, dark liquid drizzling in their wake. He could see Kadin’s bolter still gripped in his flailing hands. The creature shrieked and Astraeos could taste the hunter’s joy in the sound. As he watched, Kadin twisted and rammed the muzzle of his bolter between his body and the creature. The bolter roared. Shell casings showered down to the deck. Then a juddering line of explosions broke from the creature’s back. It dropped Kadin an instant before the green fire at its back became a rolling sphere of heat. He did not see Kadin hit the floor.

In front of Astraeos, the surviving creature gave a howl of triumph. He snapped his eyes back to it as the distance closed. It had shredded the remains of the shuttle, and was crouching amongst the wreckage. In the wash of gunfire, its black armour glistened with spatters of machine oil and blood. Something was moving at its feet. He saw a hand reaching up as if trying to ward the creature off.

The creature unfolded to its full height and splayed its arms wide. The claws of its fingers were the white of bone. Its angular head tilted back and Astraeos heard the silent howl of triumph in his mind.

The creature noticed him an instant before the tip of Astraeos’s blade pierced through its left eye and punched from the back of its head. Astraeos felt the impact jerk up his arm and snapped his mind into the blade’s core. The creature’s head and upper torso exploded in a web of crawling lightning. The remains slumped onto the wreckage, and twitched until the last electrical arcs vanished.

Astraeos unfastened his helmet. The outer doors were sealed but the atmosphere was still thin. He curled his lip. The corpse at his feet was fuming a scent of charred meat and spoilt fruit. He turned his head to where Ahriman struggled amidst the twisted wreckage; impossibly alive, his armour was torn but there were no signs of blood or wounds. Astraeos bent down to pull the twisted spars of metal aside and then paused.

‘When you are out of this, I think it is the time for some answers.’

VIII
RUBRIC

Ahriman looked up. They were all staring at him. Thidias stood by the wall, his hands across his chest, his weapons locked to the thighplates of his armour. Carmenta stood in the corner, a still shadow in her ragged black robe. Kadin sat on a thick pipe, watching Ahriman out of the side of his eyes. A purple bruise and swollen flesh covered much of Kadin’s face, and the broken bones beneath made him look even less human than normal. Astraeos stood at the circular hatch of Ahriman’s chamber. Ahriman could not shake the feeling of being on trial. In a sense, of course, he was.

They are angry, thought Ahriman, and at some deep level they are afraid of what I have pulled them into.

Only Carmenta’s mind was calm. In fact, it was blank to a worrying degree, almost as if part of her thinking had shut down. The ship is eating her humanity, he thought. At times, she was more human than any tech-priest he had ever met, but then she would become withdrawn, or confused. He looked back to the three Space Marines. They were all lost and damaged creatures but he needed them, and their trust would not tolerate anything less than the truth. He swallowed and found his throat dry. He had not expected it to be like this.

He turned away from them, feeling the coarse weave of his patchwork robe rub against his skin as he moved. After the battle and crash his armour would require long hours of repair before he could wear it again, but his flesh had been almost untouched when they peeled the armour from him. ‘Like stone,’ Carmenta had said. There were patches that were still cold and numb, but it would pass.

He rubbed a hand across his face. His mind still ached and he needed rest, but Astraeos would not wait for his answers.

‘My name is Ahzek Ahriman,’ he began.

‘So you have told us,’ said Astraeos. Ahriman ignored the interruption.

‘I was once Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons Legion. I fought at the side of primarchs and witnessed the Emperor during the Great Crusade. We were betrayed, and betrayed the Imperium in turn.’

‘Those were not agents of the Imperium that came for you,’ muttered Kadin.

‘No. They were sent by one of my brothers.’

‘Why?’ It was Thidias who asked, his voice devoid of emotion. Ahriman glanced at him.

‘The creatures he sent hunt through the warp. Perhaps they caught my scent. Perhaps the one I went to meet on the moon betrayed me. ’

‘That is not what I asked,’ said Thidias. The calm accusation in the words almost forced a smile from Ahriman’s lips.

‘If you want to understand, then you will have to see for yourself,’ said Ahriman.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Kadin, and glanced at Astraeos.

‘I can project my memory into your minds. You can see for yourself how this began.’

Kadin looked ready to protest.

‘Very well,’ said Astraeos. Ahriman looked to Carmenta.

‘Mistress?’

She said nothing.

‘I will not go into your minds. I will just show you a part of mine.’ He shrugged. ‘The answers are there if you want to see.’ After a long pause, Carmenta gave a single stiff nod. Thidias inclined his head when Ahriman glanced at him. Kadin looked at his two brothers, spat, but then nodded.

‘Very well,’ said Ahriman, and closed his eyes. He could still see his chamber, its image traced in perfect detail in his mind’s eye. Slowly the details of walls, lights and pipes dimmed, then gave way to black. He saw the images of Carmenta, Thidias, Kadin and Astraeos look around in surprise. ‘Come,’ he said, then turned and began to walk down a tunnel towards a long-sealed door in his place of memory. ‘See it with my eyes.’

The palace grew towards the blue sky, its marble warm in the sun, its spires shining white against the cobalt-blue dome of the heavens. Ahriman walked up the steps and through the doors. He could feel the presence of the others following him but he did not look around. He had not allowed them to speak; here in his mind they would be mute witnesses, but their thoughts scraped against the quiet, and tremors of their surprise and wonder shook the palace’s halls. No one had ever entered his memory palace before, and the knowledge that there were other minds walking with him through the cool shadows of his past made him feel strange, as if he had no skin. The breeze blowing through the open windows carried a hint of smoke, and he wondered what that might signify for what he was about to do.

The stone door with the silver ring resisted his touch, and it ground across the floor as he dragged it open. Stepping within, he felt the eyes of the others roam across the shelves of marble jars until they reached the window and the view of the Planet of the Sorcerers beyond. Their minds went quiet one by one as they saw the towers and the nine suns turning through the sky.

Ahriman stepped to the book which lay on the plinth at the room’s centre. Careful not to look at the words within, he opened it; the pages felt hot, as if they were burning.

‘It is here for you to see,’ said Ahriman.

Their presence drew closer, circling on the edge of his sight. Ahriman looked down. The book’s pages turned as if caught by a gale; symbols and words blurred and coiled across the parchment. The chamber vanished. Images and sensations folded around him, and then flicked past. The others were with him, seeing what he had seen, feeling the past brush them as it rushed by.

He saw Amon standing on the summit of a tower, and beyond him more towers extended away in a forest of night-tarnished silver and sapphire.

‘Are we sure?’ Amon had said. ‘Is there no other way?’

‘None,’ Ahriman had replied.

He saw again the cabal expand in countless pacts and secret bonds. He saw more of the Thousand Sons become creatures of endlessly mutable forms. He saw the moment when all was ready, when the final components had aligned, and there was no barrier remaining between him and the completion of his great work, his Rubric.

‘It is time, brother,’ Amon had said. Ahriman felt the memory of the final breath he had taken at that moment. It tasted of smoke, rich with incense and the dry, metallic flavour of the wind blowing from the surrounding plains.

Then, memory of the Rubric unfurled into him like the touch of lightning, spiralling into his thoughts like a storm rush. He had never desired the power of gods, but at that moment, he saw every one of the Thousand Sons, a scatter of flickering soulflames laid out beneath him. He saw every strand of matter in their limbs and the colour of their souls. He became all of them. Every half-formed thought and sensation was his; he was Menkaura, suddenly blind to the tome open in front of him; he was Zebul, frozen as he lifted a blue crystal ball with a scale-covered hand; he was Ketuel, his eyes vanished into his flesh, a hundred tongues licking from the mouths that split his armour. He was the centre of a hurricane, the focus of a thousand stilled minds and arrested hearts. Their broken dreams, their hopes, their power lay in his hands like water snatched from a torrent. It extended on and on, a sensation without time, eternal and yet as delicate as a strand of glass.

Even in memory, the moment almost overwhelmed Ahriman. For a second he was aware that far away his real body shivered and blood sweated from the corners of his eyes. Then it was past, and more moments came tumbling after.

He saw his brothers walking out of the dust clouds, first one, then another, then another, coalescing like corpses rising from silt-clogged water. Dust spilled from them as they moved, the embers of their souls burning within each, but nothing more. The memory was like ice coiling through Ahriman’s guts and up his spine.

‘What have we done?’ Amon had asked in a voice that cracked like dry earth.

Ahriman had said nothing. Failure has no answer.

The flicker of images settled like the dust falling gently from the dying wind. And there it was, an image that blurred and changed as if even Ahriman’s memory could not contain it: a silhouette of a man outlined by fire, countless eyes spinning in golden light that sang with a thousand voices, a twisted cripple with quill-covered skin and blind pits for eyes.

‘Father,’ Ahriman had said, and the image resolved into that of a copper-skinned giant, clad in plates of bronze. Feathered wings spread from his thick shoulders, and his hands held an orb-topped staff. A mane of red hair fell from a frown-creased face from which a single blue eye stared. The air had smelled of burned blood and incense.

+Tell me, is this the salvation you sought?+ Magnus the Red had said.

‘I am satisfied,’ Ahriman had said, defiance making his voice hard. The image of Magnus had seemed to nod.

+You are the best of my sons, you always were,+ spoke Magnus, and the thought banished Ahriman into the stars like dust blown from an outstretched palm.

The chamber was silent after Ahriman opened his eyes. For a long moment the memory of Magnus lingered as a fading image before his eyes. Kadin shivered, a sheen of sweat glistening on his face. Thidias just looked at Ahriman and then turned away. Carmenta did not move, but shook her head, swaying slightly. Astraeos stared at Ahriman, his bionic eye seeming dim beside the brightness of his true eye. Ahriman gave a weak smile.

‘That is why,’ he said.

‘And the one who sent the hunters and emissaries?’ said Thidias, without looking at Ahriman.

‘Amon,’ said Ahriman. ‘I should have seen it before. Of all of those who joined my cabal, he was the hardest to persuade.’ A sad smile flicked over Ahriman’s face. ‘Always loyal, always on the right side of any argument.’

He looked up at Astraeos, but the renegade Librarian still had not moved.

‘Why now?’ Ahriman looked around in surprise. Kadin was looking at him, a frown deepening the scars on his face. ‘After so long, why does he come for you now? Why not before? And why pursue the rest of those exiled with you?’

Ahriman nodded slowly.

‘I don’t know. At first I thought it was simple vengeance, but I should have known that it was not. Amon may want revenge, but his mind is too deep for such singlemindedness.’ He gave a weary smile. ‘Our Legion is not given to thinking on a small scale.’

‘So you will search for answers now?’

Ahriman felt the tension in the words. In truth he had not thought his next move through yet, but as he considered the question, he realised that there had only ever been one answer.

He nodded stiffly. Kadin stared at him for a long moment, and then walked to the hatch without looking back. Thidias followed a moment later. Astraeos gave Ahriman one last hard look before stepping through the hatch and pulling it shut after him.

‘Do you wish that you had never begun?’

Ahriman flinched at the sound of the voice. He had almost forgotten that Carmenta still stood in the corner of the room. She took a step forwards, her mechadendrites twitching at her robes as if they were the unconscious movements of nervous hands.

‘Do you?’ she said again.

Yes, he thought. I wish that I had never listened to the whispers of my heart. Some might have called those whispers hope, but it was arrogance. The arrogance of knowledge that believes that there can be no limit to what it encompasses, that cannot see the precipice at its feet.

‘I am not sure,’ he said at last.

Carmenta shook her head as if trying to clear a sound from her ears. For a moment he wondered if she was going to ask another question, but then she moved to the hatch and pulled it open to leave.

‘Thank you,’ she said, and left Ahriman looking after her in puzzlement.

IX
DEAD SPACE

Ahriman found himself at the door of the lightless cell as the Titan Child ran blind. He had walked the decks for hours. Clusters of servitors had slunk out of his path as he passed through the machine decks, their ink-black eyes reflecting luminous green in his helmet display as they watched him pass. He had walked through the shuttered corridors that ran along the spine of the ship and seen nothing, but the dust glimmering in the light of his eyepieces as it fell softly to the ground. He had been looking for Maroth, trying to discover if the broken soothsayer still lived, or if he had curled up and expired in a lightless hole. His search had begun on a whim, a meaningless task to help him make his decision, but he had found no sign of Maroth and his decision still weighed on his mind.

Why now? Why does he come for you now? The questions had rolled endlessly through his thoughts ever since Kadin had spoken them. There had to be a reason why other exiles had been taken or killed. He remembered Tolbek telling him to come with him, and the creature hissing ‘Alive. Yes’. Amon wanted Ahriman taken alive.

He remembered the feeling of claws sawing into his guts. Alive at least in mind, if not whole in body.

He had considered possibilities, but all seemed meaningless without genuine information. ‘Speculation is fantasy,’ Magnus had once said to him. ‘Knowledge does not encompass doubt.’ Ahriman had only speculation, and one means of obtaining knowledge: the warp. It was that cold conclusion that had hardened as he walked through the echoing ship, and found himself in the frozen dark outside the crude warded door. For a second, he wondered if his worries had guided his steps. The thought made him want to shiver, but did not stop him stepping through the door.

The bound daemon was already staring at him when he stepped into the chamber. Ahriman had the feeling that it had been watching him even before he entered. Its body had a clammy look to it but the chains and bindings were still in place.

‘Cadar,’ said Ahriman, the words sounding hollow inside his helm.

The daemon smiled, and made a sound like bones rattling in a dying man’s chest. Ahriman could feel his skin become cold, as if numbed by ice.

He had not meant to come here, but an obvious possibility now occurred to him.

‘I seek an answer,’ said Ahriman. There was no air to transmit the sound but the bound daemon heard, of that he was certain. It tilted its head from side to side. ‘Will you answer?’ The creature went still. Ahriman could feel its hunger beating at the bindings that held it in place.

+Feed.+

Ahriman heard the word in his mind and ears at the same time. A hot iron taste filled his mouth and throat, and he felt a need to bite, to rend and gorge. The creature ground its teeth, and Ahriman realised he was mirroring the movement. He brought thought wards crashing down on the intruding instincts, and forced his will into his voice.

‘By the bindings placed on you in this place, I call you to answer.’

The creature thrashed as if he had struck it. Thick layers of ice began to run down the chains holding it in place. It snarled, its black tongue flicking in and out of its mouth. Ahriman felt its frustrated rage, and knew that no answer would come. It was a spirit of hunger, its power bent only to feasting on mortal flesh, its nature devoid of the intellect to know what he needed to know. Ahriman had suspected as much. Maroth’s bindings were powerful but crude, and his skill unequal to catching a more devious daemon.

Ahriman turned to leave, feeling the bound daemon’s hunger still chewing at his mental defences. He would have to do what he had hoped to avoid more than anything else. As he stepped from the chamber, the daemon-husk hissed to itself and watched the door as it closed.

Blackness surrounded the dead station. Astraeos watched its shape resolve bit by bit, like an ancient wreck revealed by a beam of light in the ocean depths. Starlight, weak and curdled to the colour of pus, caught the edges of the station’s bulk and snagged on its spires. It was an irregular half-sphere, towers and domes covering its flat upper surface while masts and sensor blisters hung in thick forests from its curved underbelly.

Astraeos blinked rapidly and the image became a single window at the corner of his helmet display. The gunmetal cave of the craft’s troop compartment filled his eyes. To his right the loading ramp hung open, the shuffling shapes of servitors clacking across the deck as they performed final checks. To his left, more void-suited servitors sat in silent rows on either side of the dull metal chests that filled the compartment’s floor. Kadin and Thidias sat across from him. The eyes of their helmets looked at him but he knew they were watching the image of the dead station.

It had taken them weeks to get out here. Swaddled in his amniotic cocoon, Egion the Navigator had ridden the Titan Child to the edge of the Eye, its Geller field envelope creaking like a sail in a high wind. Now they waited in the guts of their one remaining gunship and watched the feed from the Titan Child’s sensors. He looked at his two brothers; there was an unseeing, stiff quality about them, as if they were empty armour. He had not told them why they had come to this scrap of dead space, of course. Ahriman had told Astraeos when they broke from the warp, but Astraeos had said nothing to Kadin or Thidias.

Is that because of how you think they could react, said the doubting voice in his head, or because if you say it out loud it will become true? He remembered Cadar hanging in a web of chains, a daemon grinning from his empty eyes. This is how it begins. One lie grown on another until you cannot remember the truth. But still he said nothing.

He flicked his eye back to the waiting image of the station and blinked; it filled his view again. Tens of thousands of souls had once dwelled here, but they were long dead and the derelict hulk was silent, dark and cold. It was difficult to judge its size from an image but the numbers and scales that twitched at the edges of the screen told him that the station was over fifty kilometres in diameter. In comparison, the Titan Child was like a fish drifting towards the corpse of a leviathan. They were approaching the station on minimal power. Linked to her ship, Mistress Carmenta was holding the ship’s power in reserve, poised to be diverted to speed or weapons fire, if needed. Watching the station draw closer, Astraeos could not shake the feeling that they were intruders into the realm of a sleeping beast.

‘It is deserted?’ said Kadin over the vox.

‘So it seems,’ said Astraeos, keeping his eyes on the luminous image of the station.

‘It was Imperial,’ said Thidias, quietly, from just beside Astraeos. ‘And it died by force; look at the plasma burns on the lower sections.’ Astraeos had already noticed the characteristic blistering and smooth ripple burns on some of the station’s armour. Ship-killing plasma weaponry had fired on the station, and there were other signs: tumbled and broken towers, ragged holes that must have been at least a hundred metres wide, still clouds of debris that caught the starlight like crystal sand. Astraeos did not need the battle signs to know that the station was a dead shell; he knew it with a leaden certainty he could not explain.

‘Something of this size must have taken some killing,’ said Thidias. ‘Defence batteries, shield generators, it has enough to hold off a battleship.’

‘Not enough, though,’ growled Kadin, and turned away from the image on the screen to look at Astraeos. ‘Why have we come here?’

‘It was an astropathic relay station,’ said Astraeos. His eyes had fixed on a statue that rose from the back of the station: an angel, its wings spread against the stars, its hands reaching into the darkness. Its bronze skin was uncorroded, its form whole. But it was the face that drew his gaze. Someone had bored its eyes out with plasma blasts. Without thinking, Astraeos brought his hand up to the eyepiece above his own lost eye. ‘Hundreds of astropaths sifted the immaterium here, catching messages and spitting them back out. Then the Eye swelled and swallowed it.’

‘Why seek such a place?’ said Kadin, his voice thick with contempt. ‘And how did he know it was here?’

‘Because I helped destroy it.’ Ahriman walked up the ramp and ducked into the gunship’s compartment. His armour was still the same battered plate he had worn serving the Harrowing, but now it was blue. The old battle damage was still visible beneath the fresh lacquering. A tabard of pale fabric hung from his torso, and his face was bare, the ambient light of the gunship’s hold darkening his smooth skin to the hue of polished wood. ‘I was here when this place died. I saw its crew killed and its astropaths burned alive in pyres.’ He paused and looked at Kadin. ‘Their screams still hang in the warp here. All those messages and minds wore the barrier between worlds thin.’

‘Is that why we came here?’ spat Kadin, and Astraeos could feel the aggression fuming from his brother.

‘It is also a long way from anything else,’ said Ahriman, his voice calm. Astraeos could feel control radiating from Ahriman like cold from frosted steel. He sat beside Astraeos and locked a mag-harness around his torso. With a wheeze of pistons and pressuring air the loading ramp began to close. The frame of the gunship began to shiver as its engines caught.

‘Why?’ said Kadin, his voice low but loaded within soft aggression.

‘Because of what I must do.’

Carmenta watched the gunship slip from her flank. Somewhere she breathed and twitched in her cradle of cables.

No, she thought, not my flank, the ship’s flank. The shuttle was exiting from the Titan Child, its engines brightening as it built speed. I have to keep the separation, even if it is only for a few hours. I have to rest, but not yet. Ahriman had said that they had to be ready: ready to leave, ready to fight, ready for something that he had not wanted to tell her. After the encounter at the black moon, it was an understandable request, but she had stayed linked to the ship for weeks without pause, and the link had begun to take its toll.

After the exhilaration of battle and sudden flight had come the iron-flavoured feeling of exhaustion. It was in those moments that she was weakest, and when she was weak, the Titan Child slipped deeper into her thoughts. She had woken from dreams as they scudded through the warp, unable to remember who or where she was. Whispered thoughts of weaponry and sensations of clicking machinery filled her even when her memory returned. Worse were the moments when she had been deep within the sensations of the ship only to find her mind dumped back into her body. She would lie in the tangle of interface cables, unable to move, panic washing through her until her body reconnected to her mind. She needed her link to her ship, but at times she loathed it, like a drunk grown tired of drunkenness.

She had no time to rest, though, not now.

She watched the gunship as its flight curved under the station’s belly. Somewhere, on the edge of her perception, her fingers twitched. She scanned the station again with auspex and deep penetration augurs. She raked across its scarred surfaces, listening with multi-spectrum aerials. No movement, no heat signs; just pockets of air trapped in the superstructure, like bubbles trapped in a sunken wreck. The station was a corpse, an empty shell. It made her want to run, to light her engines and dive back into the blackness. She began her slow orbits of the station, her sensors twitching between it and the void. Somewhere, in the body she half forgot she had, she was shivering.

The gunship slid into the station through a ragged hole in its underbelly. Bright white lights stabbed out from the small vessel’s nose and wings. Blackened girders and tangled metal threw shadows into the cavernous space beyond. The gunship glided forwards, the weapon pods in its chin and flanks twitching as they searched for targets. The space had once been a series of holds and stores, but explosions had gouged it to greater dimensions, breaking through floors and walls to create a vast cavern.

In the gunship’s belly, Ahriman sat in silence. Tolbek’s sword rested across his knees, his helm’s red eyes staring at nothing. In his freshly lacquered plate and helm, he was a statue. The warp was quiet, like still water around a half-submerged wreck. That quiet did nothing to reassure him.

Ahriman let his mind reach out into the dead space that clung to the station’s bones, probing gently, feeling the tatters of reality slide over his senses. Memories coated in blood and wrapped in screams surfaced in his mind. He had been on the station decades before when the Brotherhood of Darkness had stripped it of life. What they had left was a torn layer of scar tissue over a deep wound. The warp was still, but only in the way ice was still before it cracked.

He pulled his senses back into his immediate surroundings. Residual images and sensations prickled the surface of his thoughts. He blinked and flicked his eyes over the hold. He had not enabled his armour’s enhanced vision and the only light was from Astraeos, Thidias and Kadin’s eyepieces, which glowed like coals in the gloom. He and the three other Space Marines sat closest to the hold’s ramp. Further in, and filling the rest of the hold, were the servitors. They sat along both walls, their bulbous helms lolling and shaking as the gunship manoeuvred. They would not move until commanded. A memory of the hand of the Rubricae closing around his wrist rose in his thoughts and then sank again.

‘Landing area identified,’ came the vox-flat voice of the pilot servitor.

‘Very well,’ said Ahriman. ‘Set us down.’

‘By your will,’ replied the servitor. The whine of thrusters rose in intensity, as the gunship slipped through a web of girders to settle on the torn remains of a platform. There was a thump as its landing feet magnetically locked to the deck.

Kadin had already opened his mag-harness, his bolter ready in his hands. The inter-armour comms were silent, but Ahriman could hear the words of Kadin’s battle oath in his mind like a whispered prayer. Sat beside his brother, Thidias was still, his thoughts a steady beat of battle focus. Astraeos shifted and glanced at Ahriman.

Ahriman stood and moved to the assault ramp, his sword held ready in his hands. Astraeos rose, his own blade loose by his side.

‘Will you tell us now what you expect?’ said Kadin.

‘I am not certain,’ said Ahriman. He felt the stab of contempt in Kadin’s thoughts, but said nothing.

The high-pitched whine of the engines still shook the gunship as the pilot servitor held it poised to boost away at the slightest sign of trouble. Pistons pushed the hatch wide and the gunship’s air hissed into the darkness outside. Ahriman’s helmet display flickered to life, turning his world into night-piercing monochrome. Hard vacuum and gravity warning runes pulsed red at the edge of his sight. Threat markers glowed in unresolved amber. He stepped from the hatch and felt the magnetised sole of his foot clamp on to the platform. He began to walk, his feet locking and releasing with each step. For a moment, it felt as if it were his armour walking, not him, as if he were a passive watcher inside. He shook his head and saw Astraeos was already moving past him, heading towards where the wide platform met the cavern’s wall. Kadin and Thidias overtook him and spread to either side, their heads moving to scan the cavern. Ahriman followed.

‘All quiet,’ said Thidias, and a popping screech of static filled Ahriman’s ear. He had reached the wall that edged the platform like a cliff rising above a strip of tidal sand, and he stopped and looked back to where the gunship sat. Hard white beams of light still stabbed from its chin and wings, but the airless dark of the cavern seemed to swallow their brightness.

‘Unload,’ he said on a closed channel. Another wail of distortion answered him. For a second, he wondered if they had heard him, then the servitors began to march down the gunship’s ramp. They moved in lumbering lockstep, their faces hidden by thick brass domes, their bodies clad in vulcanised rubber. Between them they bore the grey metal chests.

‘I have found a door,’ said Astraeos, his voice chopped by static. Ahriman turned his head and waited for Astraeos’s locator marker to settle in his vision.

‘Stay where you are,’ said Ahriman, and he began to move towards Astraeos’s marker. He found the Librarian on one knee, watching an opening in the cavern wall. The door was as tall as a super-heavy tank flipped on its end, a black gulf edged by the teeth of the blast doors pulled back into its frame.

‘I do not like it,’ said Kadin as he came up behind them. He too was looking up at the waiting doorway, his bolter tracking his eyes. ‘No energy readings, no life or movement signs, it’s like it was scooped out.’ He turned his head and looked at Ahriman. ‘What did you do to this place?’

‘They…’ began Ahriman and then paused. He had been there, he had helped. It was not his design, but he had had a hand in its completion. He thought of the Brotherhood of Darkness, the runes glowing on their midnight armour as they lowered the astropaths into the pyre on chains. They had screamed and screamed until their tongues charred in their mouths. Fat had dribbled off them as they burned. There had been shapes in the fire, shapes which pulled the burning psykers down into the embers. There had been hundreds of astropaths on the station and the pyre had burned for days. The Brotherhood of Darkness had watched from the shadows, their armour glistening with dried blood, whispering their prayers to the night, and Ahriman had stood amongst them.

Think what you were and how far you have fallen, said a voice in the back of his thoughts; and for a moment, he thought he heard the rustle of crows’ wings.

Ahriman shook his head and looked away from Kadin. He let his mind slide along the angles of the wall and through the doorway. His senses stretched across metal and airless space, flowing down lightless passages and tasting the pockets of stale air trapped behind sealed doors. It felt cold, as if he were swimming through black water under a crust of ice. His mind shivered. It was so easy, like running one’s hand through fine sand, or smelling wood smoke on a winter wind.

The darkness pressed against his thoughts; every inch of the station was bare of the smeared colours left by life, emotion and thought. He paused. Had he been wrong; was this place not what he thought after all? There was only one way to be certain. He let his mind dip just below the level of the real and opened his senses to the dimension beyond –

– a jungle of colour and light, splitting, re-forming, refracting and battering against eyes he did not have.

Heat, the smell of excreta, roses, a feather caress.

Shapes tumbling one over another, like oil mixing with blood and boiling gold.

A shape looked up at him with a pair of eyes the colour of amber and a chuckle spread across a face that formed as it grew. It laughed. There were more faces and a thousand eyes staring at him.

There were hands. Pale, soft hands pawing at black, enfolding liquid.

The stink of ash and urine, the cold of ice and the stickiness of drying blood –

Air gasped into Ahriman’s lungs. He could feel sweat beading on his skin. For a second, he could see a lingering after-image, a luminous imprint of juddering hands reaching from a springing vortex of colour. He tried to move but felt his armour resist, and for an instant he felt panic. He was dead in his armour, trapped in its iron grasp, forever falling, forever drowning. Like his Legion, like the brothers he had destroyed.

‘Ahriman.’ Astraeos’s voice filled his ear, urgent and raw.

Ahriman tried to move and this time his armour unlocked as he tensed against it. His vision cleared. Biorhythm warning icons glowed cold blue in his eyes. He had passed out and his armour had locked around him, holding him unmoving. He turned his head. Thick hoar frost covered the platform around him, crawling up the cavern wall and doorway.

Astraeos stood five paces from Ahriman, his sword drawn. Green light clung to the sword’s edge and haloed his head. Thidias and Kadin stood further away, but both had their bolters levelled. Ahriman shook his head again. His throat was dry and his voice cracked when he spoke.

‘How long?’ he said, hearing his words echo in his helm, and the vox scratch and pop in his ear. Thidias glanced at Astraeos. Slowly the Librarian lowered his sword and the light soaked back into the blade. Beside him, Thidias let the muzzle of his bolter point down to the floor. Kadin did not move.

‘Two seconds. I felt it,’ said Astraeos. Clicking static filled the pause. ‘Whatever you did, I felt it.’ Ahriman nodded, but said nothing.

He had intended to taste the warp; instead his mind had broken through the veil of reality. Transiting one’s mind to the warp was a delicate matter; it demanded ritual, and care. It should not have been that easy, he thought. He had simply punched through. He remembered the power flooding through him when he had faced Tolbek, the raw joy of it, the ease of power unlike anything he had felt before. But, even here, it should not have been so easy.

Slowly, he took a step towards the door. His muscles were shaking; a taste of burned sugar and soured milk was still on his tongue. He extended his mind again, probing at the warp around them, letting it drift just ahead of his steps. He felt his senses want to leap ahead, to soar in the warp-thinned reality, but that was dangerous in a place like this. Any use of power without fine balance and control was a risk. He should have known that, and for a second he wondered why he had allowed himself to slip before.

The procession of servitors closed in behind them, their magnetised steps sending a tremor through the platform. Ahriman looked back to where Astraeos and his two brothers watched.

‘Follow,’ he said, and stepped across the doorway. Behind him Astraeos glanced at his two brothers and followed into the dark.

Kadin watched Ahriman as they walked through the station’s silent passages. The sorcerer could kill, Kadin had seen that truth, but he moved like a lord rather than a warrior. Kadin had seen it before, an arrogance that ran so deep it bled from words and gestures. It was the mark of one who would destroy anything, and break oaths for truths that only they could see. Kadin had seen his Chapter burn at the hands of such men. Now he was oathbound to ideals that might see him dead.

They turned into another passage. Straight and narrow, it seemed to stretch away into eternity. Kadin turned his head to look back. The servitor procession was ten paces behind him. He blink-clicked his helmet display to infra-vision. The heat fuming from the servitors’ bodies glowed from white to dark blue. He snapped back to the green glow of night vision, and returned his gaze to the tunnel ahead. Astraeos and Ahriman were ahead of him, their positions lit by green runes.

His eye lingered on Astraeos. The Librarian was changing. Kadin could see it; there was rage and defiance still but there was something else, something that perhaps the Librarian was not aware of. Astraeos still held to their former ways, but they were a Chapter of three, and the old oaths seemed thin to Kadin. They had broken their vows, and spilled blood to do it. They were warriors, clinging to lives they should have laid down. And now a new master had their words of loyalty.

Ahriman briefly halted in the darkness in front of Kadin. The sorcerer turned his head to look back. Kadin went still and met his gaze for a moment. Then Ahriman turned away and kept walking. Kadin followed, but his eyes stayed locked on Ahriman’s silhouette. Parchment strips haloed the sorcerer, floating in the zero gravity. Kadin had watched Ahriman attach them to his armour as they rode the gunship. He could not read what was written on the parchment, nor understand the words the sorcerer had muttered as the red wax had bonded them to the blue armour. Just another secret that their saviour was keeping to himself, but then Kadin would have expected no less.

Oaths. All they had were oaths, so Astraeos had said, but Kadin had seen every oath to him broken and broken his own in turn.

We are traitors, he thought. We call our vows sacred as we did when we had a thousand brothers. But they are gone.

The rune marking Ahriman pulsed green in Kadin’s eye. Green. Green for no threat. Green for friendly. The rune flicked to amber ringed by red. An alarm began to shrill in Kadin’s ear. He knew what it meant: the muzzle of his bolter had followed his stare to point at Ahriman’s back. The warning alarm sounded louder. He blink-clicked the warning away but kept staring.

We have fallen. There is no higher cause to give our allegiance to. Trust, and we are dead.

He could feel his trigger finger tighten. The alarm started to scream again, filling his helm. He focused on Ahriman, seeing the path of the bolt-round, the point of impact, the secondary target points.

There is only survival.

Kadin blinked the targeting rune to threat. Red filled his eye.

And we survive alone.

Ahriman stopped, and turned. Kadin froze. The red targeting rune spun above Ahriman’s right eye. Kadin stared. Ahriman was completely still, his hands by his sides, his weapons sheathed. Astraeos had stopped a pace in front of Ahriman and was looking back.

‘Is something wrong?’ Astraeos’s voice crackled over the vox. Ahriman cocked his head, the red eyepieces still fixed on Kadin.

Slowly, the sorcerer shook his head.

‘No, it was nothing,’ said Ahriman, and walked away down the passage. Astraeos looked at Kadin for a heartbeat then turned to follow Ahriman. Kadin did not move. The red targeting rune held steady in his eye. Then he blinked it away and followed.

They reached the choral chamber after four hours. Ahriman had felt Kadin’s hostility itch at the back of his skull for every step of the journey. A well of bitterness boiled in the warrior; Ahriman did not need to read Kadin’s mind to know it. Distrust ran through Kadin’s being like worms burrowing deep into dead meat. There was no end to it, just a pause, a momentary cessation.

He is right not to trust me, thought Ahriman.

The door to the choral chamber was small and framed by an arch of cut stone. Thorns, bones and angel wings crawled over the surface, and a carved skull looked down on him as he crossed the threshold. The space beyond was utterly lightless, and his helmet display fizzed with fog as it tried to pierce the gloom.

‘Bring light,’ said Ahriman. Behind him he could sense Astraeos, Thidias and Kadin taking up positions flanking the door. Ahriman smiled, but without humour. There was nothing here to guard against, at least nothing that a defensive dispersal could counter. The servitors followed, burbling acknowledgement of his order. Most of them would have to be destroyed after they were done. The whispers of the place would get into the remaining meat of their minds. Ahriman was surprised they had functioned so far.

The servitors mag-clamped the metal chests to the floor and began to unfasten the heavy lids. The first chest held glow-globes which they ignited and sent spinning through the airless dark. Ahriman looked up as the spheres of light revealed the chamber around them. Hanging terraces of stone rose above them. Pillars circled each terrace, each pillar a figure carved in green stone that glittered with crystal impurities. There was an angel, its face hidden by its hands; there was a war saint, his face grim beneath a beaten copper halo; and there was a withered woman clasping a twisted staff, a snake coiling over her shoulders, her eyes hidden and her mouth sewn shut.

It was not as he remembered it, as if the silence and darkness had slid a mask over the past. He remembered the screaming, the statues on the lower tiers looking down as the pyre grew, their carved skin blackening with soot. The fireglow had danced shadows across the walls. Smoke had spiralled up, underlit by fire, grey stained to orange and red.

The scars were still there, though. Lengths of chain and crude iron frames still hung from the higher tiers, the metal twisted by heat. The astropaths had screamed, even as fire filled their lungs they had screamed.

He looked down to the heat-cracked floor. It had been a mosaic of crystal and polished stone. At its centre, a great eye had looked up at the astropaths when they gathered on the terraces. Images of saints and symbols had spiralled out from the eye to the chamber’s edge. Now the pattern was gone, the tiles melted and fused into an iridescent swirl of colour. At the edge of the floor he could see a face, its features still recognisable. A laurel circled its brow and it looked up at Ahriman with a serene expression at odds with its scorched surroundings.

He felt Astraeos approach. Caution and uncertainty layered the Librarian’s thoughts and questions bled from cracks in his armoured mind. But there was something else besides the unusual hesitancy.

He is changing, thought Ahriman. I am changing him. I am making him what I need: a pupil, an ally to stand by me when I have none. Does he know what I do, does he realise where it might lead?

‘What now?’ asked Astraeos.

‘Send Thidias and Kadin to guard the passage back to the gunship,’ said Ahriman. Distortion ran through his words. He could feel the wild surge of the warp churn just out of sight. It was responding to them, responding to the light of their minds and the dance of their thoughts.

‘Guard? There is nothing here.’ Astraeos gestured at the shadows clustering at the corners of the choral chamber.

Ahriman was silent as he walked to the remaining dark metal chests. He unlocked the lid of the first. Inside, a bronze bowl the size of a storm shield gleamed in the dim light. Circles and symbols spiralled from its centre to its rim. Ahriman lifted it out, his eyes reading the symbolic layers of the pattern. He had instructed Astraeos in some of what they needed to do, but he had never told him the entirety, he had never said it aloud. Astraeos had not asked, but the question and his doubts had boiled at the edge of his thoughts for days.

‘I thought we came here so that you could get answers,’ said Astraeos from behind him.

‘That is why we are here,’ said Ahriman, and turned towards the centre of the chamber.

‘But why here? The warp is close here. I can feel it as you can. This is not an auspicious place. This is a wound.’

Ahriman walked to the centre of the crazed floor and looked up, judging his relative position to the walls with a glance. With a careful flick of his hands Ahriman let the bowl go. It hung in the gravity-starved space, spinning around its centre, gleaming. At the chamber’s door Thidias and Kadin waited, listening. Ahriman let his thought glide out until it touched Astraeos’s mind.

+You know, Astraeos, you know why we are here,+ he sent. Astraeos flinched, but replied.

+You intend to perform a rite– +

+No.+ Ahriman’s reply severed Astraeos’s thought like a knife parting cord. He stood and looked up from the offering bowl. Astraeos had taken a step forwards, his body tensed, his hand unconsciously brushing his sword hilt. Thidias and Kadin were watching, deaf to the thoughts passing between the two psykers. +We are not performing a rite,+ sent Ahriman, and then paused. Will an oath, still fresh and untested, hold him to this? +We are here for a summoning.+

Astraeos was still, his hand resting on his sword hilt, his eyes on Ahriman.

‘Send the others to guard the passage as I ordered,’ said Ahriman, his voice crackling across the vox. He could feel emotion radiating from Astraeos, sending ripples through the aether like stones dropped into already churning water. Then the Librarian straightened.

‘As you will,’ said Astraeos, and bowed his head.

Ahriman watched as Astraeos set another bowl spinning at the edge of the chamber. Ninety-nine of them now floated in the choral chamber, spinning around their centres at different heights from the floor. Each bowl was the width of his palm, and fired from smooth black clay. Crystals of incense sat frozen in the bottom of each one. Ahriman looked around the chamber, taking in every detail as if it were fresh, comparing each object and alignment to the shape that he held in his mind’s eye. The black bowls floated in a pattern that created a multi-planed polyhedron. White candles formed a many-armed spiral across the cracked floor. Both bowls and candles formed alignments with each other, with the chamber, and with the cracks and melted patina of the floor. Ahriman had considered every value, every significance and detail. There was no accident, no chance of concordance or discordance in the design; it was the architecture of his intent made real. He looked down again to where the large bronze offering bowl spun at the centre of the design. Above it an athame held steady, the light of the glow-globes catching the silver of its blade and setting the marks etched on its surface dancing. The chamber was like the tight skin of a drum, ready to resonate to the intent and will of those within its bounds.

Slowly, Ahriman touched the athame’s handle with his left hand. It began to turn, spinning with a heartbeat slowness.

+I am ready,+ sent Astraeos.

+Very well.+ Ahriman reached out to grip the athame floating above the offering bowl. +We will begin.+

X
SUMMONING

It was darker than Kadin had ever known. It was not that he could not see, for he could; it was that the darkness seemed to press on his eyes. Blackness hung over everything like a heavy curtain. Objects would appear in his green-washed view, sometimes so close that he could not believe that he had not seen them before. He would look ahead and see nothing, only to take another step and find a bank of machinery looming above him, or a thick vine of cabling barring his path. Several times he had looked back at objects he had passed, and seen nothing but blackness, and a fizzing hash of green static.

Long ago, on a world only he and his brothers now remembered, he had been born in the dark. They all had. In caves that no sunlight or starlight had ever seen, he had learned to read the flow of air, and sense by smell, touch, and sound. When they had come for him and raised him up to the light, he had remembered the dark. The dark was his father, and mother. So the Chaplains had taught, and Kadin had learned the mysteries behind those words. He was the darkness and the darkness was him. Except here, in the night-vision-tinted corridors of a dead station, he remembered the darkness that sometimes would bubble from the depths of his birth world. He remembered the shunned depths of caves where the beating of his heart was the only thing he could hear or feel. It had been a long time since he had remembered such things.

‘Nothing,’ he said into the vox, and heard a crackling echo of his own voice in his ear.

‘Understood,’ came Thidias’s voice, as stiff and controlled as ever even over the scratched transmission of the vox. ‘Threat signs are negative here.’

They had been patrolling the passages for close to an hour, following Astraeos’s order to guard the route back to the gunship. They moved alone, connected only by the vox and the locator icons pulsing in their retinal displays. Since they had begun, Kadin had seen nothing, heard nothing, sensed nothing, but still he did not like it. Inside his helmet, there was no sound other than his own breath and the buzzing whirr of his armour. The sounds should have been reassuring; he had lived with them for so long that to be out of his armour felt like the absence of a limb. But in the dark of the passages, the familiar sounds felt alien, as if they belonged to someone else.

‘There is no need for this,’ he said as he turned into a wide tunnel of rivet-covered plates. There were marks from gunfire on the wall, and bolter casings on the floor, but they were as old and cold as the rest of the station. ‘There is no threat sign because there is nothing here.’

‘We are to patrol,’ replied Thidias, and Kadin could almost see him shrug. ‘Astraeos willed it of us.’

‘The sorcerer willed it,’ sneered Kadin. In front of him, the passage stretched away beyond the limit of his sight. He switched to infra-vision and the corridor became a black space of perfect cold. He turned, looked down, and saw his footsteps as patches of green fading to blue. The vox clicked.

The vox clicked, but only static filled Kadin’s ear.

‘Returning to main route,’ said Thidias abruptly. Alone in the darkness Kadin shook his head.

‘Acknowledged. Proceeding on approach tunnel sweep.’ Kadin cut the vox and turned to start down the waiting passage. He stopped, his limbs and armour locked into sudden stillness.

Patches of heat dappled the passage floor in front of him, their edges bleeding to yellow and green. They led away into the cold dark of the passage he had been about to walk down. The most distant mark was already merging into the icy black. The nearest patch was bright red with fresh heat. It was right in front of him, and had a shape that was recognisable even in the blurred outline of a heat trace.

It was a footprint.

Kadin paused and then blinked his display back to bleached green.

Two eyes looked back at him from an inch in front of his face.

Kadin fired, and the flare of his bolter drowned the sight of glass-black eyes and pale skin. He stepped back, fired again. Static boiled up across his helmet’s display. Something was moving beyond the fog of distortion, something pale, with spindle limbs. He fired a burst, layering fire in a blind pattern.

His helmet display snapped back into focus, bright and clear. There was nothing in front of him. He opened a vox-channel.

A voice screamed in his ears. His fingers clenched on his bolter. He drew breath to shout.

Silence.

The passage was dark and empty in front of him. He blinked to infra-vision. Cold blackness. He looked down at his hands. The muzzle of his bolter glowed yellow-white from its recent use. He looked up.

Darkness. Complete darkness: the darkness of the caves of his human childhood. Somehow he knew that if he looked down again he would not see his weapon, even though he could still feel its weight in his hands.

There was no passage in front of him. He was alone. In his chest, his hearts were beating in a forgotten rhythm.

Slowly, Kadin turned and looked behind him.

Ahriman breathed slowly as the chant rose in his mind. He was utterly still, his hands raised at his sides, palms open. His eyes were closed but he could sense Astraeos standing on the other side of the spinning offering bowl. Witch-light was fuming from their hands, pooling in their palms and arcing across their armour.

As Ahriman’s mind wove through the chants, he felt Astraeos follow him, his will singing a simpler harmony. He could feel the Librarian struggle, his breath labouring and his skin prickling with sweat. Ahriman had prepared him as best he could, but this was no song made of sound and words; it was a flowing river of meaning and connection, words blended with symbols, with colours and sensations, each triggered in precise metre at the speed of thought. Both Ahriman and Astraeos were creating the chant, but it also created itself, spiralling wider with every passing instant, spinning patterns of its own. If any living thing had stood within the choral chamber they would have felt it, heard it, and seen it swimming before their eyes in broken colours. It was the music of the spheres, the primordial language of creation and destruction, the roaring fire of existence. And it was silent.

Ahriman felt the warp unfold into his mind like fire spreading through a dry forest. It flooded his sensations, overwhelming his sense of the physical. He was his flesh, the beat of his heart, the surge of his blood, but he was also the space around him, the stone walls of the chamber and the flicker of the glow-globes. He felt the hard lines of reality soften as the laws holding the chamber together flexed in time with his pulse.

Slowly, Ahriman opened his eyes. Above them, the glow-globes exploded in a sphere of sparks. Opposite him, Astraeos was shaking where he stood.

+Open your eyes,+ sent Ahriman. Behind the lenses of his helm, Astraeos’s eyes opened. +Ready?+

Astraeos nodded once, and the strain of that movement bled across the psychic link to light stars of pain behind Ahriman’s eyes. Ahriman looked down at his right hand, flexed the fingers and extended it above the spinning bronze bowl. The blue gauntlet unlocked and peeled away from his hand, the sections pulled by telekinetic fingers. The flesh of his hand bleached white as it met the airless cold. Alarms began to ring in Ahriman’s ears. He focused on the athame in his left hand. His thoughts flattened like a mirror, reflecting the rising storm of aetheric energy with calm indifference.

Blood. It always comes to blood, he thought. That was the way of things, and always had been. He heard Astraeos moan. Around him, storm winds smeared the choral chamber’s features. A candle kindled close to him, its flame flickering impossibly in the vacuum. Then another lit, and another. Frost began to form on his left arm, creeping up from the athame. At the edge of the room, the servitors began to twitch and spasm. Thick sparks arced across their bodies. Somewhere, at the edge of hearing, Ahriman could hear the chattering of crows. The flesh of his bare hand was blue with cold. He could smell ozone and incense. +Now,+ he thought, and stabbed the athame into his bare palm.

Blood bubbled into the air. It formed spheres of deep red, gloss-sheened in the candlelight. There was no pain, just a numb ache. Everything had become silent and still, as if a wall of crystal had descended around him. There was just the blood, spurting out under its own pressure. In the long-dead rituals of wizards and mystics, this moment had many names. It was a moment of balance, of supreme control. His lips split as he spoke the name, dredging its syllables from an oubliette of memory. The sound left his mouth and the hanging spheres of blood began to spin together. The last phrase came from his mouth with a sound like cracking cartilage. He heard Astraeos scream.

‘You are summoned,’ roared Ahriman, and the words echoed in the airless gloom. Around the chamber, flames leapt from the floating bowls. Smoke and sound filled the room. He could hear screaming, the screaming of the dying as they were lowered into the pyre of his memory. The floating mass of blood began to burn. The bronze bowl was glowing, shedding its covering of hoar frost in viscous dribbles that fell towards ceiling and floor. Then the bowl fell and the blood fell with it, splashed against the bronze, exploded back up, and froze.

Ahriman stepped back, and drew his sword. Astraeos was staggering, his hand scrabbling for his own blade. The candle flames leapt higher, molten wax falling upwards. The light caught the shape of the frozen blood spray and cast it against the blackened chamber walls. Ahriman glanced at the shadows and froze. The silhouettes of feathered wings and overlong limbs spread and danced across the walls.

In front of him, the frozen blood was spreading like the branches of a growing tree. It pulsed as it grew, discolouring and charring as it flowed into the shape of veins, muscle and bone. Shoulders formed. Arms. Hands. A head. A mouth opened in the glistening meat, and moaned with the pain of its birth. The sound of a beating heart shook the chamber. Skin spread across the raw flesh of the body. At last the figure stood tall, its hands by its sides, its bare flesh rippling as details resolved. Eyelids formed and closed over hidden eyes. Hair grew from its scalp to fall to its shoulders in a dark wave. It smiled, showing white teeth, and opened its eyes. They were the yellow of amber, the pupils black holes.

‘Ahriman,’ breathed the figure, and its voice rattled with the sound of dead winds and dry bones.

Across Carmenta’s back, sensor arrays turned as she circled the station. Her weapons and engines were aching, the tension from being held in a state of readiness bleeding into the rest of her being. She kept circling, listening for signals, watching for movement.

Nothing. There was nothing. Again she cycled through augur settings, sifting for the energy markers of Ahriman, Astraeos and their entourage. They had vanished from her senses as soon as the gunship had entered the station. She could not even raise the gunship. She could launch another vehicle, servitor driven, bonded by a close mind-link. No, she would not do that; Ahriman had been clear.

‘Wait,’ he had said. ‘If the matter goes awry, you will know.’ But she had waited and the more she waited the more she wondered if the silence could roar any louder. Should she launch another shuttle? Should she flee, or fire?

No; she would obey. She would wait in silence.

‘Mistress.’ The voice reached her as a thought. She pulled part of herself back from watching the station, and formed her voice into something digestible by a human mind.

‘Egion,’ she said. The Navigator had stayed awake, ready to guide her if they needed to flee.

‘I can see something, mistress,’ said Egion, in a voice that trembled as it formed in her head. Somewhere far away, where she was still flesh wrapped in cables, her skin prickled with cold.

‘What can you see?’ she said, pushing as much calm into the words as possible.

‘I can see it even when I close my eye,’ he said, and the thought carrying the voice was so weak that she could hardly hear its meaning. She realised that if he had been standing in front of her, he would have been moaning.

‘Tell me what you can see,’ she said. A wash of emotion leaked across the mind-impulse link, a haze of awe and fear, like watching emotions play across someone’s face as they look at something just behind your shoulder.

‘Silence, mistress. I can see only silence.’

‘I do not understand, Egion.’

‘I looked, just once, and now it’s all I can see.’ His voice had begun to fade.

‘Egion–’

‘Silence, mistress, the warp is silent, it is dark and calm. It is never so. Never.’

‘Why–’

‘It is waiting, mistress,’ said Egion, his voice rising in forced strength. ‘I can see it, I can feel it. I know it. It is waiting.’

The daemon wore his brother’s face, of course. Ahriman let out a long breath as he looked into Ohrmuzd’s countenance. It was the image of his true brother, not as he died, not even as he had lived as a warrior of the Thousand Sons, but as Ahriman remembered him: young, unchanged, human. But of course it was not Ohrmuzd, nor was it human.

‘I command and bind you to the purpose for which I called you,’ he said, and the daemon grinned at the words even though there was no air to carry the sound. ‘By these swords I hold you to this place and my will.’ Ahriman pointed the tip of his sword at the daemon. On the other side of the circle, Astraeos mirrored the movement. The daemon flinched, then grinned and bowed its head.

‘It is good to see you again, brother,’ it said, its voice deep and resonant.

‘You are not my brother,’ said Ahriman, his voice level.

‘Oh, am I not?’ The daemon tipped its head to the side, and looked down at the floor. Ahriman could feel its presence testing the bindings like a thief probing a lock. It would not get free; he was certain of his work. He could command it to change its shape if he desired, but he would not; questioning such a creature was a dance of lies and wills.

‘You are a creature of the warp, a lie, a falsehood,’ he said, and sent a measure of his will at the daemon. The splinter of power pulsed through the chamber. The daemon fell as if whipped. Black cracks spread across its skin, and dribbled thick yellow fluid. It panted, curses spilling from its lips in a dozen tongues. It appeared to take a breath, and the cracks in its skin closed. It looked up at Ahriman, rubbing its jaw, an amused expression on its handsome face.

‘Would you like to see how Ohrmuzd died again?’

Ahriman felt another shard of power crack from his mind before he could think. The daemon fell back to the ground, its skin flaking off. Beneath the skin was something that looked like the matted feathers of a dead crow. It pulled its knees to its chest, whimpering and weeping. Slowly the smooth skin closed, and it stood again, nodding as if in apology.

‘I am sorry. You have questions,’ said the daemon, looking at Ahriman. ‘You do, don’t you?’ It cocked its head. ‘That is why I am here, that is why you called me?’

‘By the nine hundred words I bind you to answer what I command,’ said Ahriman. The daemon laughed, a high false laugh.

‘So formal, Ahriman.’ The daemon turned to where Astraeos held his sword drawn, his body locked at readiness, then craned its head to look at Ahriman over its shoulder. ‘This is the apprentice? What fate will you doom him to, Ahriman? Or is this another attempt at redemption?’ It stretched its head back and seemed to breathe deeply through its nose. ‘How many mortals did you help burn here?’ It flicked its head back towards Astraeos. ‘You should ask him.’

Ahriman saw Astraeos flinch, but the daemon was already turning back to Ahriman, grinning, delight dancing in its eyes. ‘Is that why you chose to come back? To wallow in sorrow for your sins?’

Ahriman said nothing. The daemon shrugged.

‘I seek knowledge,’ said Ahriman. The daemon seemed to sigh. ‘I seek knowledge of Amon.’

‘Another whose trust you rewarded with betrayal,’ said the daemon, and it was no longer grinning but standing still, arms by its side, its face solemn.

‘A brother came seeking me. His name was Tolbek. He came to drag me to Amon’s knees. I have sought the other exiles of my Legion but they are dead or with Amon.’ Ahriman paused, but the daemon did not move or speak. ‘Do you know of what I speak?’

‘Yes,’ said the daemon, and rolled its eyes. ‘Of course I know of what you speak. All we do is watch you, because your pitiful scrap of a Legion is our only concern.’

‘Why does he seek me? What does he intend?’

The words seemed to hit the daemon like a physical blow. It shuddered, its whole body briefly losing its pure lines before settling again. Its chest heaved, and it spat black phlegm onto the floor.

‘I cannot say,’ said the daemon. Ahriman raised a hand, and his disgust forced the daemon to its knees.

‘You will tell me.’

‘I cannot say, because I do not know,’ whimpered the daemon.

Ahriman extended his hand and formed a fist. The daemon crumpled with a sound of cracking bones and popping joints. It crouched on the ground, holding its head and rocking backwards and forwards.

‘It is hidden from my eyes, from the eyes of all our kind.’ The daemon looked up at him, speaking from behind fingers that pulled at its own skin. Black and yellow blood was running over its knuckles. ‘You should be flattered, Ahzek. For such powers to be bent to hide the truth from you, it is almost an honour.’ It smiled, its yellow eyes flicking up at Ahriman. ‘Almost.’

Ahriman was about to speak, but the daemon spoke before he could.

‘But do you want to know why he hates you?’ Its cheeks twitched with seeming pleasure. ‘That I do know.’ Ahriman watched the daemon’s tongue flick over its teeth and lips.

Because I destroyed them, and broke the hope I promised them, thought Ahriman. The daemon was nodding.

‘Because you were right,’ said the daemon. Ahriman felt ice slide down his spine. ‘Because you saw truly but failed. That is why.’

For a second Ahriman could say nothing, and just stared back at the daemon’s yellow gaze. Then he shook himself and asked something that had occurred to him as he had watched the daemon manifest.

‘One of your kind came to me before Tolbek appeared,’ said Ahriman, remembering the image of a crow, and the light burning in Karoz’s eyes. ‘I am fate come round at last,’ it had said.

‘I know nothing of that.’

Ahriman nodded. He had expected no other answer. The relationship between the creatures of Chaos was as complex as it was fluid. There were countless daemons, each a fragment of the daemonic consciousnesses that some called the Gods of Chaos. The gods spawned daemons and swallowed them again at whim. Within the ranks of daemons, there were creatures of greater and lesser power. There were creatures that hunted mortal souls like wolves, and had little intelligence beyond their instinct to hunt and devour. There were lesser servants, soldiers and attendants, that swarmed to their god’s will. Above them were the greater choirs, and the princes who had ascended from mortality in their god’s service. The daemon that stood before Ahriman was a princeling of the pantheon of Chaos, a creature that must once have been mortal but who had slipped the bonds of flesh. A fragment of its name learned long ago had allowed Ahriman to summon it and bind it to answer him.

‘What is the path to finding the truth I seek?’ asked Ahriman.

‘A path of lies,’ said the daemon. It crouched, shoulders hunched, its back rising and falling as if it were struggling to breathe. Its skin looked pale and clammy, the muscle beneath wasted. Ahriman paused; through the binding he could feel the daemon’s essence twist like a fish pulled from water, dying in air it could not breathe.

‘From where can I learn the answer I seek?’ said Ahriman, and the daemon twitched at the question. It was trembling, its now bone-thin fingers pawing at its mouth. It is dissipating, thought Ahriman; its form and presence were draining from the physical world, back into the great ocean of the warp.

‘From Amon himself,’ it said. ‘No other can speak the answer you seek.’

Of course, of course, but then what did I expect? That Amon would be less than the sorcerer and strategist that he was?

‘Where is he?’

The daemon snarled, showing teeth that were now black and rotting.

‘Tell me. You must tell me,’ said Ahriman.

It shook its head. ‘I will show you,’ said the daemon, and extended a skeletal hand. Ahriman did not move. The daemon was bound to his will, but to touch it, to make a connection with it, would strain those shackles. It was a risk. ‘I cannot lie to you. You know that your binding does not allow me to utter falsehood.’

I have to know. I have come this far. I have to know.

‘There is not much time, Ahriman. If you wish to know then I must show you the path to what you seek.’

Ahriman looked at the open palm of the daemon’s hand. On the opposite side, Astraeos started forwards. Ahriman reached out, and touched the daemon’s hand.

Fingers closed around Ahriman’s wrist. Cold spread up his arm and laughter filled his ears.

‘Thank you, Ahriman. Thank you,’ said the daemon, and its pleasure made him feel suddenly sick. A pattern unfolded in his mind, layered with formulae, metaphor and ritual; a path through stars and space and impossibility. ‘I spoke truth, this is the path. I give this to you, Ahriman, but you will never see the path’s end.’

Ahriman tried to pull himself back, to pull his hand away, but could not. He could see both the warp and the physical realm, like two pict feeds overlaid. The daemon bloomed in the warp around him, becoming a snake covered in burning feathers. It spiralled around him, pulling him into an embrace of fire. In the physical realm, the daemon still wore his brother’s face as it roared with glee. It stepped towards him and Ahriman felt the bindings he had placed on it shatter, each one a bright nova in his skull. He saw his mistake, then, and the trap that waited to swallow him.

He had summoned and bound the daemon, but beneath those bindings were others which wove through it at a deeper level. Someone had already bound the daemon to a different purpose, someone who had guessed what he might do to get answers. He had summoned the daemon, but it served another.

Ahriman’s battle plate glowed red under the daemon’s grasp. His skin was blistering against the inside of his armour. The candles on the floor rose into the air, the tallow melting in an eyeblink. The bowls of incense crashed to the floor. Shards of black porcelain fell towards the ceiling. The servitors standing at the edge of the room burst apart, exploding into spheres of blood mist. Green ball lightning crackled over the walls. Out on the edges of his aetheric sight, Ahriman could see vast shapes made of the shades of night. The shapes bulged and swelled with thousands of hungering faces and reaching hands.

The daemon looked down at him. It no longer looked like Ohrmuzd, it no longer looked like anything even slightly human. Ragged black feathers pushed through its pale skin. It reached out a taloned hand and touched Ahriman’s forehead. The metal of his helm buckled and cracked. Armour integrity warnings screamed in his ears. The air in his armour stank of carrion meat and hot metal. He thrust his mind at the daemon, trying to draw power to him, finding only the constricting presence of the daemon choking his soul.

‘I will be free,’ whispered the daemon, and the whisper echoed, rising in volume and changing until it filled Ahriman’s ears. He tried to move his sword hand but it moved so slowly, and the daemon’s mouth was opening wider and wider. ‘I will take your mind to my master, and I will be free.’

Ahriman felt his strength wither. He had failed. He was nothing, a heretic and fool whose reach had exceeded his grasp, a remnant who should have fallen to dust long ago.

The daemon shrieked, and suddenly its grip on Ahriman vanished. It writhed, clawing, its back arching. The point of Astraeos’s sword projected from its chest. Blood and pus bubbled from the wound, sheeting down its torso.

Behind the daemon, Astraeos let go of the sword’s hilt. The shadows behind the Librarian were moving, forming shapes of limbs, tentacles and teeth-ringed mouths. Astraeos’s shoulders were shaking, thick plates of ice cracking from his armour as he moved. He looked at Ahriman and sent a single word.

+Run.+

XI
WARP BREACH

‘We must run,’ screamed Egion.

Carmenta felt terror, and it was not all her own. Egion was crying in her soul, his terror bleeding through the mind-impulse link. Her engine’s flames fluttered and misfired. Stars and darkness blurred in the sensors that were her eyes.

Don’t let me go, she moaned. Please don’t let me go. The Titan Child’s engines spluttered and died. It streaked forwards on its momentum, the station looming closer by the second. Hold on to me, she pleaded. Something is coming for us, for us all. Do not let me go.

In her cable cradle, her body went into convulsions. She retched oil and blood through the mouth slot in her lacquered mask. She was drifting, her mind unanchored. Voices whispered in her ears, telling her of things she had forgotten, of the darkness of a labour hab, of the broken turning of a fan and the chopped light falling across the body of a man curled on a soiled pallet. He twitched and gave a hacking breath. His eyes opened. She had thought he was looking at her, but he would never see her again. The air had reeked of urine, mould and rust; she had forgotten that. How could she forget that? It was not a memory, it was the present. She was not the Titan Child. She was not Carmenta. She was nothing but a girl staring at her father’s face and watching his blood-pink spittle dribble down his cheek. She could see the cogged tattoos of service under the runnels of spit.

The memory vanished.

I am losing control, she thought.

‘It’s here,’ shouted Egion, over the link. She could almost see him twisting in his amniotic tank, defecating and bleeding in panic. ‘It is here, we must run. Run.’

‘No. We must…’

‘We must run,’ he shouted, and as he shouted his voice carried the vision of his fear into her mind.

She saw what he had seen. It was like seeing a reflection caught in rippling water, all form and pattern breaking as soon as it was seen. She could see beyond the grey lines of the station, behind the stars. Shapes moved there, huge and protean. Scales and scabs of colour clung to their bulk. They waited, their hunger barely restrained.

Carmenta shrieked as a machine. Throughout the Titan Child power conduits ruptured, spilling gas and burning fuel into her insides. The plasma reactors faded and surged. She felt her own body twist in the cradle of cables. Her engines were still burning, but she was numb to them. She was losing her grip on her Titan Child. Her hull was shaking, trembling like skin exposed to an icy wind. Egion’s terror was flooding her with human fear and the ship was trying to shake her free. She had to cut the interface with Egion, or he would destroy them.

She forced her mind back into the link. Her mind became the Titan Child again, ramming through her systems, trailing code damage and corrupt routines. She grasped the mind-impulse link and, in that instant, she saw him.

He floated in his amniotic tank, churning it to froth with his vestigial limbs. Ribbons of fresh blood stained the fluid. Feed and waste tubes had ripped from the sockets in his mouth and back. His head seemed grotesquely large atop his shrunken torso, his eyes milk-white with blindness, his mouth stapled shut. The open eye on his forehead twitched wildly at the view beyond the crystal walls of the chamber.

‘Please,’ he said.

She shut down the link and the vision of the Navigator’s chamber vanished. The slow beats of her plasma-filled heart pulsed through her as she hung silent in the void. Then the Titan Child’s engines roared to life. Fire ran through her veins, and she wanted to run, to run and not look back. But she turned towards the dead station.

‘Ahriman,’ she shouted in an electronic cry.

Ahriman did not run. The chamber’s stone walls and pillared tiers were melting. In front of him, the daemon arched its back and vomited a great wash of black liquid into the air. The sword impaling the daemon began to glow with heat. Astraeos staggered backwards, his palms smoking. The daemon quivered, scattering burning droplets of blood as its body dissolved into a boneless pool of flesh. More daemons stepped from shadows like congealing smoke. Bodies of wasted muscle and cracked skin clawed out of the gloom. Ahriman glimpsed white eyes, claws, and rows of hooked teeth in mucus-thick jaws.

Exhaustion bubbled up inside Ahriman. Black circles popped at the edge of his eyes. Hoots and chitters scratched at his thoughts. He felt as if he were falling down a lightless shaft. He took a step backwards. His muscles ached as if he had been fighting for weeks without rest.

A daemon stepped from the growing throng. It had a long, vulpine head, and its skin was taut over a hunched body of lean muscle. It took a slow step, its black eyes flicking over Astraeos and Ahriman. Ahriman saw its legs tense. The daemon jumped. Behind it, the rest of its kin came forwards in a single wave. Astraeos began to turn to face the leaping daemon, but too slowly. The daemon’s claws touched his shoulder guard just before it was about to land.

+Down,+ shouted Ahriman. Astraeos dived to the floor. The telekinetic wave hit the daemon while it was still in mid-air and flung it back in a spray of black slime. The charging daemons faltered, and Ahriman ran forwards and pulled Astraeos to his feet in the instant before they rallied and came on again. Bright light danced in front of his eyes and his skin felt clammy. The circle of daemons closed over them before they could take a step. Ahriman heard claws scrabble at his armour. Teeth and eyes filled his vision. Rancid breath fogged his eyepieces. He felt something sharp slip through a joint in his leg armour. Armour integrity warnings lit in his helmet display.

+Astraeos,+ he called, and reached for the Librarian’s mind. He felt Astraeos’s mind resist for an instant, and then open. Their wills became one, and Ahriman felt his fatigue fall away. He formed a single, blunt thought and heard its echo in Astraeos’s mind.

The dome of force exploded outwards. Daemons ripped from the floor and tumbled through the air. Fragments of pottery, metal and bone rose in a scattered cloud. A moment of perfect, still calm flowed through Ahriman. He could feel every mote of dust and scrap of debris caught on the edge of the expanding telekinetic sphere. He changed the shape of his thought and Astraeos followed. The debris exploded outwards in a wave of shrapnel. The daemons caught in the blast fell in shredded heaps. The way was open to the door out of the chamber.

The calm had vanished from Ahriman as suddenly as it had come. He felt Astraeos’s mind buckle. Voids opened in his own will. They ran for the door.

The daemons followed, pouring into the passage opening like a swarm of insects. Frost ran down the walls in front of them. Cracks opened in the plated metal, glowing with a blue light. Ahriman tumbled end over end, his mag-grip on the floor broken. He reached out blindly, felt his hand hit something solid and grabbed on. His body spun around his grip and slammed into a hard surface. Force juddered through him, and the air left his lungs. He could not tell if he was holding on to the wall, ceiling or floor. Confused runes swam across his eyes. He twisted around, trying to find the direction in which they had been running. Silence filled his skull. He could feel blood hammering in his ears. Something hit his arm, and he twisted to bring his sword around. Astraeos’s eyepieces were inches away from Ahriman’s faceplate. The Librarian had clamped on to the passage wall.

+Which way?+ sent Ahriman, but Astraeos was reaching past him, pointing.

No, realised Ahriman. Not pointing. Aiming.

The bolt pistol fired. A jet of silent flame spat over Ahriman’s shoulder. Ahriman spun around, still holding himself in place with his right hand. The bolt-round’s detonation lit the darkness for a second. A living wall of mouths and reaching claws filled the passage behind them. Ahriman pulled his sword around and closed his eyes. He burrowed deep into his being, calling on reserves of focus he had kept sealed for so long he had almost forgotten them.

+Burn,+ he sent, and the fire leapt from the blade tip. It shone blue with heat. Ahriman’s mind went with the fire, riding its fury and guiding its path. It struck a daemon with a halo of waving arms, and burned straight through it. He swept the fire around, cutting through the daemons in a brilliant arc. Some of the daemons split into two smaller bodies which floated for a second in the death-slime of their parent before swimming forwards. Others burst apart in explosions of multi-coloured steam.

Ahriman was shivering, his skin clammy and wet with sweat inside his armour. The formulaic patterns in his mind were burning, tainting his senses. He could smell smoke, and feel heat prickle his lungs. Somewhere beside him, Astraeos had stopped firing.

They had to move. He released his hold on the flame. It did not end. The fire still coursed from his sword tip, ripping through his mind and body. He could not stop it; he could not release the power he had called. In his mind the burning pattern glowed brighter and brighter, becoming more complex, sucking in thoughts and sensations like a hurricane wind. The hand holding the sword began to glow. Pain lanced from his fingers, but he could not open them; he could do nothing but watch as fire boiled out of the cracks of his soul. His skin blistered. There was just fire roaring in his mind. He could not stop. He could not remember how it had begun.

I am Ahzek Ahriman, came a voice from the depths of his mind. It was an old voice, forgotten and rejected.

No, he screamed in a thought that was charring to nothing. No, I am not. He failed. The dream failed, and I fell.

The power vanished, soaking back into his mind. He opened his eyes. The lance of heat still lingered as a smear of neon light hanging in the vacuum, cooling and fading from blue to purple. The distant door to the choral chamber was still visible, edged by a pulsing blood-red glow. Globules of slime and skin spun in the half-darkness. As he watched, pink amorphous shapes began to form from the vaporised slime. He could see sucker-tipped fingers flexing as they extruded from the congealing matter.

Ahriman turned to look for Astraeos. The Librarian was already flying down the passage, kicking off walls, floor and ceiling. Ahriman started to follow. A beam of actinic light fizzed past him and melted a hole in the passage wall. He turned as a daemon hooted and flicked another beam of light from its fingers. The daemon was crawling across the buckled floor-grating. A wide mouth split the face in the centre of its torso, a thick tongue slavering over teeth. Blue and yellow flames were licking its skin and lighting the hunger in its saucer eyes. Its six limbs moved with boneless speed as it scrambled closer.

Ahriman spread his mind into the passage walls. Sweat instantly sheeted his skin, and then froze in hard droplets. His body floated to the centre of the passage, cradled in a telekinetic web. Pressure built like a tightening bowstring. The metal of the walls began to buckle. He felt as if the noon sun were blazing in his skull. In front of him, Astraeos was spinning as he shoved away from the roof. He folded his mind around the Librarian. Astraeos resisted, shoving back with a panicked wave of will. Ahriman felt the pain in his head increase.

+Submit,+ screamed Ahriman, and felt the resistance drop away. He released the force of his mind, as a daemon reached for him with a flame-wreathed hand. Ahriman and Astraeos shot forwards like arrows loosed from a bow. The tunnel ripped apart in their wake. The star of pain in Ahriman’s head exploded. Shreds of metal scattered before them, half melting or dissolving into grey dust as they flew into the waiting dark.

The Titan Child rolled and skidded as Carmenta felt thrusters fire too hard. Opposing forces shook through her bones, and she screamed in pain. Coolant was venting into her holds, oil spraying from ruptured pipes, her corridors filling with acidic gas and steam. Bulkheads snapped shut, and she felt parts of the ship go numb. The Titan Child kept skidding. The iron cliff of the station’s flank loomed out of the static of her sensors, so close she felt she could touch it. Then her sensors cut out and plunged her into blindness.

No, no, no, she thought, no, not like this, not blind. She was alone and could feel nothing. No, not like this. I am not flesh. Only flesh dies. I am metal, I am data, and machine. I am Titan Child.

Her machine eyes opened again as data punched back into her mind. She was in time to see something pull itself from the station.

A hundred-metre-wide sheet of metal cracked from the station’s back and lifted up like the carapace of a vast turtle rising from mud. Tendrils of lurid energy trailed from it as it emerged. Under its shell, the creature had limbs of wreckage, pincers of twisted metal, and fins of torn steel. A blunt head formed from twisted gun turrets turned and looked at the Titan Child. Its eyes were gouged holes that wept molten metal. Carmenta looked back at it and felt the promise of ruin in the creature’s gaze.

The creature roared, an impossible sound that rang across the void. Carmenta fired. Plasma batteries and turbolasers lit the narrow gulf between her and the station. The creature leapt. Debris spun behind it, sparkling like snowfall under starlight. Wings of crumpled metal unfolded from under its shell. Carmenta could not process what was happening. She had missed. The creature was accelerating towards her.

No, it was flying in the airless void. The buzzing beat of its wings flooded her sensors. She readied to fire again, feeling the thrum of charging capacitors and vibration as breeches closed on macro-shells.

With a shower of void-pitted metal, another creature broke through the back of the station and leapt into the void, then another, and another.

Carmenta fired. The creatures vanished as plasma-tipped shells exploded in a spread of overlapping fire-spheres. The release of each shot was hot, filled with a scream of molten fury.

The creatures came through the inferno, red with heat, mouths wide. Carmenta felt cold, the cold of dead iron spinning through an endless night. She fired once more before the wave of burning creatures passed through her shields and sank their claws into her hull.

Ahriman’s mind buckled as his thoughts slurred. They were tumbling now rather than flying through the station, banging off walls, floors and ceilings. Ahriman’s helmet display cut out, returned and cut out again. He could hear air hissing from rents in his armour. He had no idea how much further they had to go, or even if he had guided them back the way they had come.

The frame of an open blast door slammed into his helm. Sparks ignited behind his eyes. Part of his awareness fell away, as a portion of his brain blacked out. He hurtled on unguided, momentum spinning him on as his telekinetic projection died.

Astraeos caught him, grabbing him as he tumbled past. The Librarian had clamped his boots to a wall and reached out to hook Ahriman’s arm. He tried to speak, but his teeth were loose in his mouth and his tongue was thick with blood. A sickly luminous haze crept across his vision.

+Which way?+ sent Astraeos. Ahriman tried to answer, then shook his head. Astraeos pulled him closer, his face looming in Ahriman’s blurred vision. +Which way should we take?+ sent Astraeos again. Ahriman tried to understand what the Librarian meant. +They are coming.+

Ahriman turned his head, and tried to focus through the fog of colour and popping stars of light. Three doorways looked back at him, three blank openings leading to darkness. They had come this way; of course. Or had they? His thoughts flowed like treacle. He could not remember and he could not have been sure which door led to the gunship even if he had. Astraeos was shaking him harder and harder. He moved his hand to push him away, but his movement was sluggish and weak. He tried to grip Astraeos’s shoulder. The ceramite was vibrating as he touched it. Ahriman stopped moving back down the passage they had flown down. The walls were shaking as if in rhythm to a rising tide.

+Which one?+

+I don’t know,+ sent Ahriman.

The end of the passage glowed as walls bent and flexed like the inside of an arching snake. Astraeos let go of Ahriman, and raised his bolt pistol. Light spilled forwards, clawed and horned shadows reaching down the walls. Ahriman found he still had his sword in his hand. He tried to raise the blade but the movement made him roll in the zero gravity.

A stuttering streak of flame sprang from behind them. The daemons vanished behind a wall of phosphor-bright detonations. Ahriman turned. Another burst of flame split the passage. A figure in armour the colour of dull copper was advancing from behind them, firing as he moved, his feet locking to the floor with each step. The vox spat to life in Ahriman’s ear.

‘Take the central door. One hundred metres, then left turn fifty metres.’ Thidias’s voice was emotionless, but Ahriman could taste the focus in the warrior’s mind.

‘Where is Kadin?’ shouted Astraeos. Thidias gave the smallest twitch of his head in reply, took a step towards the daemons and fired a broad burst. Ahriman could see that the fire pattern was taking all of the warrior’s focus.

‘I do not know,’ said Thidias. The last round coughed from Thidias’s bolter. He stepped forwards, pulled the clip from the weapon, loaded, and fired again in the space of a breath. The passage in front of him was ablaze, phosphex and oxygen gel burning white-hot on the walls and floor. Beyond the glare, Ahriman could see the daemons recoil like wolves on the edge of torchlight. ‘Last contact was before the station…’ Words failed Thidias, but he needed to say nothing more.

Ahriman looked towards the central of the three doorways, and then back to Astraeos.

‘Go,’ said Thidias. ‘I will hold.’

For how long? thought Ahriman, but he kicked off towards the central doorway.

‘Go,’ said Thidias again, and Ahriman glanced back. Astraeos had not moved from beside his brother. ‘Go, brother.’

‘We stand as one,’ growled Astraeos. Pale lightning was playing around his fists, and Ahriman could feel the Librarian trying to draw power from the warp.

‘No,’ said Thidias. ‘You always were bad at judging character.’ He was firing in short controlled bursts, stepping forwards to change the angle of his shots. With every explosive splash of fire the daemons were closer, their bodies flickering between impressions of limbs, eyes, hands and teeth. Thidias turned his head for a second to look at Astraeos.

‘You will go, and I will stand alone. It is my choice.’ The Librarian was silent for a second then kicked off in a leaping bound towards the door. Ahriman crossed the threshold just in front of him. They scrambled towards the waiting dark, while behind them, muzzle flashes strobed on.

Half blind with fatigue, they moved with heedless speed, spiralling and crashing, until they spilled from the door into the cavern and saw the gunship waiting. The muzzles of the wing-mounted heavy bolters glowed dark red. Something had already come for the gunship. Globular flesh, scraps of metal and spent cases formed an expanding cloud. Ahriman pushed off from the door frame. The cooling mouths of the guns swivelled to face him. Sensor discs sent identification signals, and his battered armour answered. The guns went still. Unable to slow or steer his flight, Ahriman hit the craft’s blunt wing with a bone-jarring clang. He grasped the wing before he spun into the vast darkness of the cavern. Astraeos hit the tail fin an instant later, and almost lost his grip.

Slowly Ahriman pulled himself down the wing. The ramp was still open, and dim red light diluted the gloom of the crew compartment. Ahriman had begun to climb the ramp when he saw the figure waiting within.

Thidias stopped firing. His clip was empty. Light filled the passage in front of him, the bright white of phosphex dancing in the blackness of the daemons’ eyes. He let go of the bolter, and his last touch sent it gliding into the narrowing space between him and his foe. He drew his knife and pistol. The daemons came on without pause. Red target runes spread across his eyes as he aimed the bolt pistol. He began to fire, switching from target to target without thinking. Daemons fell. Bodies burst like bloated sacks of skin. A smell of rotting meat and spice filled his mouth and nose. He pushed the sensation away, and kept firing. The round counter ticked towards zero in the corner of his eye.

The bolt pistol went silent. The daemons were ten paces away, their flesh quivering as they swung and flew closer. He began to run towards them. His knife was a reassuring weight in his hand, like a memory held close.

He had broken his oaths to the Imperium. Others, now long dead, had disputed that fact, but Thidias had always known the truth in his soul. They were falling and would fall further. Better that he ended now, as a warrior who could still remember what honour was.

A daemon broke away from the swarm and spiralled towards Thidias. Long arms waved around its stump of a body, and hundreds of tiny mouths covered its bloody-pink flesh. Thidias took another stride, dropped low and rammed his knife upwards. Black liquid drooled out in weightless cords as he sawed up through the deflating bag of the daemon’s corpse. Something was scrabbling at his legs with long talons. He kicked blindly, felt an impact and kicked again. Something he could not see stabbed into his left ribs. Alarms began to ring in his ears. Acid was spreading down the inside of his armour. He cut at a creature with a wide mouth and rolling eyes. The blow split it in two. The alarms were a constant whine in his ears. He took a breath, felt liquid rise in his throat. He raised his knife and cut again, before a hooked talon darted out and spilled his guts into the cold vacuum.

Ahriman went still. The figure was half sprawled against a flight bench. Red crystals of blood hung around its crumpled form. It wore armour, its pitted bronze surface gleaming dully in the dim light. Even half hidden by shadow, it was clear that its body was not whole: its arms and legs were bloody stumps. Something had ripped chunks from its chest. He could see white ribs poking from the sides of its wounds. Ahriman stepped forwards. He began to reach out with his senses to feel for the pulse of life in the slumped figure. As soon as he tried, his mind filled with a chorus of cries and a heat-haze sickness.

Astraeos swung down into the hold, not seeing the figure. +Come on,+ he sent. Ahriman made to reply, but a voice stopped him.

‘Brother?’ said the voice, scraping across the vox. The figure on the floor moved, turning its head with drunken slowness. It still wore its helm, but the eye-lenses were blank and unlit. Astraeos had frozen where he was. ‘Is that you, Astraeos?’

It was Kadin, the warrior’s voice a crunching slur of clotting blood. Kadin tried to move, but what he achieved was a pitiful twitching. ‘Brother, I cannot see,’ said Kadin, a wet breath between each word. Astraeos took two strides and bent down.

‘It is I,’ said Astraeos. ‘We have you, brother, you will be well.’ Kadin coughed, and Ahriman heard the scraping of bones in the sound.

‘Liar,’ said Kadin. ‘Where is Thidias?’ Astraeos said nothing, and after a second Kadin nodded weakly.

‘We have to go now,’ growled Astraeos. As if in echo to the words, the gunship’s weapons began to fire. Ahriman felt the craft’s frame shake with recoil. Beyond the open hatch, strobing muzzle flashes broke the blackness. He moved towards the front of the crew compartment, clicking the vox to transmit as he did.

‘Take off!’ He had no idea if the pilot servitor was still alive or if its mind was still functioning, but he shouted the command anyway. ‘Take off now!’ A blurt of machine code answered him. A second later the gunship’s internal gravity activated, and the ramp began to close. Through the narrowing gap, Ahriman glimpsed the daemons, floating and bobbing towards them, caught in the flarelight of the firing guns. The gunship rocked as it unclamped from the platform. Air vented into the crew compartment in a cold fog. The guns were still firing, and the gunship shivered as its engines lit. Ahriman grabbed hold of an overhead rail.

The gunship shot across the cavern, accelerating on bright cones of fire. Behind it, the daemons ran across the platform and leapt into the void after it. Bolts of corpse light and arcs of crackling power followed the gunship. Some hit, burrowing into metal, chewing into circuits and fuel lines. The heavy bolter mounts on the wings swivelled and fired.

Within the crew compartment, Ahriman tried to reach for a point of serenity amidst his fatigue. Kadin’s wounds were thawing, oozing blood onto the decking. Astraeos was muttering something to the dying warrior, one hand supporting the back of Kadin’s helmet.

Something hit the gunship, sending sparks crawling across the inside of the hull. The stink of burning cables and hot metal filled the compartment. Ahriman pulled his thoughts away from the scene in front of him, and pushed his mind into the void beyond the hull. A thought the shape of ice and crystal formed in his mind, hardening over the gunship like a shell. Another bolt of lightning cracked across the gunship’s wing, and Ahriman felt his mental ward hold for a second and then break. He gasped and blinked away blood-thick tears.

+Astraeos,+ he sent. The Librarian’s head snapped around. Ahriman could feel the rage fuming off him in hot waves. +I need your help.+

Astraeos said nothing but reached up and pulled his helm off. His skin was pale, and burn marks blistered his brow. He stared back at Ahriman, his true eye a pale orb with a pinprick of black beside the electric green of his augmetic.

+We will all die here if you do not help me,+ Ahriman sent. Astraeos looked back to the chewed remains of his brother. Fresh blood was seeping from the wounds. +We will die here, and any chance Kadin may have will die with us.+

Outside the hull, the heavy bolters fired their last shells. As if sensing the weakness, the daemons spilled forwards. The gunship jinked and flipped, weaving amongst blasts of rainbow energy. Invisible blows ripped at its wings, sending it spinning. Ahriman heard the craft’s frame scream like a ripped girder. There was no time. He turned to look back at Astraeos.

+Now,+ he sent, and layered the command with all he had learned of the Librarian. Astraeos was a man with many names: the name granted to him by his Chapter, the name he had been born with and forgotten, the name that his mentor had called him, and the number the Black Ships had given him when they took him from his birth world. The command held all of these names, and it hit him like a physical blow. Astraeos half fell then came up fast, his face twisted with pain and rage. Ahriman remained still.

Astraeos stopped, his hands clenched in fists. The gunship bucked again. Astraeos opened his mouth, but never said what he was intending.

Kadin rose from the deck, floating into the air with a crack of bones that sounded like pistol shots. Frost spread across the walls and deck. In Kadin’s deep wounds, blood ice was forming. His head came up last. Black eyepieces looked at Ahriman.

Ahriman felt cold. In his mind the distant cries of the daemons suddenly sounded like laughter. He had misunderstood. He remembered the gunship’s weapons glowing red as he had approached it. He saw Kadin’s wounds and remembered the blood and meat hanging in the airless dark. The daemons were not chasing them, they were circling.

‘I cannot see,’ said Kadin’s choking voice.

The Titan Child was burning across half her hull. Carmenta knew it, but could not feel it any more. Her void shields were gone. Scabs of molten slag had peeled off across her flanks and prow. The creatures crawled over her, chewing and ripping at armour plates softened by the heat of their breath. She was half blind but she could see the gunship, spinning in a clear sphere of space a few hundred metres away. It was so close but it was tumbling like a broken bird. In one of her still functioning landing bays, a slab-sided lifter rose from the deck. Its servitor crew blurted an acknowledgement of her order. Blast doors unfolded and the lifter pushed into the void.

Kadin floated towards Ahriman. Steam was rising from him even as frost thickened across his armour. Shreds of skin hung from the stumps of his legs. Kadin’s wounds closed before Ahriman’s eyes, fresh flesh filling the chewed gaps.

Astraeos lunged towards Kadin. Kadin’s head twitched, and a telekinetic wave slammed Astraeos into the wall. He rolled with the impact and sprang forwards. Kadin drifted to the side and struck him across the chest with a lash of energy. Ahriman heard a dry crack of splintering ceramite. Astraeos folded and, before he could hit the floor, the daemon’s power smashed him across the compartment. He lay still, blood seeping from the cracks in his armour.

Kadin looked back to Ahriman.

No, thought Ahriman. It is not Kadin, not any more. He could see it now, the daemon rooted in Kadin’s flesh like a parasite, snaking through his blood and bone like horned chains. There was nowhere to move. He tried to summon power, but it slipped out of his grasp like a rope tugged away by the wind. The daemon gave a sorrowful cackle in his head. He could not move. He felt invisible hands grip his flesh, holding him in place. The daemon raised Kadin’s arm. A long talon of frozen blood extended from the chewed stump. Delicately, almost gently, the daemon placed the tip on the lens above Ahriman’s left eye. The daemon pushed the talon forwards. The crystal of the eye-lens splintered. Ice-blue light flooded Ahriman’s left eye. He could not look away as the needle tip extended towards his pupil.

+Kadin,+ said Ahriman, and felt the last inch of his strength shorten. The talon tip halted. The daemon roared with rage, the sound ripping from Kadin’s blood-clogged lungs. +Kadin. I bind your flesh. I compel you by your blood.+ The daemon staggered, and around them the stricken gunship spun and spun. Ahriman’s will flowed into Kadin’s body. It was not fully the daemon’s. Not yet. The daemon had taken Kadin as a host, but it had done so by blunt force. There was still a fragment of Kadin’s mind and body it had yet to conquer.

Into that shrinking gap, Ahriman poured the last of his will. He did it without subtlety, ramming his raw strength against the daemon. He felt the scraps of Kadin’s soul lend him strength. The daemon vomited, and the neck seal of Kadin’s armour burst as red-streaked bile spilled down his chest. The stolen body twitched, striking the walls of the compartment. Ahriman felt his knees buckle. His own body felt like a distant memory. The daemon’s hold on Kadin’s flesh weakened, then began to slip. The daemon’s back arched. Kadin’s body was glowing like an overheating furnace. Ice melted from him, turning to steam before it could hit the floor.

Then he felt another presence pour into Kadin’s body. It was cold and black, like water gathered from a deep cave. The daemon that had been fighting for Kadin’s flesh vanished beneath the oncoming tide. Ahriman felt the edge of the new presence touch his own mind. It was like being stabbed by needles of ice, and the shock snapped him back into his body.

Above him, the new creature shivered with Kadin’s flesh and stepped forwards. Kadin’s features vanished as his body moved, as if he had fallen into shadow. For a second, he looked like a hole cut in the background of the world.

The newcomer reached down and lifted Ahriman from the floor, cradling his head in Kadin’s hands. He could feel the creature’s eyes looking at him, into him. He looked back.

‘No, not you,’ croaked Ahriman. ‘It cannot be you.’

+Forget,+ said the shadow. Ahriman blinked.

He saw billowing clouds of light that spiralled to a vanishing point. His body was cold, his mind was numb. He could not think. Somewhere beyond the border of his senses, he was bleeding. The world was silent. He was not sure if he was still breathing.

He could not remember where he was. Warm darkness crept over him.

He saw nothing.

XII
CHANGE

Ahriman woke suddenly, pain and nausea replacing a blank absence of sensation. His eyes were open, but he could not see. He tried to raise his hands to touch his face, but they would not move.

‘Subject conscious,’ said a machine voice, and he flinched at the suddenness of the noise. A high ringing filled his ears, and he could hear the whir and scrape of mechanical gears.

‘Remove the dermal covering,’ said another voice. This one was human and female. He recognised its hard edge. ‘Start at the face.’

‘Carmenta?’ he said. Something sharp pricked his forehead, and scored down the centre of his face.

‘Yes, Ahriman.’ He felt something tug at his face, and light stabbed into his eyes. He blinked, for a moment as blind as he had been before. Then the world around him resolved into blurred shapes and indistinct colours. ‘You are alive.’

He turned his head. He wore no armour, and was bound to an upright frame in a long chamber that extended away to blackness on either side. Bright lights stabbed down at him from a hoist suspended above him. The walls and ceiling were gloss red, and a channel ran down the scuffed metal floor. He could smell antiseptics, machine oil and crude but powerful pain suppressors. A hunched servitor stood close beside him, staring at him with a cluster of green lenses. Red-brown spatters covered its off-white robe, which trailed in scabbed tatters across the floor. The servitor peeled an inch-thick layer of what looked like pale fat from Ahriman’s skin. Carmenta stood in front of him, her cracked red lacquer face tilted to one side, watching. Ahriman thought she looked exhausted, but he could not say why.

‘You have been unconscious for six solar days,’ said Carmenta, as if answering an unasked question. ‘You suffered extensive internal damage, bone fractures, blood loss and burns.’ She stepped forwards, a mechadendrite reaching out to take the limp layer of flesh from the servitor’s razor fingers. He noticed the lattice of capillaries running through the soft material. ‘Luckily, your body has done much to heal the damage itself. The layer of synthetic flesh was mainly to treat the scorching. You looked like you had been cooked.’ Ahriman looked beyond the harsh circle of light. He could see metal frames and racks, nests of machine arms gathered close to the ceiling, and metal-sided vats connected to thick pipes that snaked across the floor.

‘You are a biologos, as well as a machine-wright?’ he said.

‘I dabbled once. This is one of the servitor reclamation holds.’

‘Helpful.’

‘Not really. The little I know of your kind just confirmed that there was little that we could do. Your own flesh is your salvation.’ Ahriman nodded. The injuries he had sustained must have induced a healing coma. As sensation returned, he could tell that he would be below peak condition for some time. His aetheric senses also felt dull and sluggish, as if a deadening fog wrapped his mind. The memories of the last moments on the gunship were indistinct blurs. He shook his head. That he was alive, and that the Titan Child had clearly survived, was enough for now.

‘Where are we?’ he asked.

‘In a dead stop in the deep void.’ Carmenta paused. ‘It cost us. I hope it was worth it.’

‘Astraeos?’

‘Is alive,’ she nodded. ‘Like you, he suffered significant physiological damage. He is still in the same type of coma you just woke from. Kadin suffered worse. I am not sure what happened to him, or why he is alive.’

Ahriman’s blurred memories snapped into sharp focus. Adrenaline roared through his tired veins. He could feel damaged muscles twitching in response. He was suddenly aware that his limbs were still bound to the metal frame, thick rubber-covered clamps holding him at the wrists and ankles. A thought pulled them open with a grind of bending metal. He stepped to the floor.

‘Where is he?’ he growled.

‘He is unconscious in a sanguinary immersion tank,’ said Carmenta, carefully. ‘I don’t know if he will wake again.’ He looked at her and something in his look must have shaken her, because she stepped back, her hands and mechadendrites rising. Ahriman stilled his own emotions.

‘Isolate it,’ he said. ‘Shut down every connection to where he is held and override all access protocols. Keep it that way until I see him.’ Carmenta did not move. ‘He is a danger to the ship, to all of us.’

‘Really?’ If she had had lips Ahriman was certain they would have curled. ‘An unconscious cripple kept alive in a tank is a danger? You think I don’t know that you already keep an abomination on my ship? The thing created by your pet Maroth.’ She was staring at him, her bionic eyes lit with coldness.

‘Do as I say,’ he snapped, and she flinched and took a quick step away from him. She is still human, he thought. Broken and driven half mad by the machine she tries to tame, but she still feels and fears. It took him a moment to reach what he judged a correct response. ‘I am sorry for what happened, mistress.’

‘My ship, you nearly killed my ship, and you say that Kadin is a danger to us.’ Her voice trembled as she spoke and her mechadendrites twitched. ‘Parts of the ship are still burning. Half of it is just wreckage: systems, weapons, engines. All so you could get answers?’

Ahriman returned her stare. He had once known many tech-priests and adepts of the Mechanicum. In the time since he came to the Eye, he had met many more who had fallen to the warp. All had seemed to him to become colder with age, more withdrawn, as if becoming like the metal of their machines. It was a form of insanity, he supposed, an obsession that dissolved away everything outside it. In Carmenta, though, the closer she bonded with her ship, the more fractured and raw her emotions, the more human part of her became; and what was left became… What?

‘We will find supplies, and there are places on the Eye’s periphery that can remake ships. Even one of this size.’

She shook her head, a strange combination of mechanical precision and human exhaustion.

‘Egion is dead,’ said Carmenta in a flat voice. Ahriman understood then what she meant: the Titan Child was dead in the void. It would be able to jump to the warp, but without a Navigator it would be rudderless, capable only of short, unguided hops before having to re-enter reality. They would be guessing their path and even the most modest journey would take an eternity. Worse, they balanced on the rim of the Eye of Terror in a region already saturated by unstable warp phenomena and storms. They might be alive for now, but Carmenta was facing near certain death if they attempted to move. For someone who was still human in a sense, she was taking it well.

‘How did he die?’ he asked, after a pause.

‘I am not sure,’ said Carmenta, and there was a note in her voice that he could not place. ‘Perhaps it was this place that killed him. Perhaps he was dying before we went to the station.’ She turned away with another shake of her head, and took a clinking metallic step towards the end of the chamber. ‘We fled once we had you. Some of the… the creatures were still on my hull. I had to shake and burn them off.’ She paused, an angry catch in her voice. ‘I had to destroy parts of the ship’s hull. I had to hurt my own ship. Egion was screaming all the time we were in the warp, then he just stopped, and we were here, and he was dead.’

He looked at Carmenta as she took another limping step. Dried blood stained her charcoal robe, and he could smell servo systems overheating as she moved. She was hiding something from him, but he restrained the instinct to simply take it from her thoughts; he had taken too much from her already.

‘Where are we now?’ he asked. Carmenta kept walking, and did not look at him as she replied.

‘Egion was raving as we fled. I do not know how their kind function, but I think at the end he was not navigating so much as running in terror.’

‘Where did he flee to?’

Carmenta stopped, and slowly turned her head to look back at Ahriman. In the low light the cracks in her mask looked like the traces of black tears.

‘Home, Ahriman,’ she said. ‘He tried to flee home.’

Looking out of the armourcrys cupola, Ahriman saw the Cadian Gate as a fluttering dot of light, set in a lone patch of black in a voidscape stained with nauseous colour. It was a gate only in the abstract sense, of course. A system turned into a fortress, it guarded the only stable passage from the Eye of Terror into the Imperium. There were other ways into and out of the Eye, but they were uncertain and dangerous paths, difficult to find and likely to kill any that sought them. Any sizeable fleet wishing to pass into or out of the Eye of Terror had to pass through Cadia, or so it was said. Garrisoned by millions of troops, ringed by space fortresses, and circled by war fleets, anything trying to break through had to either bring overwhelming force or wear the face of a friend. Time and again, armies of renegades had tried to break Cadia and failed.

‘Towards the light,’ said Astraeos softly from beside him. Ahriman glanced towards the Librarian.

No, he thought. Not a Librarian, an acolyte, an apprentice. My apprentice.

Astraeos still wore the robe the servitors had given him while he slept and healed. Glossy burn scars covered his face and arms, and all his facial hair had vanished. His breath hissed and cracked with the sound of unhealed bones. Ahriman felt an echo of the lingering pain in Astraeos’s body every time he looked at him.

Both of them stood under a wide dome of brass and crystal high on the spine of the Titan Child. Beneath them, the living wreck of the ship glimmered in the curdled starlight. Black wounds like huge bites ran along the ship’s hull. In places, he could see gas and liquid still venting from holes. The leaking gas formed a mist, which hung over the buttresses and gun towers like smoke rolling over a burned city. The ship was still at a dead stop and had been for days. By the time Astraeos had woken, Carmenta had healed what she could of her ship, and Ahriman had brooded on what to do next. He knew, of course. The options were limited, but that did not make them any less dangerous, or any more palatable.

After a long moment, Astraeos turned his head to look at Ahriman.

‘The Navigator ran towards the only light he could see, and it led him here,’ said Astraeos, his breath hissing wetly between each word. ‘All creatures born in the light run towards it when they are afraid. Only vermin run into the shadows.’

Ahriman raised his eyebrows and looked back to the stars. A dark mood had pervaded Astraeos since he had woken from his healing coma. Ahriman had caught snatches of bleak and clouded thoughts the few times that he had skimmed his apprentice’s mind. For a while Ahriman had thought it was fatalism, that the fate of his last two gene-brothers had broken Astraeos’s spirit, but it was not; it was resignation, a surrender to something cold and dark within.

‘This is the closest I have been to the Imperium since…’

‘Since you betrayed it,’ said Astraeos. Ahriman was silent for a second. He could recall every day with a precise clarity, but how long had passed since he had last broken the bounds of the Eye eluded him. Time in the Eye was not fixed; like a trick of perspective, it changed depending on where one stood, and for how long one looked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘What happened on the station? Why did my brother die?’

‘He died because I made a mistake.’

‘Just one?’

Ahriman held Astraeos’s gaze and nodded.

‘The daemon I summoned was already bound to do another’s will. My summoning drew it into existence, but once it was manifest, I had no control over it.’

‘It was a trap,’

‘Someone predicted my actions, and acted first.’

‘Amon?’

‘I think so, but I have no shortage of enemies,’ shrugged Ahriman, and turned to look down the length of the Titan Child to the distant tip of its prow.

‘I want to wake Kadin,’ said Astraeos. Ahriman let out a slow breath. He knew it would come to this; it was one of the inevitable steps he would have to take if he wanted to move forward. He should have ordered Kadin dumped into a plasma furnace and the ashes vented into the void.

‘That would be unwise,’ he said after a moment.

‘It would be unwise to refuse,’ said Astraeos, his voice cold, but his thoughts growling with aggression. ‘You promised me salvation for Cadar, but you have only taken another brother from me.’ Then the emotions vanished and Astraeos’s thoughts were just the familiar hum of a well-shielded mind.

He is learning quickly, thought Ahriman.

Ahriman stared back, his face still, his emotions balanced and masked by layers of subconscious baffles. He could annihilate Astraeos, and burn Kadin to nothing without allowing him to wake.

He could do these things and lose what few allies he had.

Necessity is the father of error.

‘Very well,’ said Ahriman.

Astraeos watched him for a heartbeat then nodded. ‘Once he is awake we follow you, and you will fulfil your promise to me.’

Ahriman gave a crooked smile. ‘Is that a fresh oath?’

Astraeos’s mouth made a stiff line. ‘If you choose.’ He paused and glanced out at the distant light of Cadia. ‘You mean to continue, don’t you? After all this, you intend to find Amon.’

‘Yes,’ said Ahriman. ‘The daemon showed me how to find him.’

‘You believe what it showed you, even though Amon bound it to his service?’ Astraeos shook his head.

‘It was not bound to hide where Amon is.’

‘You don’t think that it could be what Amon wants: a trap within a trap to draw you to him?’

Ahriman said nothing. He had considered the possibility that the information the daemon gave him was a trap, or a lie, or both, but he was committed now. He had to know.

After a second Astraeos shook his head again, but this time the gesture was heavy with weary resignation.

‘How will you follow this path? We are four souls and a broken ship without a guide.’

‘We are not without a guide,’ said Ahriman. ‘I can guide us for a short way.’

‘Where?’

Ahriman looked up to where Cadia glimmered amidst its sea of calm night.

‘To steal a Navigator.’

Kadin rose from the blood tank on the end of polished chains. The tank was an iron-sided box over twice the height of a man, set at the centre of a chamber of riveted bronze that curved to a domed roof. Viewports in the tank’s side showed the red liquid within. Cracked glass readout displays were set beside the viewports, and symbols scrolled across their grimy surfaces in luminous blue. The air in the chamber was damp and warm.

Astraeos watched as the machines suspended above the tank slowly swallowed the chains. He sniffed; the air stank of fresh blood, a sharp iron taste that overwhelmed even the smell of machine oils and rust. His brother’s head was the first thing to break the surface. The servitors had cut Kadin’s helmet away to attach a mane of injector tubes and bio-feeds to his scalp and neck. Under the draining blood, the skin of his face was pale grey and pulled taut over his skull. Spiral-shaped lesions covered his crown and looped down over his sunken cheeks. His eyelids were closed. Blood drained from his slack mouth as he rose from the tank. Astraeos stared. Still clad in his stained robe, he felt suddenly cold. Part of him wanted to look away, but he could not.

‘He is in a drug coma,’ said Carmenta from beside him. She turned her head to glance at Ahriman. The sorcerer stood utterly still, his eyes watching Kadin emerge from the tank, his hand resting on the pommel of his sword. ‘The dose we need to keep him sedated is massive, and…’ She trailed off as Astraeos looked at her. He nodded once to her, not sure why she had stopped speaking. He looked back to the top of the tank.

Kadin’s torso had emerged. Astraeos heard himself breathe out slowly, but did not feel the air leave his lungs. The armour over Kadin’s shoulders and chest was blackened and melted. The edges of torn ceramite had folded into the exposed flesh beneath. His right arm was missing below the elbow, the left below the shoulder. The legs that emerged were twisted strips of meat hanging from shattered pegs of bone.

The hoist stopped with a clunk of gears, and then swung forwards. Slowly, it lowered Kadin until he was on a level with Astraeos. Blood was pouring off him, spattering on the floor and forming dark pools. Astraeos lifted his arm and slowly extended his open palm. Behind him, Ahriman’s stillness shifted. Astraeos’s hand touched Kadin’s shoulder guard.

‘Brother,’ said Astraeos quietly.

‘He cannot respond. His injuries are extensive, and we are still passing sedative into his system.’

+Brother,+ sent Astraeos, focusing his message on the ember of consciousness he could sense in his brother’s mind.

+His ears and mind are closed,+ sent Ahriman, and Astraeos felt a surge of anger at the sorcerer’s intrusion. +He is in the abyss. Even if he wakes and can speak, he will not be your brother.+ A warmth of reassuring emotion came with the sending, like a hand of a friend resting on his shoulder. +Trust me in this.+

‘Withdraw the sedatives,’ said Astraeos. Carmenta glanced from him to Ahriman. ‘Wake him,’ he snarled.

Carmenta paused for a moment, then stepped towards the tank and keyed a small control panel. There was a distant clunk of shifting machinery, and the tubes connected to Kadin jerked and twitched. More blood began to dribble onto the chamber floor from Kadin’s body.

Astraeos watched, waiting for a scream, for Kadin to wake like a child from a nightmare. After several minutes of silence and stillness, he turned to Carmenta again. She shrugged with a ripple of mechadendrites.

‘He was gravely wounded, and my knowledge of Adeptus Astartes biology is limited at best.’

Astraeos was about to bite off a reply when he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. His head snapped around to meet Kadin’s open eyes staring back at him. Astraeos froze. Eyes. Kadin had two eyes. The iris of each was bright green and slit by a black pupil. There was no sign of the augmetic, just smooth skin.

‘Brother,’ said Kadin, in a wet rasp which became a smile. Suddenly blood was pouring from his mouth, and Astraeos flinched back. Carmenta’s mechadendrites uncoiled in an eyeblink. Only Ahriman was still, his relaxed hand resting on his sword hilt. Kadin coughed, and spat a thick clot of blood onto the deck.

‘Blood in his lungs,’ said Ahriman.

‘So,’ said Kadin. ‘Are you going to unchain me?’

Astraeos was looking at his brother intently. Kadin’s voice was a mutilated growl, a grave-echo of his old tones. And the eyes…

‘I am not going to kill you,’ said Kadin, his gaze flicking between Astraeos, Ahriman and Carmenta. He smiled. ‘You have my word.’

‘You are… injured, brother,’ said Astraeos.

‘A fact that I had managed to grasp.’ Kadin’s lips peeled back from broken and jagged teeth. He still had not blinked. Astraeos glanced at the flesh and armour of his brother’s body. Now that the blood had drained from it, he could see portions of flesh that looked to have healed, ugly knots of scar tissue, visible through breaks in armour plating. His gaze stopped. The broken ceramite and plasteel glinted brightly where it had sheared. Except, in places it seemed to have softened and distorted; as if it had begun to close over the flesh beneath, as if it were flesh itself, as if it were healing.

‘You–’

‘It’s gone. See for yourself.’ He flicked his chin to Ahriman. ‘Or ask the trickster lord if you don’t wish to look.’

‘Your body is not whole.’

‘Augmetics, brother.’ Kadin turned his face to Carmenta. Astraeos thought he saw her shiver. ‘You can fit those, can you not? And I will need armour, though I do not think that some of this will come off. You will have to work around that.’

For a second, Astraeos wondered if he should not have let Ahriman keep his brother shut away, forgotten and quiet. Even if he wakes and can speak, he will not be your brother, said Ahriman in his memory.

Perhaps death would be better, thought Astraeos. But then I would be the last, and then what would any of it have meant?

‘You won’t let me die, brother,’ said Kadin without looking at him, then turned his head slowly to fix Astraeos with his green, reptile eyes. ‘You don’t have the strength.’ Kadin raised his chin towards Ahriman. ‘And he needs you, so he won’t kill me even though he should.’

Astraeos found his hands were clenched, his own scarred face set in hard lines. It was not his brother, he knew that the moment Kadin had spoken, but he had to know what of him remained. Slowly, hesitantly he extended his consciousness out and into Kadin’s mind.

It was like plunging a hand into an open wound. He could feel textures of torn thoughts, holes where memories and beliefs had been. What remained hung together in a tangle of tattered remnants. There was nothing else there, no daemonic intelligence nested in the ruins, just a mutilated hole where it had once been. Astraeos broke the connection, and met his brother’s gaze. Kadin gave a smile that was almost a grimace.

Ahriman had stepped up beside Astraeos. ‘And what do you intend?’ he asked, his voice cold and flat.

‘Why, to follow where you lead, Ahriman,’ said Kadin and spat another clot of blood and acidic phlegm onto the deck.

‘Do as he says,’ said Ahriman to Carmenta. ‘Rebuild what you can of him.’ Astraeos found his mouth opening to say something, but Ahriman had already turned and walked out of the chamber. He looked back to his brother, the unformed thought still caught in his open mouth.

Kadin grinned up at Astraeos, as thickening blood oozed from the corners of his mouth.

Kadin had heard Maroth before he had seen him. The low cough of rust-clogged servos and the stuttering whine of the sorcerer’s armour had followed Kadin as he walked the deep and silent spaces of the Titan Child. He had been walking ever since Carmenta had finished her work, ever since he had been remade.

He closed his eyes and heard the sound of creaking armour again, closer now, moving between the rows of machinery at his back. He opened his eyes and the monochrome, shadowless world returned. His leg pistons snapped and hissed as he moved. Carmenta had done her work, folding the remains of his body around limbs of plasteel. In some way, those additions had been stranger than the other changes: his regrown eyes, the fact that he was sure that he could not remove his armour if he had tried, that the world he saw, touched and breathed seemed as dead as a holo projection.

His mind was no longer whole; he could feel the breaks and voids in his own psyche like the ghost sense of a lost limb. Emotions and thoughts did not link up, and his memories were a ruin of holes and fragments. Whole sections of his life were gone, and some seemed so unreal that it was as if his life belonged to someone else. He no longer knew what any of it meant, but worse, he was not sure that he cared.

Kadin’s tongue flicked out and he tasted the air. It was warm with the static pulse of thousands of cables and pipes which twisted across the chamber. The darkness was almost complete, but the passage stretched in front of him in yellowed monochrome, as if dirty moonlight shone from behind him. He had always been able to see in the dark, that was the first gift of the world which had borne him and then of the gene-seed which had remade him. But now the shadows seemed to melt away from his gaze. Every now and again, he would close his eyes just to feel the touch of true darkness.

He did not know what had happened to his augmetic eye; there was no mark of it on his face, just smooth skin and bone circling the socket in which a new eye looked out at the world. He breathed out slowly. His breath still tasted of the blood of the immersion tank, sweet iron on his tongue. The sensation enfolded him for a second and, in the darkness behind his eyes, he could feel nothing but the thick flow of blood on his skin, inside his veins, in his lungs and mouth.

A low hiss of breath filled his ears, so close that it felt as if it were next to his ear. Kadin spun and his arm snapped out, pulling Maroth from his hiding place in a machine niche. Piston-driven fingers squealed on fracturing ceramite as his grip closed around the collar of Maroth’s armour.

Rage filled Kadin. Rage like a thundercloud. Rage that shook him like the shout of a god. He remembered the sorcerer leaning in towards him, smiling, blood dribbling down his chin. ‘Your eye tastes of weakness,’ he had said. ‘Just like your brother’s,’ and all the while, all Kadin had been able to think of was Cadar falling, his chest open to the air. The rage became a scream inside him that merged with the metal screech of his closing grip.

Then suddenly nothing, just blank emptiness that flowed to the horizon of his thoughts like a black mirror. He looked at Maroth dangling at the end of his grasp. A wet laugh spluttered from Maroth’s speaker-grille.

‘You will not kill me, Kadin,’ said Maroth.

‘And what makes you think that?’ Kadin gazed at him, his hand still gripping the collar of Maroth’s armour. The sightless lenses of the hound-shaped helm blinked with light.

‘Because you and I are kin,’ hissed Maroth. His legs were scrabbling, trying to find purchase on the decking as he clawed at Kadin’s arm. ‘That is why I have sought you, because we are the same now.’

It was Kadin’s turn to laugh. ‘We are no kin.’ The fingers of his hand tightened, and he heard something pop in Maroth’s neck.

‘You are here searching the shadows. You look for yourself but you will find nothing.’

Kadin reached up with his free hand and gripped Maroth’s wrist. Slowly, he twisted and heard the armour break and the bones within pop. Maroth screamed, the high sound echoing through the machine stacks before turning into a rasping gurgle. Kadin tensed to begin to pull the arm from its socket. Pistons bunched down his arms.

‘Tell me that you feel anger as you once did,’ said Maroth, and his voice held no laughter or madness, just a weariness that held Kadin as still as if he had been bound to stone. ‘Tell me that you remember what it was to hate and know why. Tell me that you cannot feel the abyss within your soul.’

Kadin had gone completely motionless. Maroth nodded as if in agreement. ‘It will grow. Yes it will. In time you will bathe in blood just to try and remember what it was to feel anything. You will kill and burn all you once treasured and find that it means nothing. The abyss will take all. I know this. It is why I found you, why I am here.’

Maroth shook his head, and the gesture, for an instant, was that of Thidias looking up at him from the floor of his chamber. ‘We are falling,’ Thidias had said, ‘and the sun is a vanishing memory.’

Kadin felt his hand tense to snap closed, then he breathed out and dropped Maroth to the floor. He looked down at the broken being that had once been a man, and then a Space Marine, and now was just a creature. He watched as Maroth patted at his cracked armour like an animal licking a wounded paw. He could see nothing of the strength of a warrior, nothing of the pride of the gene-seed and tradition that had once made Maroth. He saw only filthy armour hiding a body within that had nothing left to it but the next breath coming from its mouth.

‘We are the abyss’s hollow children, you and I,’ said Maroth, and cocked his head as if waiting. Kadin watched him for a heartbeat and turned to walk away. After a second Maroth scrambled after the sound of footsteps.

Ahriman shook. Blood had run from his eyes and dried in long brown runnels across his cheeks. Sweat sheened his skin and his mouth was numb with repeating the same phrases for days.

But this place has no days, he thought. No days and no nights. Just the slow-moving surge of thoughts and emotion, rising, spiralling, and falling, like the deep tides of an ocean, like the winds of Terra, like the sway of a forest.

He realised that his focus had slipped, and that the next ritual phrase had almost caught in his throat. He forced his mind back into the rote pattern and aligned his heartbeat to the rhythm of the words coming from his dry mouth.

He sat on the bare metal floor of the viewing tower where he and Astraeos had looked towards the Cadian Gate. Black iron shutters closed off the view beyond the crystal dome above. The only sound was that of his slow breaths. A polished circle of silver hung in front of him, suspended by his will, its surface rippling with the reflected light of another world. He gazed into the mirror surface, watching patterns form, his mind shifting between remembered stores of symbolism.

+Reduce engine output by two-fifths. Allow us to drift for six seconds then continue on previous vector.+ The effort of the sending forced fresh sweat to bead his bare arms and chest. He felt Carmenta understand the message, and sensed the Titan Child’s engines dim in response. Astraeos sat opposite him, mouth closed, his mind syphoning strength into Ahriman. Even with such support, scrying their route towards the Cadian Gate was draining Ahriman to the point of delirium.

They were travelling a relatively short distance, at least in terms of realspace. In the warp, though, distance meant nothing. Thought, emotion, imagination and dreams were more real than anything physical. A true Navigator was able to look directly into that unreal realm and read its tides. Ahriman knew that what he did was a shadow of that ability. Where a Navigator saw the warp directly, Ahriman was looking at an echo captured by ritual and interpreted by symbolism. It was as crude as the ancients divining the course of the future in the coiling of smoke, or the way that sand fell from a child’s hand.

Yet crude or not, it took his entire mind to avoid the reefs and storm tides of the warp before the ship hit them. He had not blinked since they had entered the warp. He could not; one missed instant of perception would end them all.

On the scrying mirror, the patterns of light and colour shifted suddenly and he felt his mind reel. A wave of dizziness and nausea rose from his guts, and he fought it down, focusing on the changing patterns and colours. He clawed for understanding of what he was seeing. Then, without warning, he had clarity.

+Exit. Now.+ The thought blurted from his mind, and a second later he felt a slippery sensation beneath his skin as the Titan Child dived back into realspace. Ahriman did not move; in his mind, the oracular calculations spun on like cogs driven by a still-tense spring. The scrying mirror still swirled with colour and light.

‘We have made translation,’ came Carmenta’s voice over the chamber vox-speaker. Ahriman did not blink. His consciousness was fading; only the rote processes he had held steady in his mind while guiding the ship were still running. On the polished silver of the mirror a shape appeared, like a shadow cast through mist.

What is this? What am I seeing? The thoughts formed in Ahriman’s mind, but the momentum of his ritual had unwound, and blackness rose from within to claim him. His eyes closed and he slumped back. The mirror fell to the floor and shattered.

He lay on the stone floor and dreamed of shadows shaped like men, and soft voices telling him to forget.

He opened his eyes hours later to see stars looking down at him from beyond crystal. Astraeos had gone. He picked himself up, his head aching in bright stars behind his eyes. He limped to the vox-speaker and thumbed it to life.

‘Ahriman?’ Fatigue filled Carmenta’s voice.

‘Where are we?’

‘We are stationary in realspace.’ Silence crackled from the speaker-grille, and then she spoke again. ‘I can see Cadia, Ahriman. We are close enough that I can see the light of its star.’

‘Good,’ he said, and was already moving. He was tired, but they had to prepare. There was no time for the doubts of dreams.

PART THREE

TO DUST RETURNED

XIII
CLOCKWORK

‘Signal. Partial. Imperial probable. Minimal energy output. Additional energy readings indicate weapons fire, field and hull damage.’ The servitor finished its monologue of information and went silent. On the circular command platform of the Lord of Mankind, Inquisitor Selandra Iobel registered the report with a pursing of her lips. It was unexpected, but then nothing in the Eye of Terror was totally predictable, even on its margins. They would need to decide what to do, and quickly. That did not please her; hasty decisions had a habit of being regretted later.

They were on course for Cadia, its star shining several weeks of realspace travel away. No one, not even an Inquisitorial augur mission, dropped from the warp close to Cadia, at least not if they expected to survive. So the Lord of Mankind pushed through the void like a sea voyager of old returning to port after a storm. Iobel wanted to see that fortress system again, to not be on constant alert, be free of the chronotrap, and allow herself to be tired. Above all, she looked forward to being free of her damned armour. Fire-orange lacquer covered its plates, and the outlines of angel wings, raptor heads and rayed suns spread across its surface in lines of black iron. She shifted in her seat, unconsciously trying to release slowly cramping muscles. She had worn the battle plate for weeks, and it had begun to feel like a hand clamped over her skin. Not that there was any choice. Every member of the crew wore armour; it was a necessity.

She turned to look at her two peers. Inquisitor Erionas sat on his brass throne, his eyes closed above the rebreather that covered the lower part of his face. He wore graphite-grey armour sculpted across the chest to resemble flayed musculature. A spread of thick cables connected his throne to the cogitator towers that ran down the centre of the command chamber. Iobel could see light playing across the inside of Erionas’s eyelids. He gave no sign of having heard the servitor’s report, but she knew he had; he heard everything. On her other side, Malkira sat on her own seat of polished bone. The thrones were tiresomely symbolic, of course. Iobel’s own throne was silver, but no more comfortable for it. A hunched figure crouched to the right hand of each throne, its features hidden by red robes woven with sacred names.

Malkira gave a blood-wetted cough, her usual preface to speech. ‘We should ignore it.’ Iobel turned to look at Malkira, and was met by the inquisitor’s black eyes glinting back at her from the wrinkled skull of her face. ‘Time is running low.’ Malkira raised a hand and tapped the chronotrap fixed to the chest of her pearl-white armour. Cogwork whirled behind the circular pane of crystal. Iobel glanced down at the brass frame of her own chronotrap, her eyes reading the movement of the numerals etched into the silver and brass cogs.

‘You are correct,’ said Iobel.

‘Of course I am,’ snapped Malkira, and coughed again. The rhythmic pumping of the life-sustaining systems built into the crone’s armour became louder. ‘We are risking too much if we divert our course now. A few more weeks and the data will be secure.’

‘You don’t need to convince me,’ said Iobel.

‘No,’ said Erionas. Both Iobel and Malkira turned to look at him. He had not moved, and his eyes were still closed. ‘We should divert course to investigate.’ His voice crackled out of the vox-grilles set into his respirator.

‘Ridiculous,’ sneered Malkira, her lips peeling back from her silver teeth.

‘No.’ Erionas’s voice held no emotion. Iobel had heard him order the razing of cities with an equally dead voice. ‘This is an opportunity. I have accessed the scanner readouts. The ship is of unusual construction. It’s definitely Imperial, in my opinion. Psyocculum assessment says that it has been deep within the Eye. Yet it does not exhibit macro levels of malign warping. A culling of its data stores could tell us much.’

‘Or get us all killed in the sight of safety,’ spat Malkira.

‘Safety is not why we came here.’ Erionas let that reminder sit in the silence.

He was right, of course, Iobel could not deny it. They were an augur expedition, a ship sent into the Eye to gather information on its nature and current state. The data and lore they carried in their warded stacks was beyond value. It was a glimpse of the face of their enemy, one that might warn them of growing threats, or reveal weaknesses.

Such expeditions were dangerous in the extreme, and the possibilities of attack and violent death were the most minor of the risks they faced. The Eye itself was toxic to the soul and body. Warp energy and matter overlapped in the Eye, and physical laws became thinned to the point of non-existence. At the edges of the Eye, a weak skin still existed between the two realms, but at its heart, nightmare reigned unchallenged. To venture even partway into the Eye risked corruption.

The Lord of Mankind had been crafted specially to make such a voyage. Prayers and wards had been etched into every plate and rivet of her hull. Psychic dispersers and null generators ran through her structure. Any part of the ship could be sealed and flooded with nerve gas should the systems detect an intrusion. Most of the crew were servitors, and almost all of the human crew were kept in stasis until needed. All but the three inquisitors would be executed on return to the Imperium. The risk of corruption was too high. All of them knew this, and yet all still served. It was a fact that caused Iobel to feel puzzlement and admiration every time she looked into the face of one of the doomed but dutiful crew.

But the warp not only corrupted, it also made a mockery of time. It was possible for an expedition to spend a handful of months in the Eye and return to Cadia thousands of years later, or seconds after they left, or in the past. There was also no guarantee that all of those on the ship were experiencing the same amount of time. So each member of the crew wore a chronotrap, and more were set into the structure of the ship. The traps measured subjective time and exposure to the substance of the warp, slicing it away in a million cog clicks.

‘There is no time,’ said Malkira, tapping the chronotrap set onto her breast. Iobel felt the fluttering whir of her own chronotrap send a small vibration through her armour.

‘Incorrect. Temporal distortion across this volume is falling, and we are within exposure levels. We approach, send a recovery mission, return and continue on to Cadia. In and out, as soldiers say.’ Erionas paused, as if enjoying his use of such a phrase. ‘We have risked much, why not a little more?’

Malkira snorted. After a handful of heartbeats, they both turned to look at Iobel.

She knew it would come to this. ‘Agreed,’ she said. ‘We will investigate with caution.’ Malkira scowled, but began hissing orders to servitors and crew. Iobel was sure Erionas was smiling behind his respirator.

The Titan Child lay in the void, its hull gently revolving on an irregular axis. Grey clouds of gas and atomised liquid hung around its bulk, expanding slowly like warm breath expelled into cold night air.

‘This is ill-advised,’ said Astraeos, and glanced towards Carmenta. She ignored him. Connected by a trunk of cables to the ship, it was easy to let the activity in the hold fall into the background of her awareness. It was not a full interface, the systems here did not allow for that; her mind was still her own, but she could feel the rumbling dreams of the Titan Child, and touch its heart. It was reassuring, like knowing someone was close to you as you slept. The ship was half dormant, its injuries allowed to bleed energy and waste into the void. She felt the tug of its slumber, even as she controlled its steady beat.

‘The Imperial ship is on an intercept course,’ said Ahriman without looking up from where he knelt on the deck. ‘Our alternatives at this point are limited.’ He was armoured again. The azure lacquer reflected the stab lights suspended above. A white tabard covered his torso and hung around his legs. Parchments hung from his shoulder guards, covered in script Carmenta did not understand. A design spiralled out from where he knelt, its curves and sinuous symbols burned into the deck with a melta torch. It spanned the width of the hold, ranging across hundreds of metres of metal plating. It had taken days, and Ahriman had laboured alone until now. At the tip of his hand, she saw the white heat of a flame spark and then vanish.

‘We may not survive the damage,’ said Astraeos. Like Carmenta, he stood on a hoist suspended a foot off the hold’s floor.

‘We certainly won’t survive another way,’ said Ahriman. Astraeos looked as if he were about to say something else, but remained silent. His armour was an echo of Ahriman’s, but Carmenta could not shake the feeling that it looked temporary, as if the blue painted over the pitted battle plate would flake off to reveal the old bronze beneath.

They are both right, thought Carmenta. This plan will probably kill us all, but we have no choice. Wait until a ship came close enough to become curious. Cripple its engines with a surprise weapons strike. Then Ahriman, Kadin and Astraeos would board the stranded ship and take what they had come for. Then run again. It was simple, but it rested so much on chance and luck that Carmenta could feel herself recoiling from the risk, not least because of Ahriman’s method of boarding their prey.

He will kill us, said a voice inside her. He has nearly done so many times over. He is our destruction. She suppressed her worries with a shiver. At least they had been lucky in one respect. They could have waited months or years for a ship to pass close enough to notice them and decide to have a closer look. In fact, it had only taken a few weeks.

‘The Imperial ship is closing and transmitting hailing codes.’ She could feel the cipher codes itching across the Titan Child’s systems. The signals felt aggressive, like a challenge shouted at a figure seen on the edge of light. They are right to be cautious, she thought.

‘Why do they hail us? We are a near dead wreck in their eyes, are we not?’ asked Astraeos.

‘They are seeing if there are any survivors or active response systems,’ she said.

‘If they find any signs that the ship is not as dead as it seems…’

‘They won’t.’ She had prepared for weeks, setting systems and machinery to function in broken spasmodic rhythms, and the largest part of the Titan Child’s wrecked appearance was no illusion. The encounter at the dead station meant that the Titan Child was in many ways what she seemed: a half-crippled ship, twisted by battle damage, barely clinging on to existence. Every time Carmenta had linked herself to her ship, she felt its damage like a lingering fever, and had emerged with empathic wounds in her flesh and damage to her augmetics. For the first time, she had begun to fear the link with her ship; she had a terrible feeling that the Titan Child had begun to hunger for her, and its hunger was not kind.

Astraeos grunted at her words and looked away, his eyes roaming across the design cut into the deck by Ahriman.

‘This will work?’ he asked, flatly. Ahriman looked up, his face impassive, but there was a flicker in his eyes as he looked at Astraeos.

‘Nothing is certain,’ he said. Astraeos met Ahriman’s gaze, held it for a second then looked down and nodded.

‘As reassuring as ever,’ said Kadin. He was staring at the pattern Ahriman had cut into the floor, his eyes flicking across symbols and lines as if taking in every detail, as if he were reading. Astraeos, she noticed, chose to stand at the other end of the platform from his brother. The two had not said a word to each other since they had entered the hold.

They had not been able to remove the armour from Kadin’s remaining flesh, nor had they been able to recolour its blackened plates. Carmenta had personally fitted what augmetics were available. That at least had been successful, almost worryingly so. Kadin’s flesh had begun to grow and embrace the metal replacements. His right and left arms now ended in three-digit pincers of brushed steel. Below the waist, he walked on a pair of back-jointed legs, which hissed at every step. A bolter and double-edged chainsword were mag-clamped to his back.

Carmenta felt a tingle as another wash of signal from the approaching ship hit the Titan Child’s sensors. Her attention strayed from the sights in front of her, as a part of the still-waking ship began to break the signal ciphers apart. There was something about the hailing signals, something hidden in the weave of their code…

The cipher cracked open.

She blinked, suddenly terrified. She was trapped, crammed into a shell of soft meat joined to weak metals. She could not feel the void on her outer layer. She could not feel the beat pulse of her plasma core. She began to panic. She could not move. She did not understand what had happened to her. Her flesh shell was quivering. She did not understand why. She–

Carmenta gasped and staggered on the hoist platform. A ripple of sparks spiralled up the bundle of cables that linked her with the Titan Child. For a second, she could hear nothing but the panicked chatter of machines roaring to life in a disorganised spasm. Lights flickered on and off in the hold. The hull creaked. Somewhere in the ship, power began to flood sleeping systems.

‘What’s happening?’ Ahriman was on his feet. Carmenta blurted static-filled machine code, feeling the sharp sounds grate in her still-human throat. She was swaying, her mechadendrites grabbing blindly at the air. Ahriman vaulted onto the hoist platform. One of the metal tentacles snapped at him but he batted it away with a thought.

‘What–’ he began.

‘The ship,’ said Carmenta. ‘It is afraid, it’s trying to get ready to fight or run.’ The lights above them were strobing faster and faster, like a rising heartbeat. ‘The ship that is coming…’ She felt the world sway around her. ‘It’s not just an Imperial ship. It is the Inquisition.’

‘Multiple energy blooms,’ blurted a servitor wired into the sensor systems. ‘Full threat alert initiated.’ Iobel heard the words, and was already clamping her helm over her head. Red light filled the command nave of the Lord of Mankind. Blast doors were dropping over the exits. A static charge filled the air as a null field activated. Iobel felt a wave of nausea as the field smothered her psychic sense.

‘A trap,’ hissed Malkira from beside her. A cyber-cherub with wings of beaten copper lowered a dome-shaped helm over the crone’s head. It locked in place with a hiss of air.

‘We don’t know that yet,’ said Erionas, his voice flat calm. ‘There are other possibilities.’

‘Target energy flow fluctuating,’ called a servitor. ‘Target shields sporadically active. Engines firing.’

A silver-coated servo-skull drifted over Iobel’s shoulder. It held a boltgun in calliper hands. Iobel reached out and took the weapon, feeling the targeting display inside her helm come alive as she touched the gold-worked casing.

‘If it is not a trap, what other explanation could there be?’ she asked, glancing at Erionas.

‘Target vessel firing weapons,’ said the servitor.

‘Increasingly unlikely ones,’ said Erionas. His eyes opened, two bright spheres of glass gazing out at the red-lit chamber. ‘All weapons prepare to fire.’

Ahriman felt the hull shake. Munitions impacts, he judged. He turned to Carmenta. She was twitching, trying to stand as sparks ran over her black robes.

‘How far out is the enemy ship?’

‘I can’t tell,’ she gasped.

‘You must. How far?’

‘They have yet to reach optimal firing distance.’

He nodded. It was as he guessed and it was not good. They were supposed to be closer, much, much closer.

‘Get control of this ship,’ he snarled, and turned to Astraeos. ‘Astraeos, Kadin, here.’ He was reaching into Astraeos’s mind even as he stepped to the deck.

+Ascend,+ he sent, as his own consciousness climbed to perfect focus. He felt Astraeos’s thoughts resonate with his own. He began to loop his thoughts, sending separate patterns spinning through his mind like pinwheels, each gathering power. The design etched into the floor began to glow, fire-orange light radiating from where they stood at its centre. The power in his mind called to the etched symbols, and they answered him. He felt the swelling power roar with hunger that he alone could not feed.

+Now,+ he sent to Astraeos, and raised his hands. His mind touched Astraeos’s consciousness and linked to it.

It was like standing at the site of a lightning strike. Around them the Titan Child vanished, and Ahriman’s mind soared across space like a burning comet.

‘Accelerate. Maintain fire,’ called Erionas, his voice raised over the babble of machines and voices. ‘Burn it to nothing.’ Iobel watched the crew respond. Her throne and the deck beneath it were shaking in time with the recoil of hundreds of guns.

‘Target impacts are good,’ purred Erionas. Iobel could tell he was watching the direct gunnery dataflow. ‘We will need to be closer to finish her off, but annihilation will be complete.’

‘So sure?’ said Malkira, the speaker-grille of her helm robbing her voice of none of its scorn.

‘Yes,’ said Erionas. ‘We will have virtually destroyed them before they are in effective range.’

Iobel found herself nodding, but not because of the words. Her skin felt taut. A sour taste of metal ran over her tongue. There was something wrong, she could feel it. On her chest, the chronotrap’s cogs began to whirl faster.

They should have turned and left the wreck to its fate, they should have kept course for Cadia. They should…

She stopped her thoughts. Her eyes were closed, her breath and pulse still. She let her perceptions settle, trying to see the pattern in the whirl of emotion and sensations. On the Lord of Mankind, she alone was a psyker. Her ability was low grade, barely a functioning talent, but in that moment she knew that something was very, very wrong. It was like a building wave of pressure rolling in front of a storm.

‘Something is coming.’ Her voice was cold, and only she heard the tremble at its root.

‘What–’ began Erionas, but at that moment Iobel felt something slam into her mind with the force of a tidal wave. Around the bridge, machines, servitors and people were yelling. Every chronotrap across the ship began to hiss as their cogs spun to a blur.

Astraeos could still see even with his eyes closed. He could see Ahriman stood to his right, his arms outstretched, his physical form lost in a white blaze of light. He could see Kadin, his face coldly impassive. Ahriman spoke another phrase, and the world became a shape with too many dimensions that spun away like a leaf caught on the wind. The deck beneath their feet was gone, though he could still feel it. Stars surrounded them. Astraeos did not need to look at Ahriman to see him; the sorcerer’s mind was burning like a sun, sucking in all other light, growing brighter and brighter. The stars were turning, whirling to broken rainbows against the void. Only the three of them remained fixed, only they were still, everything else was movement. They were skimming beneath the void, looking out at the stars like fish seeing clouds turn above the surface of the sea.

A vast shape loomed suddenly in front of them. It was a ship, jagged, stardust-pitted, a black knife cutting through the void beyond the veil of swirling stars. Fire surrounded it, streaking from its crenellated flanks. They dived towards it. He felt something shatter around them, as if they had broken through a pane of glass. They were inside the ship. He could see shapes around him. They were translucent, glass-spun outlines of walls, doors, and pipework. Then reality snapped into place with a roar of sirens and the sound of tearing metal.

XIV
TAKEN

Silvanus woke from his drug coma with a gasp. His mundane eyes opened to the flash of warning lights. The chair enclosing his body shook as his back arched, and his fingers raked at the black leather. He vomited, heaving mucus from his empty stomach. He could feel the awakening drugs grating through his body, flushing away his dreams in a chemical rush. His heart was hammering in a broken rhythm.

He scrambled up, pulling needle-tipped tubes from his body. Liquid dribbled from the needle marks as he moved. He could not see properly, the emergency awakening still fogging his eyes, but that did not matter. All that mattered was reaching the observation cupola. They were in a full emergency: that was the only reason he would have been woken in such a brutal manner. It meant that there was an incursion within the ship, or a primary level threat. He needed to be able to steer a course should the ship have to translate to the warp.

He tried to run. His legs skidded out from underneath him, and the cold deck came up to meet him hard. The air went out of his lungs. He gasped, lying on the floor.

You’re a fool, Sil, he thought to himself. He came up onto his knees, and he felt the need to throw up again. A fool for thinking this was a good idea, and a fool for agreeing. After a moment of trying to stop the world spinning, he did vomit.

In the corner of the chamber, the hulking shape of his warden clanked forwards. Silvanus looked up at its machine gaze, and tried a grin.

The warden stopped above him, looking down with a cluster of glowing red lenses. Its body was a vaguely humanoid sculpture of green-lacquered armour plates. Somewhere within its metal shell its lobotomised brain watched him. Its weapon-arms were hissing, fully charged and ready to fire. It was there to protect him, but it would also kill him if he ever showed a sign of corruption by the warp.

Silvanus reached a hand up towards the warden. An articulated limb snapped out of its side, revealing a multi-faceted scanning lens. A sensor ray swept over Silvanus’s naked body; he felt its touch as a static tickle inside his skin. Its scan complete, the warden took a heavy step back, leaving Silvanus on the floor, hand still weakly raised.

‘Good to see you too,’ said Silvanus.

He paused, took another breath, and finally managed to stand up. His head felt like an explosion had gone off in his skull. He swayed, glad that there were no mirrors in his chamber; something told him that his current state would not have had a positive effect on his appearance.

He was tall, like all his bloodline, and unusually thickset, which only meant that he had slightly more flesh than a skeleton. Powder-white skin and scarlet eyes completed the overall aesthetic. Besides a few tubes hanging from needles still embedded in his flesh, the only thing he wore was a bandana of black silk and silver thread. The strip of fabric wound across his forehead, its ends hanging down between his shoulders. Beneath the thick silk, his third eye stared out blindly at the physical world.

Muttering low curses at past decisions, Silvanus pulled a blue silk robe over his head. The fabric stuck to wet patches of drying blood and injection medium. A smell of flowers was thick in his nose, and he could taste strange, metallic flavours on his tongue, another consequence of a shock awakening. They kept him in a drug coma when he was not navigating, or preparing to navigate. It was a safety measure, one among many designed to minimise the risk of sending a ship into the Eye. Silvanus had laughed when they had told him, but they had not seen the joke.

He limped towards a door of black metal on the far side of the chamber. A golden eye sat in the heart of a rayed sun of orange topaz at the door’s centre. He raised his left hand as he approached the door. A luminous sun and eye emblem bloomed across his palm, and the door split down the middle.

Beyond was a lift, its walls lined with black stone. Silvanus stepped in and paused while the warden clanked through the door behind him. A second later the door sealed, and the lift shot upwards. As he heard the chains pull them towards the observatory high on the spine of the Lord of Mankind, Silvanus Yeshar, Navigator Primus of House Yeshar, wondered what had triggered the alert which had woken him. After a moment of consideration, he decided he really did not want to know.

Ahriman felt the shockwave as the Imperial ship’s psychic protection broke. Fragments of invisible barriers spun in the warp like shattered crystal. Across the ship, null field generators burnt out and silver wards melted to run down walls in white hot tears. His head was reeling, filled with images of racing stars. They had reached the objective, the translocation ritual had worked, but they would die now, in the space of a handful of heartbeats, if he failed in this moment.

He closed his eyes, and let all thoughts fall away. His mind was clear. The pulse of blood through his body was an ocean surge, low and controlled. He could feel his muscles relax, and his armour mimicked them. Above it all, he floated, a mind without thought, with infinite choice and unfixed possibility. He felt sensations run through his flesh, tugging at his attention, screaming to let them rule his mind and body. He held still. Half-formed thoughts passed through him like clouds across a blue sky. He let them pass.

His heart beat once.

He had not done this in a long time. Even when Tolbek had come for him, he had fought from instinct. This, though, this would be different.

He let the sensations of his physical self return fully. His mind searched for imbalance in his body chemistry. He had to have balance. To enter the mind of battle everything needed to be in balance. He was crouched on one knee, he realised: his head bent as if in prayer, his fingertips resting on the floor.

He stood, and opened his eyes.

Debris was still falling around him. He could see torn slivers of metal spinning slowly amongst shreds of burning parchment. The walls had buckled outwards as if hit by a Titan’s fist, and they were glowing with heat. Beside him, Astraeos was still straightening, his hand moving to the hilt of his sword. Kadin was a pace further away, standing just as he had been in the hold of the Titan Child. Red light covered them, caught in the moment before it strobed off and blinked back. A fog half filled the roof, venting from ducts in the ceiling. He could sense the toxins in the fog, the potential for death waiting in each particle. At their backs was darkness, in front of them a door of riveted metal. A yellowed skull stared at Ahriman from the centre of a tri-barred ‘I’ worked into the door in black marble. He did not recognise the symbol.

His hearts beat again.

Thoughts, reasoning and logic slotted back into place like cogs in clockwork. This was what it was to be a Magister Templi of the Thousand Sons, this was what the Imperium had never grasped; power was nothing without balance. Reason to balance force, will to balance passion, coldness to balance fury.

Ahriman sensed Astraeos reaching into the warp, drawing power to him like a choking man gulping air. Foolish, rash, unbalanced. The warp submitted to will, but to the balanced mind and body it gave the power to soar. Ahriman waited. He was ready, his mind rooted, its processes running with perfect precision. He expanded his awareness. There were people coming for them; they were running down the corridor on the other side of the door.

Kadin had taken a stride, the pistons of his augmetic legs bunching in place of muscle. The door in front of them remained shut.

Ahriman selected his patterns of thought and formulae, placing them within the blank sheet of his mind like a surgeon arranging razors on a silver tray.

He was ready.

His hearts beat once.

Kadin’s step crashed down. Red light strobed across Ahriman as he flicked out a telepathic command.

+Down.+

Astraeos ducked. Kadin twisted, trying to shrug the command off even as he crashed into the passage wall.

Fire sprang from Ahriman’s eyes. The air roared as it cooked. The white-hot beam struck the door and bored through it like a spear through fat. Liquid metal sprayed out in a molten flower. The hole in the door widened, rippling outwards, glowing brighter and brighter.

Ahriman could feel the presence of minds beyond the door, fourteen still alive, one fading to nothing, ten already gone. His telekinetic blow hit the door and blew the remains out in a cone of molten metal rain. The troopers that had been crouching in the passage beyond vanished as the pressure wave lifted them from their feet and mashed them into the walls. Some further back held their nerve and began to fire. Shots clouded the glowing breach in the door.

Ahriman walked forwards. Cold light followed him, wrapping his body, spiralling around him as if in an invisible wind. The troopers kept firing as he stepped through the breach. Las-bolts and hard rounds flared as they met the cloak of light and began to spin, forming an accelerating column. Ahriman kept walking, the cyclone turning around him sucking up debris from the floor; swelling, turning faster and faster, beginning to glow as the fragments abraded to sand. Lightning crackled across its surface. Ahriman could feel his mind holding every particle as it flew.

He reached the door. A wall of fire rose to meet him. He released the cyclone and it tore forwards.

The storm broke over the troopers and tore them into fragments of bone and tatters of flesh. It swept on, scraping the passage walls to shining metal, and smearing everything with a wet red film. Ahriman walked in its wake, his eyes closed as his mind leapt ahead, running under the skin of the ship, sensing and hunting like a loosed hound.

Iobel pulled herself to her feet. There was blood smeared across the inside of her helmet. She reached up and yanked it off.

‘Emergency protocol–’ protested Malkira as Iobel took a breath. The air of the command chamber stank of burning wiring and overheating machines. Iobel tasted blood on her lips. Her head felt as if something were trying to crack it open. The chronotrap on her chest was whining, its cogs spinning faster than she could see.

‘Shut up,’ she said, and spat onto the floor. Malkira went still. Unable to see her face, Iobel wondered if the old crone had died of shock.

‘We have a secondary grade incursion in progress,’ said Erionas, the monotone of his voice cracking.

‘Primary,’ said Iobel. Somewhere inside her chest something clicked wetly. She coughed and tasted iron and acid on her tongue. She had glimpsed something in the hammerblow moment when the incursion began. It lingered in her perception like a bruise. An impression of the soul that had broken their psychic defences like a hand punching spun sugar. Calm – behind the power, the mind that guided the destruction had been calm. ‘It’s a primary grade incursion.’

‘How can you be sure?’ asked Malkira.

‘Because I am the only psyker on this ship.’ She looked at each of the other inquisitors in turn. Beneath her feet, the deck shook in time with distant macro-cannon fire. ‘Because I felt what just happened. It’s him; he knows what we have seen. He has come for us.’

Ahriman’s mind spun through the Lord of Mankind. This was his thought form, the shape of his mind and soul projected into the warp. He was still standing in the dark corridor, but his mind was a ghostly bird in flight. His senses skimmed down tunnels, passing through metal, ramming through warded doors. Images and sensations flicked past his mind: the smell of oil, the clang of feet on plated floors, the blare of alarms. He noted each detail, building a map in his mind. He spread his awareness, thinning it to the barest layer of perception and instinct. Physical substance faded to a whisper-thin impression, minds became candles flickering in a fog of matter. As he soared, he felt the crystalline shapes of psychic wards and the empty domes of null fields. He spun past them, squeezing through gaps like water through cracked glass.

There: a mind shaped like no other on the ship. It was twisted, like a tree trained to grow in a particular shape. He could feel the lines of its altered mental architecture: the consciousness of a Navigator.

Ahriman’s mind snapped back into his physical self. The wide junction in front of him was red and slick with meat and chewed fragments of armour. Above them, a snowflake formation of cogs whirled and spun in the domed ceiling. There was clockwork everywhere, thousands of devices great and small, slicing through time in billions of ticks, as if terrified of losing an unmeasured moment. The entire ship was built on paranoia, laced with poorly understood defences. It made him want to smile.

Kadin was working his way through a knot of crimson-clad troopers. Astraeos was watching his brother, his glowing force sword bright in his hand, the fresh blue lacquer of his armour already scarred, burned and spattered with a sticky red film. Ahriman could not see his face, but coldness radiated from the Librarian’s mind. He could not interpret what it meant and he had not time to read more deeply. He reached into Astraeos’s mind and showed him the path to the Navigator.

+Go,+ he sent to Astraeos. +Kadin will protect me. Be swift.+

Astraeos nodded and made for a passage that sloped up towards the apex of the ship’s spine. Ahriman watched him go. In his mind he reached back, feeling for the link to the ritual circle inscribed on the deck of the Titan Child’s hold. It was there, waiting at the edge of his consciousness, a thread to lead them back through the dark. He rose into the air, lightning blazing around him as telekinetic hands cradled him. The gate back through the aether opened like an eye into blackness. It felt like fire, like ice, like the kiss of steel and the taste of dust on desert air.

+Be swift,+ he sent again. +I cannot hold the way back open for long.+

Silvanus came to his feet in a single movement. His heart thudded in his chest. He turned around, his hands raised as if to ward off a blow.

Nothing.

To the side of the chamber, his warden pivoted its torso section, looking at him with questioning crystal eyes. Silvanus breathed hard and felt the terror still running through him. There was nothing there. The ocular chamber was as it had been when he had begun his meditation, the sounds of the ship muffled by the thick blue fabric that covered the floor and crept up the walls. It was quiet except for the sound of his ragged breaths.

He shook his head and rubbed a hand across the fabric covering his third eye. It was aching. He had been lying on the velvet-covered pallet at the chamber’s centre, allowing his mind to slip into the hypnotic awareness required before navigation. He had been visualising, preparing his mind for the perception of the warp. Then something had moved across his mind, blotting out his thoughts like a vast winged shape passing in front of the sun, and he found himself standing, adrenaline shaking through his veins.

He looked around again, each sense straining for some indication that he might have imagined it. His eyes twitched over every detail: the silver shutters closed over the dome above, the gems sewn into every dimple in the upholstered floor, the polished wood covering the door that led to the lift shaft. Everything was as it was, as it should be.

The insistent beat of his heart began to slow. He took a breath, looked back at the warden’s patiently waiting gaze.

‘You did not notice anything?’ The guardian servitor tilted its head then rotated its gaze away. ‘Thought not.’

The sound of rending metal rang through the chamber. Silvanus froze. The sound came again, echoing like the ringing of a broken bell. He stared towards the doors. Had he seen them tremble? On the other side of the chamber the warden unfolded, growing taller as its leg pistons extended. Its armour plates shifted to increase its bulk. It trained its weapons on the lift door and Silvanus could see the pulse of power in their charge coils. There was a smell of ionising air.

‘Retreat. Behind. My. Position,’ said the warden in a dead machine voice. Silvanus realised it was the first time he had heard it speak. He nodded and began to move.

He took one step and felt the cushioned floor shake beneath him. Silvanus had just time to dive to the ground before the door vanished in a scream of vaporising wood and exploding steel. Dust and smoke flooded the chamber. Silvanus hit the floor and curled into a ball. He could not hear, everything was a dull roar. The warden fired, beams of energy carving through the smoke.

A shape appeared out of the fog. It was huge, a blunt outline of armour. The warden twisted, fired and fired again before Silvanus could close his eyes. Blue stars of energy flew across his vision, burning into his retinas. The armoured figure raised a hand. The beams of energy hit a wall of golden light, and the room vanished in a sheet of white brilliance. Silvanus caught a glimpse of a blunt-snouted helm and gleaming blue armour before his eyes shut.

A Space Marine. A Librarian. As he opened his eyes to the storm of light and fury, he realised that his chances of surviving were minimal.

The warden was firing again, shifting position in a blur of piston-driven limbs. More bolts of energy burned through the fog from its weapons. The Librarian pivoted, his form blurring with speed. The energy beams never hit him, but began to orbit him in neon lines. The warden shifted, armour plates redistributing over its body as its weapons vented heat.

The Librarian halted. The captured bolts of energy flicked out as a trailing whip of starlight. The warden was moving, but not fast enough. The bolts of energy struck its central torso and burned into its core. It stood, twitching for an instant, weapons trying to rise, liquid metal spraying down its chest. Then it fell, with a sound of unwinding gears. The Librarian began to pace forwards.

The warden pushed itself up and leapt forwards. Half dead, it was still fast. It was on the Librarian before he could move, pitching him from his feet. The two fell together. Metal screeched on ceramite. The warden tried to bring a weapon to bear, but the Librarian’s hand clamped around its barrel. Silvanus could see the pistons in the warden’s arm juddering with force. Oil was dribbling to the floor from ruptured hydraulic feeds.

The Librarian’s arm began to bend, and the muzzle of the warden’s weapon began to glow. The Librarian grunted. Arcs of indigo light wormed across his armour, spreading frost in their wake. The warden lifted into the air, its limbs struggling against invisible bonds. There was a storm reek in the air, a scent of electricity and cold iron. The Librarian came to his feet in a single movement and his sword came up with him. Its edge looked like sunlight caught in fractured glass.

The warden’s head twisted around, its machine eyes locking on Silvanus. It began to make a sound that might have been the start of a word. The sword cut it in two.

It hung in the air for a second, its limbs suddenly still, blood and oil pouring to the floor. Then it fell. The oil soaking the fabric-covered floor began to burn. The Librarian walked forwards through the spreading flame.

Oh, God-Emperor, thought Silvanus. He could see scorch marks spreading up the Librarian’s greaves. He had seen Space Marines before, had navigated ships in warfleets accompanying many Chapters. He was not one of the masses who only knew of the Adeptus Astartes through stories. That knowledge was no comfort.

The Librarian stopped, his green eyes fixed on Silvanus. His sword smoked with ghost energy. Gold-etched serpents coiled down its length, and hounds snarled from the crossguard. Silvanus could not take his eyes off the blade. The Librarian gave a low growl, the sound rolling from his speaker-grille like distant thunder. After a second, Silvanus realised that the sound was a humourless laugh.

‘You will live, Navigator,’ the Space Marine said as he reached down and pulled Silvanus from the floor.

‘Navigator spire breached,’ Erionas shouted an instant before a servitor echoed his words.

‘We are dead,’ said Iobel, but Erionas was not listening. His shining eyes were twitching as if in a deep dream, reading fast flows of data. ‘He will kill what we know.’

‘It is not him,’ spat Malkira. ‘It cannot be. How can he be here?’

‘The warden is no longer active,’ said Erionas. ‘We must presume the Navigator is lost.’

‘Irrelevant,’ said Malkira. ‘We are running in to Cadia in realspace. The loss of the Navigator is not a primary threat.’

‘And if we need to jump to the warp?’ Iobel did not look at the other two inquisitors. Her eyes were moving around the chamber. The Lord of Mankind was still firing on the enemy vessel, still closing for the kill. Gunnery officers and augur servitors called out changes in target aspect and firing pattern. Around them, others tried to track the progress of the incursion. That had not proved easy – it was moving with extreme aggression, demolishing opposition and breaking through containment measures. And all the while the chronotraps whirled out of sync, counting down the potential taint of each one of them.

So many uncertain outcomes, she thought. So many possibilities that end with us as just another dead ship drifting on the edge of the Eye. That represented something worse than damnation, or death; it represented failure. Slowly, she nodded once to herself and checked that her power mace was still clamped to her back. She picked up the boltgun from where it lay on the arm of her throne and racked the arming slide. She had watched the making of each of the shells in its clip. Nine thousand verses of detestation covered each casing in lettering finer than a strand of hair. Each round was tipped by Terran smelted silver and filled with the dust produced by the Golden Throne. She began to walk towards the chamber doors.

‘You must not leave. We are in lockdown protocol,’ Malkira’s voice blurted out behind her.

‘What are you doing?’ called Erionas.

‘I am going to try and kill what has come for us,’ she called without looking back. While I still have hope that it is possible, she thought to herself. She turned to look back at her enthroned and unmoving peers. Her eyes moved to the red-robed figures crouched at the side of each throne. ‘I will take the seraphs,’ she said.

Malkira was shaking her head. Iobel could feel the crone’s anger rising, tickling at the edges of her psychic senses. Erionas remained still, and then nodded once.

‘Jehoel,’ he said. The creature beside his throne unfolded. It moved with a docile slowness, but she could see the impression of muscles bunching under the fabric. It stood still, waiting.

‘Midrash,’ said Iobel, and a second hunched figure stood from beside her empty throne. The lump of its head turned within its cowl to look at her.

Iobel looked back to Malkira. The crone reached up and unfastened her helm. She looked at Iobel with her true eyes, and then tapped the chronotrap on her chest.

‘We are almost out of time. Much longer within the Eye and we cannot return.’

Iobel nodded.

Malkira continued to gaze at her, and then her lips cracked over her silver teeth. ‘Arvenus,’ she said. The figure beside her throne stood.

Iobel turned and walked to the chamber’s sealed door. In her wake the hooded figures followed.

+Hurry.+ Ahriman’s thought broke into Astraeos’s mind with raw urgency. He did not bother to reply but began to run faster. The Navigator hung from his left hand, half conscious, moaning in pain, his legs dragging in his wake. Astraeos kept moving. It did not matter if the Navigator was in pain. All that mattered was that he was alive.

Astraeos still had his sword drawn, its edge lit with a fragment of his will. He could smell battle in his mind, the scent of screams and panic getting stronger with each step. He turned a corner and the light and sound of battle broke over him. Bodies lay in wet red heaps. Chunks of meat lay in black pools which reflected the flash of gunfire. Above it all, Ahriman floated. The warp tunnel back to the Titan Child hung beneath Ahriman, a frozen lightning bolt opening wide like a mouth. Beyond the gate’s opening, colours spiralled into an impossible distance. Acid sweat oozed across his skin as he looked at it.

Above him, the cogwork set into the ceiling broke. Cogs the size of tank wheels fell, glowing at their edges. He realised he had stopped moving. Somewhere, at the edge of his sight, he saw Kadin standing, bloody and steaming. The screams and shouts of the fight rolling around Kadin sounded dull, as if they had passed through water. On the floor, Silvanus moaned and stirred as if in an unpleasant dream. Astraeos could not take his eyes off the warp tunnel as it opened. Slowly, as if wading through sand, he began to drag the Navigator forwards.

He was halfway to the warp tunnel when the seraphs came out of the dark with a crackle of lightning and metal.

‘Mecrurias!’ Iobel spoke the word of activation as she ran. Behind her, the three hooded figures that followed her leapt forwards. Beneath their hoods, mouths opened in tongueless roars. Drug injectors dumped aggression and reaction boosters into their blood. Veins stood out across their skin. Their red robes burned from their bodies as their power lashes activated. Juddering with speed, they began to run. After five paces they had overtaken Iobel. As their null limiters shut down, Iobel had to suppress the instinct to run in the opposite direction.

The seraphs glowed in the warp-tainted air, the warding circuits in their skin crawling with letters and symbols from dead tongues. They had once been ordinary people, taken by the Black Ships from worlds where they were shunned. Then the Inquisition had taken them and forged them to a new purpose. All their thoughts were transformed into murderous rage. Held by pacifier helms, they became their true selves only when activated by the speaking of ritual words. The Ecclesiarchy called such a process arco-flagellation, but the seraphs were creations of a higher order. Each was a pariah, a soul with no soul, a creature that cast no shadow in the warp, untouchable by its powers. As they ran through the passage opening, their numbing presence hit the gathering vortex of warp energy like a sea tide meeting lava.

Ahriman felt the presence of the seraphs, and his will slipped. His eyes snapped open. The rainbow light of the warp lit the junction chamber in front of him. At his back he could feel the warp tunnel shrink, its existence collapsing as the seraphs numbed his mind. He could see the Titan Child’s hold just beyond the opening, so close, yet drifting further away. Multi-coloured lightning arced through the air, crawling across the heaped corpses and bronze walls. Astraeos was standing halfway across the chamber, a limp figure in a soiled blue robe hanging from his fist.

+Go. Through. Now,+ he sent, and with every word he felt his will slip and the warp tunnel begin to close. The seraphs were bounding closer, their hunched shapes blurred by shadow in Ahriman’s eyes. Astraeos began to move, lifting the Navigator like a sack. The seraphs’ blankness howled in Ahriman’s mind. They were black holes sucking his reality into a shrieking silence. Where his mind should have seen the flame of their souls, all he saw was an abyss. He felt like he was suffocating, as if the air were being pulled from his lungs. He saw a human female in flame-coloured armour.

Astraeos was a pace away from the gate. He paused, raised his sword and sent a fork of lightning at the seraphs. It vanished in mid-air even as it arced from the sword’s tip. Ahriman felt the power drain away like water poured on sand. Astraeos paused, and his sword tip wavered and dipped.

+Go!+ screamed Ahriman. Astraeos turned and ran through the gate. Ahriman looked up as the lead seraph bounded over a heap of corpses, its movements juddering like a jammed pict feed. He could see the drool hanging from its rotting teeth, and the veins twitching in its taut muscles. It leapt, its legs curling underneath it, its flail-tipped arms raised above its head. Ahriman stared – he could not move, he was frozen, numb.

A huge shape hit the seraph in mid-leap. The seraph twisted, power crackling over its flails. Kadin landed on top of it, and his chainsword cut it in two before it could rise. Blood formed a mask of rubies on his pale face. He turned, his chainsword rising, as the second seraph brought its flails down. The power whips wrapped around the blade, licking it with lightning. For an instant the teeth of the chainsword tried to turn, and then the blade shattered. Ahriman saw Kadin fall, his face a ruin of punctured meat. He gripped the seraph as he collapsed, a metal hand clamped around its throat.

The third seraph was still bounding towards Ahriman, its metal-muzzled face low to the bloody deck, its muscles tensing to leap the final metres. He felt the warp tunnel shrink. His skin was cold, his head pounding in rhythm with his hearts. Then he saw movement behind the seraph.

The human’s face was pale, her skin the colour of snowfall. Orange and black armour encased her slender form. He could see the silver-headed pins holding the red blaze of her hair above her head. She was looking at him, directly at him. Her eyes were blue. He felt an echo in that gaze, a spark of something that cut through the numbing fog of the seraphs. Recognition, fear, triumph, a tumbling of half-formed memories that flared from her mind. She raised a boltgun and his eyes met its dead gaze.

The third seraph leapt.

The gate held open at his back crumpled.

Three paces away Kadin came to his feet, roaring, the head of a seraph in his hand.

The human woman fired.

Ahriman saw the gun flare, felt his mind slide off the shell as it flew through the air.

Kadin’s shoulder hit him in the chest.

Ahriman fell, and did not hit the ground.

XV
SECRETS

Voices came out of the night. Ahriman thought he recognised some of them, but were they voices or were they thoughts? Were they his thoughts?

‘We are taking fire…’

+Oh God-Emperor, oh holy God–+

‘He is bleeding.’

Why did she know me? How could she recognise me? What did she recognise?

+Turn by three-quarters. Grid 657 through 754, accelerate.+

‘Oh God-Emperor.’

‘Be silent.’

Fate has come for you, Ahriman.

+I am going to die. Oh Throne, oh Throne, oh Throne…+

‘Mistress Carmenta?’

I fell to my own pride.

‘He is not conscious.’

+Route power through conduit alpha 101721.+

‘That was a hit. They are coming after us.’

+Shield failure… cannot recharge… shield failure...+

It was a mistake. I am sorry. We should never have begun. I am sorry, brother.

‘… conscious…’

+…there is no way out from this…+

‘Jump to the warp.’

Apollonia. Because of Apollonia.

‘There are fragments inside the wound.’

No, it is one of the nine. One of the Fifteenth. A son of Magnus. The dreams of enslaved worlds scream his name.

‘If you do not guide us we all die here.’

+Throne, I want to live–+

‘All right.’

‘Jump to warp. Do it now.’

…going to die… jump… collate…. blood loss… god… mistress… end it now… jump–

White. Bright white; the white of sunlight on unwritten paper.

Everything was still. He looked down at his hand. It was bare. He flexed his fingers. They moved, but he felt nothing. Everything was quiet; the whisper of thoughts on the edge of perception, the shifting surge of the warp in his mind, the noise of sensation, all of it was gone.

I am cut off, he realised. I am trapped somewhere inside myself. Something has made parts of my brain and body shut down.

There had been a gunshot. He remembered the muzzle flash, and the feeling of falling backwards through the collapsing warp tunnel.

Yes, he realised. The shell hit me. It had found the weak armour under his arm and punched into his torso. An instant later Kadin had pitched him backwards into the warp tunnel.

There had been no pain, just a sudden numbness as his body shut down. Then there had been a second feeling, a feeling of being wrapped in deaf oblivion. Something was in his blood, in his body, surging around his veins with every heartbeat. It had cut his connection to the warp. The voices, they had been the last vanishing calls out of the dark as night fell. He knew all this with detached certainty.

He looked around. The whiteness had been complete, but now a checked stone floor extended away to the horizon. He turned his head again. A long corridor met his eyes. He could see sunlight streaming in through arched windows.

This is my memory palace, he realised. My mind is retreating to the one thing that exists wholly within itself.

Slowly he stood, and took a step down the corridor. There were no doors, just blank smooth stone. He kept walking.

You may be dying, he thought. Do you even know how long you have been here?

The corridor extended without ending. He turned and started to walk the other way, and stopped.

Two doors stood on opposite sides of the corridor. He recognised only one of them. The door on his right was small, wooden and carved with a flock of birds rising towards the sun. It was an old door, one of the first he had placed in his memory palace, and he had not opened it since. He took a step towards it then hesitated, and looked over his shoulder.

The second door was obsidian, polished to a mirror surface, without handle or hinges. He had never seen it before.

What is beyond here?

He stepped closer and saw his reflection slide across the oil-black surface. His hand rose almost without his realising it, his fingers extending to touch the black stone. He froze. The reflection had gone. In its place he saw the flash of a gunshot again, and the echo of light in the armoured woman’s eyes. His mind had leapt outwards as the shell had left the gun, like a hand scrabbling for dry land before sinking beneath the waves. Her mind had been open, the terror and triumph of the moment leaving her unshielded. He had touched her thoughts as the bolt shell hit him, and seen something of the secrets she kept.

This is a door of secrets. His hand moved forwards, then paused again. He looked down the corridor in both directions. There were no other doors except the obsidian door and the small door of carved wood.

He paused for a long moment. Then he pushed open the black door, and saw what the inquisitors had found in the Eye of Terror.

Ahriman’s pupils went wide in his eyes. He gasped. A fresh wash of blood gushed over his lips. Carmenta froze, her mechadendrites poised over the open wound.

‘Don’t move,’ she said, and saw his eyes focus on her. He stopped moving. She tried to relax, to focus on the movement of the blades and callipers inside the wound. There were pieces of shrapnel still inside his chest. She had been teasing them out of the torn flesh for hours. Slowly she withdrew a mechadendrite, a sharp sliver of blood-slick silver held between its pincers. Ahriman’s eyes focused on the fragment.

‘Where are we?’ he croaked.

‘Holding steady in realspace,’ said Astraeos from behind her. She saw Ahriman’s eyes refocus. He nodded, and his eyes pinched shut as if at sudden pain. His skin was clammy and its colour had bled away to a cold grey.

He is dying, she thought. She turned and dropped the fragment into a glass cylinder. A dozen scraps of silver lay at the bottom. And perhaps that is best, came another voice in her head. He has led us to the edge of ruin again and again. Sooner or later he will lead us too far and we will fall.

‘I will see the Navigator,’ said Ahriman, and began to push himself off the polished metal slab. Tubes that had been sucking the blood from his open wound came loose and began to splutter red droplets over his bare skin. Ahriman winced, then his face hardened. ‘My armour,’ he said, his mouth barely opening. ‘Bring it to me.’

‘There are still fragments in the wound,’ said Carmenta. Ahriman slowly turned his eyes on her.

‘I am aware of that.’ A bead of blood formed at the corner of his lips. ‘I can feel them. They are like needles in my mind. You won’t be able to remove them all. Two of them are hooked into the flesh next to my heart.’ He breathed hard. ‘Seal the wound.’

‘If I don’t get them out…’ she began.

‘They may kill me, but not for a while, and I need that time.’ He glanced from Astraeos to Carmenta. ‘Seal it, and then bring me my armour and the Navigator. We have much to prepare.’

After a long moment, she nodded and began to cauterise the wound. The smell of charring flesh caught in her throat as it rose from her tools.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked, as she stapled the lips of the wound closed.

‘Where we have always been going: to my brother. To Amon.’

Ahriman’s eyes were suddenly bright, and Carmenta felt more terrified than she had in all her years of flight. Astraeos did not move, but she could feel him waiting.

‘After all that has…’ began Astraeos.

‘The ship we took the Navigator from was no wandering pilgrim. It had gone into the Eye, looking for secrets. Their mystics had read portents of a power rising in the Eye, gathering forces to it.’ Ahriman paused and Carmenta could see something briefly replace the pain in his eyes.

‘How can you know this?’ said Carmenta before she could stop herself.

‘I saw it in the mind of the one that shot me.’ Ahriman moved his right hand to touch the lips of the wound in his side. His fingers came up red. He stared at his own blood.

‘What did they find?’ asked Astraeos quietly.

‘They found the ashes of a war.’

Astraeos frowned.

‘There is always war within the Eye. You have told me this yourself: eternal war for power, for resources.’

‘This was not that type of war, it was a war of annihilation.’ Ahriman looked back up, his eyes unfocused. ‘Scars cut deep into the warp itself. Vortices of destruction that scream the names of those who created them. Daemons scavenging the remains of hell worlds cracked open like soft fruit. All just the by-blows of one battle.’

‘What battle?’

Ahriman’s face looked like a mask of dead grey skin.

‘The fall of the Planet of the Sorcerers. The final death of my Legion.’

‘This has happened?’ asked Astraeos carefully.

‘Not yet,’ Ahriman shook his head. ‘Time is not a single river in which we all float towards one end. It flows in many streams. Some flow fast, some slow. If you stand within your own stream you see only your own time, but within the warp, you can move between them. A ship may enter the warp and return before it left, or emerge after centuries that the crew have experienced as hours. Such things have happened. Within the Eye, the streams of time are broken and tangled: moments of futures and pasts crammed together in an unravelling knot.’

‘So it will happen,’ said Astraeos.

‘Perhaps.’

‘How could it not, if it has already happened in the future?’

‘Knowledge is power, knowledge changes everything. I know, and so that can change what happens now.’ Ahriman gave a smile that was as cold as snow. ‘I have never believed in fate.’

‘Amon,’ said Astraeos after a long pause. ‘This is the answer that you looked for. This is what Amon gathers for: to prepare for this war.’

Ahriman said nothing.

There is something he is not saying, thought Carmenta. Another secret he is holding close.

‘Prophecy,’ said Ahriman, his voice suddenly heavy with resignation. ‘All glimpses of the future are flawed. Believe them to mean one thing, and you are falling into a trap. Ignore them and they pull you back in. Prophecy has followed me since I could dream, and all of it has led to ruin.’

‘There are wars that we must run from,’ said Astraeos.

Ahriman shook his head. He looked older and more tired than Carmenta had ever seen him.

‘No. I will not bow to fate.’

Even if it kills you, thought Carmenta. Even if it brings ruin to all of us. Ahriman looked at her, and she wondered if he had heard her thoughts.

‘You cannot do this.’

The words hung in the air. For a second, Carmenta thought she had spoken without realising, but then Astraeos spoke again.

‘You cannot do this, Ahriman,’ he said. Carmenta looked at him. His face was as blank and fixed as stone. He shook his head and his armour purred as it followed the small movement.

Ahriman did not reply, but pulled himself to his feet. His eyes closed for a second and he swayed where he stood, then he steadied to complete stillness. To Carmenta, he suddenly looked like a bronzed statue, washed with drying blood. Slowly his eyes opened.

‘I must do this,’ said Ahriman softly. Astraeos walked away without another word. All Carmenta could look at was the blood slowly dripping from the edge of the metal slab.

The precise gap between loyalty to the Imperium and betrayal was not something Silvanus had considered before. He knew about the warp, of course; he knew about it as few others born in the Imperium ever would. The warp was his reason for existing, it gave him purpose and meaning. Without it, he was just a mutant with a third eye in the middle of his forehead. He knew how the warp could corrupt, about daemons and their thirst for the weakness of mortals. He had seen the reality behind the secrets as he gazed directly into the churning ocean of the warp’s heart. He had been tested by the Inquisition, and they had found what he already knew: that he had a mind that was unconventional, highly resilient, and difficult to tempt. What they had not considered was that Silvanus, while reckless, was not suicidal. Risks were calculations, gambles with at least a chance of coming out the other side. Faced with the certainty of death, he would rather stay alive. As he bowed before his new master, he reflected that this last quality was the breaking point of his loyalty to the Imperium.

‘Rise.’ The voice was deep and resonant. Silvanus obeyed and stood, trying not to grit his teeth as the bruises from his abduction sent sharp complaints up his nerves. The figure who stood above him was a Space Marine. Silvanus’s eyes skittered over the blue armour, noting the imperfections and battle damage hidden under the lacquer. He looked up and met blue eyes. He flinched. It happened before he could stop himself. They were bright blue, like sapphires catching sunlight. It was not the colour that surprised him, but their utter stillness.

‘I am Ahriman.’

Silvanus bowed his head again, in part so he could look away from those still eyes.

‘Silvanus…’ he began, but a low resonant chuckle spread through the small chamber.

‘I know you.’

Silvanus thought Ahriman was about to embellish the statement, but only silence followed. He had a sudden urge to shiver.

‘Lord…’

‘I am not a lord. Once perhaps, but not now.’

Another silence lengthened. Silvanus swallowed, and glanced at the floor. Sweat was prickling across his back, and the dusty robes they had given him suddenly felt unbearably itchy against his skin. He had the feeling that if he were to look up he would find that Ahriman’s blue eyes would not have moved.

‘I wish you to navigate this ship.’

‘I have already–’

‘I wish you to navigate it to a particular location.’

Silvanus waited, and then chanced a glance up. Ahriman had tilted his head to one side, his eyes still fixed, waiting. Silvanus noticed a small spot of dried blood at the corner of Ahriman’s mouth.

He bit his lip. This was the moment; if he would not do what Ahriman wished then he was of no use, and he had no doubt that once he was of no use he would die. A quickly silenced part of him found that this choice made him very angry. He smiled, realised it was a grimace, smiled wider and then realised that smiling at a Traitor Space Marine was like grinning at a feral beast.

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ nodded Silvanus. ‘Do you have navigational data for the location? Charts, rutters, puzzle cyphers?’

Ahriman slowly shook his head.

‘Then how, my lor…’ Silvanus coughed to mask the slip. ‘How can I navigate there?’

‘I have a path for you to follow,’ said Ahriman, and raised a hand. Silvanus flinched at the feeling of the armoured fingers on his scalp. An electrical prickle skittered over his skin. He suddenly felt that something very unpleasant was about to happen. He opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment the world vanished around him as the path poured into his mind.

It came in a cascade of light and sound. He heard music, and saw patterns form from golden threads of light. He smelt burning sugar, and heard whispers of voices fading in and out of hearing. It was like a nonsense song made out of every sensation. He felt it drag through his consciousness, pieces of imagery snagging like threads on thorns.

It lasted for a second. It lasted for an eternity. At some point he screamed.

Then it was done, and he found himself curled on the floor of his chamber, trembling. Above him Ahriman stared down, his eyes star-points of blue.

‘You see the path. You will take us there,’ said Ahriman.

Silvanus tried to speak, to say that he understood, but all he could do was nod.

XVI
GATHERING

From a distance, the gathering looked like a scattering of gems glinting on a velvet field. Only as the distance closed – slowly, ever so slowly – did the stars become the teardrop fires of plasma engines. There were dozens of craft, perhaps hundreds, all rotating around a single point. It was like watching the lights of a city from the night sky; but here, each building was a ship.

As they moved closer, light began to catch the edges of towers and turrets. At the centre was a ship larger than all the rest. Its hull was red iron and narrowed to a point like a spearhead. Minarets and crystalline domes hung from its belly, while a city of silver towers rose into the void from its back. It had known other names, but to Ahriman it would only ever be the Sycorax.

‘A lot of ships for a dead Legion,’ grunted Astraeos. Ahriman turned his eyes from the images. He was only half concentrating; the rest of his mind was revolving through a sequence of thought patterns, pushing power into the arrangement of circles and lines scratched by Carmenta’s servitors into every floor and wall of the ship. That, and shutting out the dull ache from the wound in his side.

‘I thought only a few of your gene-kin survived?’ said Astraeos with a shrug that radiated disgust burning just beneath the surface. It reminded Ahriman of Kadin.

‘Only a few of us did,’ said Ahriman carefully and turned his eyes back to the images floating across the pict screens. ‘Many remain at my father’s side.’ He saw the grainy image of a trident-like vessel, its hull glimmering as if encrusted in jewels, then flicked to another: a grand cruiser with a broad nose of battered iron, its hull the blue of midnight. ‘These are not all true kin of the Thousand Sons. Others have answered Amon’s call. Renegades and fragments of other Legions and Chapters.’

‘Do they know what Amon intends?’

Ahriman shook his head.

‘Then why do they answer his call?’

‘Power,’ breathed Ahriman, still picking out the ships of different warbands – some whose names he knew, many which he did not. ‘Power burns bright in these realms. These others are carrion hoping to ride on the fires of Amon’s ascent. They do not care what that end is, only that they can feed on the warmth while it lasts.’

‘Look, more come,’ said Astraeos, nodding to a screen that had flared with static and then showed an image of two long-prowed ships sliding from the warp. Multi-coloured energy hung from them as the wound in the black sheet of stars closed behind them. Astraeos glanced again at Ahriman.

‘You are sure they will not detect our presence?’

Ahriman nodded but did not look up. Soon, Carmenta would cut the power throughout the ship. The engines would go cold and they would drift towards the gathering on momentum alone, as black and cold as the void. While the ice clotted in the outer holds, Ahriman’s mind would keep turning, the formulae in his consciousness feeding the incantation that hid the presence of the ship from other minds. Scratched into the bones of the ship, the Sign of Thothmes had been expanded far beyond its original purpose. Ahriman thought of Magnus closing the sign over meetings of his inner circle, shielding their deliberations from the minds and eyes of others. The use he put it to now was far from what he could have imagined then.

Necessity changes everything, he thought.

‘Another hour of burn, then darken the ship,’ he said.

Astraeos gave a nod, and he left Ahriman watching the fleet of his brother grow larger and closer.

Darkness fell across the ship and cold came with it. Ahriman could see temperature warnings flare at the edge of his helmet display as he approached the door to his chamber. There was no light except the glow of his eyepieces. He passed a servitor that was moving with determined slowness. Dark marks and blisters had spread across the exposed flesh of its arms and face. He could hear its gears squealing as they froze. The air had stopped circulating first, and what remained had become dense and misted with ice particles from the last breaths of moisture. Everything was quiet, slowing like blood cooling in a corpse after the last beat of its heart.

We are become like the dead, he thought, as he tasted blood and silver again. He could not feel the slivers in his chest any more, but he could taste their poison draining his mind.

He reached the circular hatch and pulled it open with a scream of frozen iron. The blackness within was absolute, and his helmet display created a scene of shapes formed in faded green. There were the bowls of oil for light, there the hard sleeping pallet, and there the chest. He moved to it, hesitating before he opened the lid. The objects lay within as they had before. He knelt and picked out the chipped scarab. He breathed slowly, feeling the weight of the gemstone in his palm. He felt something stir within its heart, a kernel of sympathetic memories unfolding into his mind.

There were pyramids of glass burning. There were animal shapes in grey armour wading through lakes of black water. There were… He shut the memory off. He did not need to see it again. There was no lesson it could teach other than the lesson of pain.

He looked down. The helm looked back at him. Its dust-filmed eyes seemed black, and the marks beneath each eye looked like paths carved by tears. He paused, his hand halted halfway to reaching into the chest.

Am I right to come here? The thought bubbled to the surface. He felt the doubt in his mind, the rolling surge of questions without end. He could hardly remember what he had been before the Rubric. No doubts, just the certainty of hubris.

He gave a short bark of laughter that echoed coldly in the chamber. It would always be a part of him now, a wound that would never heal. I had to come, I am responsible. I cannot flee that truth no matter how far I run.

He reached down and touched the helm’s bronze faceplate. He waited, but no surge of memory came, no flowering of revelation, just the hardness of dusty metal beneath his fingers.

Do I even have the right to judge what Amon does? He remembered the clear brightness of the belief that he would set everything right. Hope. A fool’s gold glinting in the palm of cruel fate. And yet… and yet…

The helm felt light in his hand. He had not realised he had picked it up. Dust fell from it, sparkling green in his augmented sight.

The prophecies and visions may be wrong. I may be wrong. The words of daemons, of oracles, of faces glimpsed in dreams and visions rose in his memory.

You remember this path even though you shunned it…

Others will dare the paths you do not. It is fated…

Fate has come for you, Ahriman, as you feared it would and knew it must…

The Legion will die. It will become less than the dust that the Rubric made it…

I see lines of choice vanish into darkness and I cannot see their ends….

There may be another way. There may be a path not just of survival but of hope, of restoration, of redemption….

There is a choice.

He raised the helm until he could see the light of his eyes reflected in its dust-covered lenses.

Gas whispered out in a frozen cloud as he unfastened his helmet and dropped it to the deck. He was blind, wrapped in sudden darkness, as the cold crawled over his skin with frosted fingers. He gripped the other helm, and turned it by touch. He could feel ice crystals forming on his lips. The helm slid over his head and locked into place, with a hiss of pressurisation. He could smell the dust, a gritty taste on the first breath he took. The helmet display blinked to wakefulness. Pictograms flowed across his eyes in turquoise, amber and red. He turned his head, seeing the world again in bright white lines. He felt the stillness of certainty.

I am responsible, he thought as he walked from the chamber. I always was. For good or ill.

They would hit something soon, she was sure of it. That, or something would detect them. It was only a matter of time and, as every nanosecond passed, the probabilities slid further down towards an abyss of certainty. The Titan Child was deep within the gathering enemy fleet. Her shields were down, her reactors reduced to an ember glow, and her sensors running on so little power that she was almost blind. There were hundreds of ships out there. She had plotted a trajectory through them, but without power she was drifting on momentum alone, unable to move, a dead lump of metal.

A pair of cruisers cut across her path. One second they were not there, and then they were looming into her awareness so close she could feel the heat wash of their engines. They dwarfed her. Once they might have been recognisable as ships of the Imperium, but those features had long been lost. Their hulls were bronzed and chewed by battle scars, like the face of a slave fighter. Piled structures shaped like faces rose from their hulls, and she could sense the waiting guns projecting from their mouths.

She felt calculations surge through her, estimating velocities and vectors. The bronze ships were getting closer. She would have to fire her engines soon. But her reactors were all but dead. The calculations spiralled on and the ships loomed closer.

She had to wake the reactors. Yes, that was the only way. Wake the reactors and let her heart beat again. Let her live again. She was paralysed, suffocating in the void, a dumb iron arrow thrown blind into oblivion.

You will not survive this, came a voice in her soul. We will die here. All will be lost. We will be become crippled shadows. Broken. Halved.

The cruisers slipped past her without a collision.

Somewhere, she was breathing hard. She could feel a heart racing in rising panic. She tried to correct it, but the blood it pumped was roaring through her faster and faster.

Another ship slid past her, its engines burning into her half-blinded sensors. The risk calculations screamed again in her awareness. She was cold and blind and she would not survive this madness.

She had to waken, she had to… She must…

Ahriman has led us to this folly, spoke the voice again. He cannot be trusted. This time we will not survive.

What can I do? What must I do?

The answer did not come in words. She remembered the Mechanicus fleet coming, appearing in the night sky above her birth world. They had hidden the stars with iron. She remembered the vast cylinders of Titan drop-pods falling through the atmosphere like the fists of gods. The information links had filled with broken words and fragments of data, the screams of dying machines. She had watched and listened as her clan died, as the world which cradled them died. They had screamed at her as she ran: streams of broken machine code, ciphers of anger and hurt and despair. She had listened to them all until they were too faint to hear any more. She knew they had died. The clan of mystics bonded to their machines had died screaming at her for her betrayal. All had hated her in those last moments, of that she was certain. But she had lived, and her other self, the iron creature of the void with a heart of fire, had lived as well. She had known what to do then, what she had to do for her Titan Child.

She felt calm. Carefully, slowly, she eased power from her sensors to a communication array. She would only have enough for a signal no stronger than a murmur, but it would be enough to save her.

‘I am the Titan Child,’ she said in a whisper of signal code, ‘and I must speak to Lord Amon.’

XVII
DARKNESS

‘Ahriman?’ Carmenta’s machine voice was weak in his ear. A whisper, he thought.

‘Yes, mistress?’ He had been making for Astraeos’s chambers. Now he stopped. There was something in Carmenta’s voice, a note that he could hear even through the lifeless modulation of her words. She was linked to the ship, of course. In a sense it was the ship’s voice she was using.

‘Come to the command deck.’ There was something wrong, he could tell. Something colouring even the cold machine words. Had they been discovered? They must be close to the heart of Amon’s gathering. Something could have detected their presence. Perhaps his psychic masking was flawed. No, he would know. But what else could have edged Carmenta’s voice with tension?

‘What has happened?’ he said.

‘You have to see it yourself,’ replied Carmenta.

The three Storm Eagle gunships slid through the dark in a triangular formation. Each was painted an arterial crimson, but in the void, they appeared black. The thin light of stars picked out the hints of rows and rows of pictograms etched across the hull of each craft, each no larger than a finger bone. Across the underside of the crafts’ wings, engraved gold feathers spread in mimicry of the wings of true birds of prey. No lights betrayed their approach, and their engine flames glowed a cold blue that was quickly lost to the eye. They could not see what they were making for, but that did not matter. They followed a single signal that pulsed through the void.

When the ship did appear in front of them, they were so close that they had to bank sharply to avoid crashing. They skimmed the scorched and gouged hull, following the signal’s siren call. They looped high towards the bridge that punched from its upper hull like a fist. They passed holes the size of battle tanks, unhealed in the thick armour plating. Even at a few metres’ range the ship seemed dead. Only the guiding signal gave the lie to that perception.

The landing-bay doors opened to greet them. The three Storm Eagles glided through the opening and settled onto the metal deck, their thrusters briefly surrounding them in a cloud of white mist. The ramps at the front of each gunship hinged open. The figures that marched onto the deck did so in complete unity, their armoured bulk hidden by the low light and the dissipating clouds of thruster fog.

Three figures emerged last of all. Each wore robes of silver and bone over their red armour. Wide crests flared above their helms, one resembling a cobra, another topped by the twin serpent, the third a disc worked like a rayed sun. The cobra-headed figure marked his steps with a staff topped by a black orb. Curved khopesh swords hung at the waist of the other two figures.

A servitor shuffled from the shadows. It was a hunched, pitiful thing, its flesh withered in the copper and chrome of its mechanical frame. It stopped a pace from the armoured figures, and bowed like a rag doll folding to the floor.

‘Greetings,’ said the servitor in a voice like electricity sparking between wires. The three figures glanced at each other. ‘The mistress of the Titan Child calls you to follow.’ The servitor turned and began to shuffle away. After a second’s pause, the three figures and their silent entourages followed.

Astraeos found Kadin in the central corridors. It had taken him some time to decide to tell him of Cadar’s fate. Warmth still lingered in the slowly stagnating air of the vessel’s core, but there was no light. Astraeos had tracked his brother by sound, listening for the thrum of powered armour and the hiss of pistons in the deepening silence. His brother was armoured but bareheaded, his eyes gazing directly ahead. In the ghost-green of Astraeos’s night vision, Kadin’s eyes glowed like jewels in sunlight. Three paces behind Kadin limped Maroth, chuckling and mewling, his vox-caster and speaker-grille cutting in and out. Astraeos felt anger bubble to the surface at the sight of the broken sorcerer.

‘Brother, there is something that we must speak of,’ called Astraeos.

Kadin did not look at him but kept walking. ‘How nice that you still call me that.’

‘You are my brother, you always will be.’

Kadin inclined his head, looked to Astraeos and then away with a thin smile on his lips.

‘Touching.’

Maroth continued to chuckle, the sound chopping between speaker and vox, as if his armour itself were laughing.

‘Be silent,’ Astraeos spat. Maroth turned the muzzle of his helm from Astraeos to Kadin. Behind the faceplate, Astraeos knew the broken sorcerer was grinning.

‘Nothing left, nothing left,’ purred Maroth. ‘Not his brothers, not his honour, not his soul.’ Maroth tapped the lenses of his helm. ‘Only one eye with which to see how much he has lost.’

Astraeos moved at blink-fast speed. His foot stamped into Maroth’s chest with a crack of metal on ceramite. Maroth lifted from his feet and hit the passage wall, and Astraeos was on him before he could slide to the floor. Rage ran through Astraeos in a hot red cloud. All he could see was the wreck of his past and the tatters of everything he had tried to preserve. He had failed; every time he had tried he had failed. Maroth spluttered, wet noises coming out in chopped lumps from his speaker-grille. Astraeos thought he was still laughing. He put his foot on Maroth’s chest as the sorcerer tried to rise.

‘Leave him,’ said Kadin. Astraeos kept his eyes fixed on Maroth, seeing the one who had transformed Cadar and taken his brothers’ eyes.

‘No, Ahriman promised,’ screamed Maroth, the words wet and mixed with broken teeth and blood.

Astraeos roared and raised his foot to stamp down on Maroth. The image of Cadar’s body looking back at him with empty voids for eyes filled his mind.

He paused, breathing hard. His ears were ringing with rage. He wanted to strike again, to feel that release of letting anger and muscle become one. He let out a long, shaking breath.

‘You are losing yourself, brother,’ said Astraeos, jerking his head at where Maroth lay. ‘You let him follow you like a dog. After what he was, what he did–’

‘No, Astraeos.’ Kadin’s voice was quiet, but it cut through Astraeos like a cold knife. ‘I lost myself long ago, as did you.’

‘No, we still–’

‘Have honour? Astraeos, you beggared that long ago. I am not what I was, and neither are you. Would Codicier Astraeos have done that?’ Kadin glanced to where Maroth was trying to pick himself up off the floor. ‘We are changed and changing. What we were is gone.’ Kadin paused. His rasping voice sounded tired. ‘We have Ahriman, and that is all. We are all dogs following at his feet.’

Astraeos opened his mouth to reply, found he had no words. His rage had drained away. He felt suddenly empty, the feeling spreading out and through him.

No, he thought. The emptiness that bubbled up inside him had been there since the ships of the Inquisition and the warriors in grey had fired on their home world. He tried not to look at his hands; he knew his fingers were shaking. What do I do? What am I now? What do I do?

And then a new sensation hit Astraeos like a cold shadow passing over the sun, as if a light that he was not aware of had gone dark. His head twitched up, his eyes looking around for the source of the uncanny chill. He could hear the silence in his ears.

‘What was that?’ said Kadin. Astraeos looked at his brother. Kadin was looking up at the shadows at the edge of the corridor. Astraeos felt a shiver run across his skin.

‘I don’t know.’

‘Darkness, it is here.’ Maroth had pulled himself to his feet, his head rolling from side to side as he leant on the passage wall. Then he tipped his head up sharply at Astraeos. ‘Can’t you see it?’

Astraeos blinked his helmet display to life, and opened a vox-channel.

‘Ahriman.’ Static was the only reply. He switched channels. ‘Mistress Carmenta.’

Silence.

Astraeos glanced at his brother. Kadin nodded. They began to run, unclamping weapons as they moved. Behind them Maroth followed, breathing curses to himself.

Ahriman paused before the entrance to the bridge. He had felt something, something subtle and distant like a movement under the surface of dark water, or the quick hiding of a lamp beneath a cloth. He turned, his eyes moving across the shadows at the edge of the antechamber. Nothing, just a feeling. But everything was a sign; he had learned that truth long ago.

He peeled off a portion of his mind. His hand shifted on the grip of his sword. He waited, but there was nothing. He turned back to the doors and pressed his hand against the opening seal. The doors ground back into the walls. He froze.

Darkness. Complete darkness waited for him beyond the doors. No wink of system lights, not even the smallest kernel of luminescence from a servitor’s eye. He felt something, the tiniest imperfection in his thought processes. He had missed something. No, he had seen something out of the corner of his eye, something that was bending light and shadow around it, something that was hiding just out of sight. Suddenly, he was very aware of how tired he was, and of the psychically toxic silver lodged in his chest.

The hairs on his arms rose, and static prickled up his spine.

He sensed the telekinetic wave an instant before it broke and lifted him from his feet. The darkness vanished, as if a curtain had been ripped back to reveal the sun. Suddenly, he could feel the presence of other minds all around him. They burned bright, and power howled around them like hurricane winds.

Sensations and emotions blurred as he turned through the air: heat, cold, anger, the heaviness of his own body, the gravity pulling it down, the threat icons flashing in his eyes, the tension of his fingers still gripping his sword, the spiralling gold patterns inlaid into the floor. He felt the fingers of another mind ramming into his thoughts, pulling apart his calm like a knife parting threads. He was scrabbling in a swamp of panic and then, and then…

His mind froze, it became crystal, each thought, sensation, and emotion held still as he spun through the air.

Amon’s forces were on the Titan Child. There were at least three psykers. They were powerful. There were Rubricae too, twenty-four of them. He sensed all of this in the space of a slow heartbeat.

He hit the floor. Full reality snapped back into place. He rolled to his feet and his sword came up to meet a downward cut at his head. Light flared where the two blades met. He saw red armour, bone robes and a golden helm with a sun-disc crest. Power blazed from behind the golden helm, touching his mind like the heat of the sun. He shifted, turned the enemy’s blade, and cut down at the golden helm.

It was not there. The warrior was past his guard, turning so fast that Ahriman could not predict the movement. He began to react, but too slowly. The blow sliced across his shoulder. Ceramite glowed yellow where the blade cut. The sword whipped back.

Ahriman stepped back as the golden-headed sorcerer cut again. The glowing point of the sword screamed as it scored a line across his chest, the cut going wide. Ahriman stamped forwards, and his kick rammed the sorcerer into the air. His mind was still reeling, trying to shape his will into power as the warp boiled around him. He could taste silver and iron.

On the edge of sight, two other figures in robes paced forwards. Their movements seemed slow, almost casual. One was raising a staff. Lightning forked through the air. Ahriman felt it an instant before he saw the flash. The lightning shattered inches from his body. Blinding arcs earthed in the floor. Ahriman felt the shield he had raised tremble as the lightning crawled across its glowing surface.

He felt for the point of calm in the middle of the storm of his mind, found it, and suddenly everything seemed quiet and slow. The golden-helmed sorcerer was still turning in the air behind him. He would hit the floor in less than a second. In front of him, the sorcerer with the staff and the cobra-crested helm was in mid-step, his aura flowing from crystal blue to muddy red as he struggled to refocus his own power. To his left another sorcerer was one stride into a charge, a curved khopesh held low in both hands. Beyond them, he could see the Rubricae. They encircled the room, their boltguns aimed inwards but silent, their eyes watching, waiting.

Ahriman dropped his invisible shield and the lightning wreathed him, climbing up his body. The sorcerer with the staff was shaking, trying to shut off the power that was flowing through him. Ahriman drew the lightning into himself, absorbing it and radiating it outwards. A blinding flash filled the chamber. The three sorcerers stumbled.

Ahriman’s mind rose from his body. His thought form was a creature of pure psychic energy, a vast black-winged bird with two heads, its eyes pinprick windows into a furnace. The physical chamber slid to a dim outline as he left his fleshly body behind.

The three sorcerers shimmered and then their minds leapt into the air, their thought forms trailing cloaks of light and shadow. They changed as they ascended into the warp; translucent wings unfolding from predatory bodies, mouths opening, fangs glowing like the death of stars. They were mockeries of the lost angels of legend, formed from fury and power.

Ahriman’s raven thought form roared and dived towards the glowing angels. The thought forms met in a supernova of colour and light. The crystal dome above the chamber shattered. Frost formed on every surface. Ahriman felt claws and teeth rake his thought form, scoring lines through his wings. This was battle fought with the mind alone, the thought forms no more than projections into the warp, but that made it no less dangerous. In the physical realm, he began to bleed inside his armour.

His claws closed on one of the angelic thought forms. It writhed in his grasp, shifting shape; now serpentine, now scaled and bloated with flesh. Ahriman gripped tighter and soared upwards, the sorcerer’s thought form held in his claws. Golden droplets of aetheric blood tumbled in their wake. Somewhere in the physical world, he passed through the hull of the Titan Child. Stars and the engine fires of warships were dim impressions on the edge of his awareness.

+Quiet, my brother,+ he whispered, and squeezed. His claws sank into the thought form’s flesh. It screamed as its body split open. Ahriman let go. The thought form fell from his claws. It shattered as it fell, its substance breaking into luminous tatters. Ahriman’s thought form reached the top of his climb and rolled over into a dive. The beaks of his twin heads closed on the remains of the dissolving thought form.

Feelings and memories flooded Ahriman’s mind as aetheric blood filled his mouth. Kiu, that was this sorcerer’s name. Kiu, acolyte of the Raptora. Kiu, so silent unless spoken to, now screaming with all his mind and soul. He spat Kiu’s shrivelling thought form out. In the chamber far below, the serpent-crested sorcerer fell to the floor.

The other two thought forms were rising to meet him. Ahriman roared and the roar became flame. The thought forms twisted aside. One had taken the body of a feline predator; two sets of wings spread from its back, and its fur flickered between the colours of snow and jet. The other coiled through the air, its long body glistening with blue and golden scales, its wings sheets of translucent skin. Ahriman spread his wings and met them, claws first. They tumbled together. He felt teeth rip his flesh and feathers away. Somewhere, where he had real flesh, new wounds opened. Pain billowed through him. He lashed out blindly as he felt himself weaken. He was falling now, not diving, tumbling in a savage embrace with his enemies, focus and power bleeding from him with every instant.

No, he thought. I will not end like this, not at the hands of my brothers. He gave in to the pain, let it surge into his consciousness. The raven shape of his thought form began to burn. Black feathers kindled to bright flame. His thought form cracked, blazing lines opening across its shape. And all the while the pain rose, burning away all other thoughts and sensations.

The sorcerers’ thought forms howled. Their skin peeled away. Ethereal flesh charred black and began to dissolve. They bit and clawed deeper as they burned, scrabbling at Ahriman’s thought form even as it cracked with heat.

White brightness filled Ahriman’s mind. He was losing himself, his mind dissipating into the warp as it consumed itself. He could feel his name start to drift just beyond memory, as the vortex of sensation dragged him into its embrace. He would become a dimming light, alone and unremembered. He had to end the fight; he had to end it now.

His will cut through the pain. His thought form’s bird body melted, and became a glowing sphere. The thought forms wrapped around it shrieked as their claws and teeth sank into the molten surface. Then the sphere uncoiled. Glowing lengths of scaled flesh wrapped around the thought forms. Ahriman felt them claw and struggle as his thought form constricted tighter and tighter.

Their movements grew weaker as the mind of each sorcerer pushed against his grasp. He gripped tighter, wrapping his will over their minds even as he felt fatigue wash through him. He had sustained his projection in the warp for no more than a second of real time, but even that had cost him. Blackness crept across the edges of his thoughts like night falling after day. The two thought forms trembled, twisted one last time and went still.

The exhaustion came in a thick cloud. It boiled up from within, dragging him down like the waves of a dark ocean. His will wavered. The pain and fatigue were enfolding him, cutting away his awareness of the warp. His thought form began to fade; the serpent sphere broke apart, unravelling like a knot of burning rope. Ahriman felt his consciousness flood into his body again.

He lay on the stone floor, his sword fallen by his side. Around him, the Rubricae watched him stir but did not move. He tried to breathe, choked and found there was blood in his mouth. There was blood in his armour, too. He could feel it sticking to the inside of his bodyplate like a second skin. He rolled onto his side and began to stand up. Sympathetic slashes and bites in his sides and legs pulled open, and pain whipped through him. A fever haze rose through his body; he swayed. Frost covered the chamber and floor. Splinters of crystal from the shattered dome above mingled with the ice. Under the rime he could see Kiu and the other two sorcerers. They did not move.

The Rubricae watched him as he stood, their eyes glowing green, unmoving. Whispers filled his ears, pushing through the fog of exhaustion. He turned, slowly, looking between the watching eyes. The Rubricae remained still. On the floor, one of the sorcerers stirred. Ahriman reached down for his sword.

Then he felt it, a ripple in the fabric of reality, like a stone dropped into a flat pool of water.

He grasped his sword and stood again. His helmet display pulsed with injury warnings. He was still losing blood. His eyes dimmed and luminous worms twisted at the corners of his sight. He was tired, so tired. He took a breath and felt blood rise in his throat. Even as he tried to gather his will, it scattered. He looked up.

A mote of golden light hung in the middle of the chamber. In his mind, he could feel and hear the warp churning like water curling into a whirlpool. The mote of light expanded like a blown bubble. Stars and night swirled at its centre.

Of course, he thought. He could see shapes, three indistinct humanoid outlines shimmering as if seen through a heat haze.

I am a fool. I should have understood what was happening here. He tried to gather power to his will. He raised the sword. The sigils along the blade were dim. Around the edge of the chamber the Rubricae took a step forwards, their guns levelled.

The sphere of stars swelled, and the shapes of the three figures grew clearer.

He had failed, he had presumed, he had missed the most logical of reasons why Amon had not come himself while Ahriman was still strong. Because it would have been foolish, and Amon, apart from that one time when he had believed Ahriman, had never been foolish.

The three figures were clear now: two wore flowing white robes and red armour. Curved horns rose from their helms to hold golden discs. The third figure wore blue silk robes over his armour. Horned skulls covered his shoulders, tapers of yellowed parchment spilled from the visible red plate, and he carried a staff of silver topped by the symbol of a serpentine sun. Horns rose from the crown, temples and cheeks of his blank-fronted helm. The eyes that looked at Ahriman from behind the narrow eye-slit were red coals.

The figures stepped from the swirl of colour and stars. Ahriman tried to take a step forwards, but his muscles would not respond. Blood foamed in his throat as he breathed. He stumbled, then collapsed to one knee. The three figures watched him, not coming any closer, not retreating. Ahriman kept his eyes fixed on the third of their number. He could feel the presence of all three newcomers, the hard control and power like sunlight trapped in a fist. But the third figure shone brighter than anything else in the room.

+Amon,+ sent Ahriman, and the effort filled his eyes with nauseous swirls of colour. The figure in the horned helm nodded, and then turned to look at his companions.

+Help him stand,+ sent Amon. A shiver ran through Ahriman. It had been a long time since he had heard that mind. He smiled despite himself.

Amon’s two companions approached Ahriman from either side. Both wore khopesh swords at their waist and had pistols clamped to their thighs. Ahriman breathed, trying to gather power to his mind and balance the rhythms of his body. If he could focus he could knit his wounds back together, he could… he could…

Hands gripped him and pulled him to his feet. His vision was clogging with shadows. He heard his sword clatter to the ground. He could not feel his hands. He could not feel anything. The world was folding in on itself. The winds of the aether seemed to be thick with swirling dust. Amon’s voice in his thoughts, calm and soft, followed him as he fell into the dust cloud in his mind.

+It is good to see you, Ahriman.+

Carmenta had watched with all her eyes. Internal scanners and pict lenses had seen Ahriman approach the doors to the bridge, then pause. Then there had been an explosion of light and static that grated across her senses. She had felt distortion and corrupted code boil through her as she glimpsed movements faster than she would have believed possible. Then there had been stillness, and the crackle of unnatural energy playing over her hull. An instant later, one of Ahriman’s opponents had fallen to the floor, as if he were a puppet with his strings cut. Then the other two had followed. Finally she had watched Ahriman struggle to pull himself from the floor where he had sprawled.

I was right to do this, she thought. I had no choice. He would have destroyed us. My child would have been taken from me. I was right to do this. A blue-robed figure that must have been Amon had appeared out of thin air. She watched as Amon’s two attendants pulled Ahriman to his feet. No one had said anything, not Ahriman, not Amon, not any of the silent Space Marines that encircled them all.

I was right to do this. She tried to purge the doubt, but it stuck to her like clotted blood to a hand.

She saw Ahriman slump in the grip of the two Space Marines. The one that must be Amon turned towards the doors to the command bridge.

‘Titan Child,’ he called, and she noticed that his voice was strong and calm, kind even. ‘It is done.’ He paused and turned his head so that he was looking directly into one of her pict-eyes. ‘You are free.’ He turned his gaze away, and something silent passed between him and the Space Marines encircling the chamber. He was looking at Ahriman, she realised. Hanging like a drowned man between the arms of the acolytes. ‘But betrayal should buy no peace.’

Amon’s head turned and he was looking into the pict lens again. His eyes were burning. She tried to shut down the visual feed, but could not. His eyes stared back at her from every pict-eye, blazing brighter and brighter. She felt them bore into her, stripping away layers of machine code. She wanted to scream, to run. She felt her limbs tangle in her cradle of cables. She could not feel the rest of herself: her reactors, engines and weapons were not there. All that remained was her link to the pict feeds, and that she could not break. She felt something burning within her, something liquid and vital boiling.

Carmenta’s body juddered in its cradle. Blood rained down from her, spattering on the floor as the blood cooked in her remaining flesh, as Amon’s eyes turned from her.

+Peace, Titan Child,+ whispered Amon. +Be at peace.+

Amon turned and let the killing thought fade from his mind. His thoughts felt clotted and soiled. But it had been necessary; an act of balance, not malice. The tech-priest had betrayed the trust Ahriman had given her, and any betrayal had a price. One could not choose the limits of one’s beliefs; he had learned that long ago. It was a mercy anyway. He had touched the mind that called itself the Titan Child, felt the aberrations, the lumps of self-mutilation and distortion. He glanced at the encircling Rubricae, felt the broken particles of their thoughts swirl in his mind. They tasted of dust. Yes, better brief pain and then peace than what the ship or its mistress would have become.

He looked to where Zabaia and Siamak stood, holding the collapsed form of Ahriman. With a mental flick, he extended his mind and lifted Ahriman from them so that he floated above the floor. With another tendril of thought he lifted Ahriman’s sword. He turned it over, noting the markings and the red iron raptor rising from the golden flames of the crossguard: Tolbek’s sword. So Tolbek was gone. He felt something move in his mind, a dull pulse of something starved and weakened. One more, he thought, and looked at Ahriman. He let the sword drop to the ground.

+There are two of our silent brothers on this ship,+ he sent to Zabaia and Siamak. +I can sense them. Tolbek brought them here, his mark is on them. Follow their scent. Bring them back to us. Then give this ship to the fire.+

Both acolytes bowed their heads and withdrew. He nodded in response and turned away. Behind him, the injured and unconscious forms of Kiu and the other two sorcerers lifted into the air on cushions of telekinesis. He muttered a fluid stream of names and commands, and the Rubricae moved to flank him. He would return to the Sycorax by Storm Eagle, leaving one of the craft to carry Zabaia and Siamak once they had completed their task.

He walked from the chamber, and behind him, the four limp figures floated like puppets dragged by their wires. Beside him, the Rubricae matched his step and hissed words from broken memories.

+Soon, my brothers,+ sent Amon. +Soon.+

XVIII
NAMES

Astraeos felt the enemies’ presence before he saw them. He was moving towards the bridge, Kadin a pace behind him, both running, their boots ringing metal thunder from the deck. Behind them Maroth limped, wheezing and muttering. Then something had touched his mind, a feeling like an insect running over his skin in the dark. He became still. At his side Kadin halted, looking at him, a question held in his green slit eyes.

Astraeos shook his head. He could feel it now, twin minds working seamlessly together, reaching out through the warp like searchlights. He could taste the formation of their thoughts. For a second, he had thought it was Ahriman. The twin minds had the shape of Ahriman’s mind, as if the same hand had crafted them, but there were differences, imperfections and shadows of weakness. They were powerful, though. Powerful and unknown.

He slid his mind into a pattern of thought and felt the warp respond, drawing shadows and confusion around them like a tattered cloak. They vanished, sinking into a dark fold in the warp. He glanced at Kadin. His brother’s eyes were glowing in the gloom. He nodded once to Astraeos, as if he had felt and understood what Astraeos had done and why.

‘Yes, brother,’ said Kadin. ‘We will hunt.’

Silvanus had tried to drug himself to sleep. The materials he had found for the task had been crude and, as it turned out, inadequate to his needs. He had slept for a while, but the peace he had wanted had been broken by dreams of beasts of light and fire tumbling through a void of stars. He had woken feeling stomach acid kissing the inside of his mouth. He shivered and gave limited thanks to whatever deity still cared that he had not been sick in his sleep; given his circumstances, it would have been consistent with his fortunes.

Lord of humanity, it is freezing. He had been given the void suit to insulate him from the cold, but he was fairly certain that it had not been used for some time, and the last person to wear it had not taken care of it. Curled on a pallet of mouldering fabric, he shivered and brought his hands up to rub his eyes. His hands hit the glass of the suit’s visor. He went back to cursing fate.

It was not that he wanted rest, he just wanted to shut everything out, to make reality into a featureless dream. He had agreed to pilot, of course he had agreed, he had seen enough that death held no temptation. But what would his survival be? What could possibly happen to him now? And there was no going back; he was a renegade now, an ally of servants to the nameless powers of the warp.

But, a voice whispered at the back of his thoughts, did you not already know the Inquisition would never let you live after your service was complete?

He opened his eyes. The grimy glow of the single light set into the small chamber’s ceiling looked back at him with a cracked gaze. The room was small, barely a cell. It nested close to the bridge, some kind of crew quarters from when the ship had had humans as well as servitors as crew. He thought about taking his suit helmet off, and then decided against it. The air in his suit was stale with his breath and odour, but he felt certain it would be better than the smell of his quarters.

The pallet felt unpleasantly soft as he rolled off it and came unsteadily to his feet. His head was pounding. He could still see the images of glowing beasts raking each other with claws as they fell. That was not good. He let his hands drop to his sides, took a deliberately slow breath, and waited to see if the dream images faded. After a minute, he could still see them in unfading detail.

‘Oh no,’ he muttered, and began to move towards the sealed hatch. He pulled it open and, once on the other side, did his best to start running in the direction of the bridge. Something had happened, and whether they were heretics or not, the others needed to know. There were many indications of events taking place in the warp. Many would be dismissed by mundane humans: bad dreams, minor ailments, coincidence. As a Prime of one of the greatest Navigator houses, he had spent much of his life aware of the difference between the mundane and the ominous. As he ran, he really, really hoped he was wrong.

The two sorcerers reached the bronze-covered doors and knew they had found what they had been looking for. It had taken more effort than they had anticipated to trace the psychic spoor of the two Rubricae. Voices and images had ghosted across their minds as they moved through the ship. A number of times they had thought that they had detected a sentience close by, trailing them through the ship’s corridors. They had reached out, but the phantoms had melted under their gaze. The whole ship was rotten, psychic residue clinging to its presence in the warp like tatters of skin on a skull.

They placed their hands simultaneously on the bronze doors. From beyond they could hear the muted murmur of the Rubricae, a psychic sound so low it was barely a whisper. They did not look at each other in acknowledgement. No word or blunt psychic message was necessary for them to understand each other. Zabaia and Siamak were twins of the rarest kind. While other twins might share identical features, they shared identical minds. Their consciousness intertwined, overlapping through a psychic connection so deep that in a sense they had but one mind.

They felt another presence in the chamber beyond as they pushed open the doors. It was no matter, there was nothing left on this ship that could threaten them now that Ahriman had been taken.

The chamber was dark and blackened. They saw both with the augmented sight of their helmets and the second sight of their minds. Ash was thick on the floor. Every surface was scorched black. They could see pillars, their sides crusted with hardened dribbles of molten metal. Black chains hung from the ceiling, their lengths twisted by the heat. The two Rubricae stood facing the doors. They were coal-black with soot. Fire had scoured everything from the chamber, but they still remained, unliving, never dying, and standing mute as if waiting. But it was the twisted throne at the other end of the room that drew Zabaia’s and Siamak’s eyes.

A figure sat on the throne. It was a Space Marine, or at least it had been; something about the way it rolled its head to look at them told the twins that the nobility and power of the Adeptus Astartes no longer lived in the figure. It had dragged its feet through the ash to reach the throne from a door that lay to one side of the chamber.

‘If I tell you, will I live?’ said Maroth. His hound-snouted helm tilted as he spoke. The twins did not move as their thoughts lifted Maroth from the throne and pinned him to the air.

+Helio Isidorus.+

+Mabius Ro.+

The names echoed from the twins’ minds. The Rubricae shivered, soot falling from their joints as they turned, their guns rising.

‘You have been deceived,’ screamed Maroth, as the Rubricae’s fingers tightened on the triggers of their guns. ‘You will die here.’

The Rubricae paused. Siamak stepped away from his brother. Behind the mask of his helm he was smiling.

‘How could that happen?’

‘Like this,’ said Kadin as he stepped from the shadows, his chainsword already roaring.

The bridge was quiet. Very quiet. Silvanus moved forwards slowly. He was used to how ships sounded, to how they vibrated with mechanical life; the Titan Child felt dead. Of course, that was the point: drop all systems to nothing, and just allow the most fundamental systems to sip power while Ahriman did whatever terrifying thing he needed to. But this felt different, like looking at a corpse that had been breathing a second before. He was getting a terrible feeling that he had been right.

Silvanus had noticed the silence as he stepped into the bridge, and started moving with clumsy care. He had entered through a door low in the system pits. On any other ship, tech-adepts and Naval officers would have been stalking the crevice-like rows of machines and servitor-crewed consoles. On the Titan Child, there was not even a sign that another living soul had walked the deep parts of the bridge in a century. He had crept his way past rows of cold machinery, noting the servitors slumped at their positions in the stab lights from his suit. He had knocked one as he passed and it had slid to the floor, its dead flesh crumbling away from its metal components. He had stared at the wire-filled sockets of the servitor’s skull, and a new and unpleasant question had opened in his mind.

How was this ship even running before? He stared at the long-dead servitor for a cluster of heartbeats then moved on, picking his way over the cables that snaked across the floor, noting the grime covering the glass of display consoles.

He was ascending to the main command platform, on a caged spiral stair, when he heard the dripping. At first, he thought it was distortion in his suit’s sound feed. He banged the side of his helmet. Noise scratched his ears, then went quiet. He heard it again, a single drip, soft yet echoing in the utter quiet of the bridge. He could feel his heartbeat rising. Breath fogged the glass of his visor as he climbed slowly up the stairs. He could not help but hear it now, a ragged drip, drip, drip.

The command platform was a long tongue of metal plating extending from the vast blast doors at the rear of the chamber. He had seen similar structures on other ships, but they had been dominated by the captain’s command throne, and the podiums, pulpits and dais of senior command staff. On the Titan Child it was bare.

The sound of dripping felt as if it were all around him now. Slowly, he reached up and unfastened his suit helmet. It came away with a low hiss. The cold hit his face and he felt the moisture in his skin start to freeze. His breath fogged in the beam of the suit’s stab lights. The air was thick with the smell of dirt mixed with congealed oil. He listened.

Drip.

He started to move towards the centre of the platform, the cone of the stab lights reaching forwards in front of him.

Drip.

Liquid glistened. A wide pool had spread across the platform. He bent down, and extended a gloved hand to the pool. It came up running red and oil-black.

Drip.

He saw the drop hit the surface of the pool. Ripples spread from the point of impact. He looked up, and the stab lights followed his gaze.

‘Throne of Terra...’

The beam of light hit Astraeos as he ran forwards. It glowed blue with heat. He felt its power burn an instant before it struck, and shunted it aside with a thought.

Focus, calm, Ahriman’s watchwords. Astraeos lashed out with a thought of raw force. Siamak’s mental shield rose almost too late. It was enough for Astraeos to take another stride, and slide his sword free. Siamak drew his own weapon and met Astraeos’s cut. The sound of thunder echoed across the chamber as light flared from the crossed blades.

Two paces from Astraeos, Kadin made a lateral cut. Zabaia pivoted to the side. He was a blade’s width too slow. The chain teeth caught his right arm just below the elbow, and wet shreds of flesh sprayed through the air. Kadin turned the blow’s momentum and sliced from above his head with a shriek of bionics. Zabaia’s left hand flashed out and lightning hit Kadin in the chest.

Kadin laughed as the lightning danced across his armour. The chainsword struck Zabaia’s helm. It cut through the golden disc and horns, and screamed as it chewed into ceramite. Zabaia rammed his weight forwards. Kadin stumbled. Zabaia spoke a single word aloud and became fire. His flesh and armour vanished, receding to a dark silhouette in an inferno.

A smile cracked Kadin’s pale face.

‘Very nice,’ he said and swung his chainsword. The blade’s teeth were already melting as it met the flames. Kadin let go of the grip an instant before the blow would have landed. His right hand vanished into the flames, the mechanical fingers glowing dark red as they closed on the sorcerer’s head. He wrenched sideways, his body pivoting with a scream of pistons. Zabaia spun through the air, the inferno guttering out, blood raining in his wake. The half-crushed helm and head of the sorcerer dropped to the floor from Kadin’s cooling fingers.

Siamak staggered as his twin died. Astraeos came forwards, his sword raised to deliver a kill-stroke. Siamak fell, sending a cloud of ash into the air, panic suddenly ringing loud from his mind. Astraeos was about to cut down when he heard the telepathic commands whispered from Siamak to the two Rubricae. It was a ragged sending, a raw scream full of fury and confusion.

The Rubricae fired. Astraeos raised his hand. The glowing rounds exploded just beyond his fingers. Pink and blue flames billowed across the dome of force. He could feel the flames chewing at the shield, laughing with frustrated fury.

Siamak rose from the floor, dry ash falling from his armour. The two Rubricae stepped forwards, firing again and again. Astraeos felt his mental shield cracking. The flames of the exploding shells chattered as if in anticipation. To his right, he could sense Kadin moving, leaping forwards, a war shout forming in his mouth; but slowly, far too slowly. Siamak stepped forwards, his form dusty ash-grey. The sword in his hand was glowing. The Rubricae looked at Astraeos with soot-darkened eyes. He let his shield drop.

+Helio Isidorus. Mabius Ro.+ Astraeos formed the names in his mind, and sent them in a raw shout of command.

The Rubricae froze; their fingers stilled on the triggers of their guns. Siamak faltered. Astraeos felt his shock. Kadin hit him before he could recover, a furnace-hot fist cracking his faceplate. The sorcerer fell, rolled and started to rise. Astraeos could see a single bright blue eye through the shattered eyepiece of the sorcerer’s helm. Kadin stamped down, and crushed the helmet and the skull beneath.

Silence filled the chamber. Astraeos turned to look at his brother, but Kadin was already turning away to look for the remains of his chainsword. From the throne at the end of the chamber Maroth smiled.

‘I did say you would die here.’

Silvanus stared up. A tangle of cables hung from darkness above. Some were as thick as his arm, others were fine strands of silver, all woven together like a nest of creepers in a jungle canopy. A bare arm stuck out from amongst the cables. It looked as if it had been cooked. Dark droplets of fluid grew on the fingertips. Further up the nest, he could see Carmenta’s crimson mask hanging slackly in the curve of a thick cable. Its eyes looked down at him, blank blind holes in a cracked face. He could see where the cables connected to her skull; the sockets were drooling pus and thick blood.

Silvanus heard a moan, twisted to look around him, and then realised that the sound had come from his own mouth. The cold was burning his lungs. He coughed, and felt the bile rise in his throat. He vomited, dropping to his hands and knees, retching even after the contents of his stomach were glistening on the deck.

He heard a sound like air clicking through pipes. He looked up, swallowing the sour taste in his mouth. A faint light looked back at him from the pits of Carmenta’s eyes. He could not move, he could only stare back. The fingers of her hand twitched, scattering black drops into the pool beneath. The light in her eyes pulsed, and he heard the clicking suck of her breath again.

He stood slowly, keeping his eyes on hers. Her hand was just in reach. He stretched up. His glove brushed her fingers. He opened his mouth.

Carmenta spasmed. Blood showered down. The nest of cables shook. Across the bridge, dead servitors jerked in their seats as their augmetics sparked. Screens flashed to life with static. Silvanus could smell hot metal and burning wire. A wet shriek shook the stale air as Carmenta screamed. Silvanus thumbed his suit’s vox, shouting into whatever channel was open.

‘Help me, anyone. Help me.’ After five seconds Carmenta went still and the blood began to drip again.

XIX
PEACE

Ahriman blinked as the light fell across his face. A door had opened. He could see a figure silhouetted against the brightness. He raised his head and squinted.

The small movement set chains clinking above him. They had bound him, he realised. Adamantine manacles circled his forearms and ankles. Thick chains led from his wrists to the ceiling above, held taut by his weight. More chains linked his ankles to the heavy loops in the white marble floor. They had removed his armour, of course, leaving him with a sleeveless tunic of rough fabric. His muscles ached, and his mind felt numb. The unhealed wound in the side of his chest wept pink fluid. Somewhere out beyond the cell, the warp swirled like an ocean held back beyond glass. Null field generators buzzed beneath the floor and wards wove through the cell, etched into every stone and every link of chain. The cell was lightless and silent to the power of the warp. In here, he was just flesh and bone.

The door closed behind the figure, and the chamber was black again. Ahriman heard a measured breath. A glow blossomed in the dark as a candle lit and its flame grew. Light caught the edges of the candle bearer’s armour and spread shadows across a smooth face.

‘There,’ said Amon. ‘We will have light at least.’

Ahriman met Amon’s eyes, and they seemed almost black.

‘I will not help you,’ said Ahriman. Amon’s mouth formed a weak smile. He walked to the side of the chamber and placed the candle in a holder. He moved around the room lighting more candles until pools of light broke the shadows. Ahriman watched as Amon lit a final candle to the right of the chamber’s only door.

‘Do you remember the light of Prospero?’ Amon paused, his eyes fixed on the flame as it grew. ‘The sun catching the pyramids, the dawn light crawling across land and sea. Sometimes I think I will never see such light again.’ He turned and looked at Ahriman, the sad smile still in place. ‘But then, perhaps it is just memory.’ Ahriman remained silent as he remembered a city shining under a bright sky, and the flanks of the pyramids turning to sheets of sunlight.

‘For a long time I thought of returning there, of trying to see what remained.’ Amon nodded as he walked closer to Ahriman, and then shook his head. ‘Strange, isn’t it? We were created as warriors, to be apart from humanity. Where does sentimentality fit into that?’ He stopped, a pace away from Ahriman. ‘But then I realised that the light existed only in my memory. If I touched the ashes, and saw the storm-broken sky, the memory would vanish. Then, what would remain of Prospero?’

Ahriman held Amon’s gaze.

‘The past cannot be changed, brother,’ said Ahriman softly. Amon looked away to the light at the edge of the room.

‘This is how it ends. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Brother, what you intend–’

‘What I intend?’ Amon shook his head. ‘You think that you see clearly.’ He gave a low laugh. ‘Your failings do not change, Ahriman. We are a dead Legion. What remains are just echoes, and the twitchings of corpses. Is that what you dreamed of? Is that why you led us to defy our father?’

Ahriman looked into Amon’s face.

‘I was wrong.’

‘You destroyed us, and your dream was flawed.’ Amon’s voice was measured, and Ahriman could barely hear the emotion running under the surface. ‘Perhaps you are right, perhaps there is no way to undo what the Rubric did, but that is not my intention, brother. I will not follow you into dreams. This is how we end, not how we are remade.’

Ahriman felt ice unfold in his guts and spread through him. He thought of the dead worlds he had seen waiting in the possible future.

They will become less than dust…

‘You cannot destroy the Legion,’ said Ahriman, hearing his own voice shake as he spoke.

‘But I will, brother. Perhaps you thought that I dreamed of restoration, or forgiveness at the hand of our father. Those are false hopes, and the path they lead us on is a path of lies. We are done. There is no going back, nor forgiveness for what we did, but there can be an end, and perhaps there will be peace in that. You have already destroyed us. I will redeem us in the only way that remains.’

‘The Rubric will preserve the Legion. Our brothers do not live but they cannot die.’ Above him, the chains rattled as he spoke.

‘I will break the Rubric. I will turn it on itself.’ Amon nodded sadly. ‘You showed me that such grand change is possible and, if you can remake a Legion, you can reduce it to less than dust.’

‘He will stop you,’ spat Ahriman.

‘Magnus?’ Amon laughed, and Ahriman’s gaze snapped back to his brother’s face. Amon was shaking his head in disbelief. ‘You have never in all these years thought that the Rubric came from his own work? Do you really believe that he did not know what we did? That part of him did not see the ruin he had brought us? Do you think that he does not long for an end?’

Ahriman felt as if Amon had struck him.

‘It will fail,’ he said, but he could feel the weakness in his own voice. Amon let out a long breath.

‘It will not,’ said Amon. ‘If I have to burn half of the Eye of Terror and raze the Planet of the Sorcerers to find the means, I will break your Rubric and let our Legion die at last.’

‘Amon…’

‘I thought you might come to me in the end. I even goaded you to do it. If you survived my hunters, I knew you would have to know why they had come for you.’ There was sorrow in his eyes, Ahriman realised, sorrow and pity. ‘Broken as you are, you are still Ahriman, master of the Corvidae, Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons. Your pride is still strong enough to allow you to believe that you can somehow change what will happen, that your knowledge and insight is greater, that you can divert the course of fate. You say that you were wrong, that the Rubric was a mistake, but your arrogance still burns under the lies you tell yourself. You are unchanged, brother.’

‘Amon…’ Ahriman shook his head, even as his thoughts tumbled.

‘Why did you not use the Rubricae?’ asked Amon suddenly. ‘You could have tried to turn them against us when we came for you. Why didn’t you?’

Ahriman thought of the plain of dust, of Magnus pulling apart the walking statue that had been Artaxerxes. He remembered the ghost cries as the armour had come apart and then reknitted.

‘They are my brothers, not my slaves.’

‘They are the slaves you made them.’ Amon turned away and looked up to the gloom that hid the chamber’s ceiling. ‘You should have used them, that would have been honest at least, my friend. It would have shown that you understand what you are.’

The words seemed to prise off scabs that had formed in Ahriman’s mind. Amon was right. Ahriman had allowed himself to believe lies that had destroyed him once already. He was nothing, a fading echo of failure.

‘Help me. Give me what you know of the Rubric,’ said Amon. ‘Give your brothers peace. You will see it end and then you may have your own peace.’

Fate, thought Ahriman. Fate come round at last.

‘Come.’ Ahriman felt Amon’s hand on his shoulder. ‘I forgive you. Help end what you began, brother. Give it to me.’

Ahriman thought of the towers of the Planet of the Sorcerers, of the hulking shapes walking out of the settling dust, of the dead light in their eyes. ‘I am sorry, my brothers,’ he had said.

Ahriman lifted his head. His eyes met Amon’s, sky-blue meeting night-black. He nodded once.

Amon opened his mouth, and words came out, long strings of syllables that seemed to resonate through the room. Ahriman felt the wards unpicking and the great ocean of the warp wash over him again. In his mind, he thought he heard a laugh like the call of a murder of crows as his mind connected again to the great and secret power of the universe. Amon held his gaze. Ahriman felt his brother’s mind hovering all around him, waiting.

He closed his eyes, reached back, unlocking rooms that he had long kept sealed in the corridors of his mind. The Rubric spilled out, unfolding in precise detail: every ritual, every source, every modification and moment of insight. It formed in his mind, a focused crystal of memory. He held it for an instant.

He could resist. Amon had undone the wards, his power was his again, he could fight, he could… He opened his eyes. Amon was looking at him, his face impassive. Let our Legion die at last…

Ahriman touched his brother’s mind. It felt warm, like the voice of a friend long missed. The memories flowed between them; it lasted an instant, but inside Ahriman felt he lived those long days of folly again. Then Amon closed his eyes and nodded. He turned away, muttering words and formulae. The candles went out and Ahriman felt the cage of wards form around him again, shutting out the sound of the warp until the chamber was silent. Amon reached the door, and it opened. Bright light spilled into the chamber again. Amon paused at the door, and then looked back at Ahriman.

‘Thank you,’ said Amon, and left Ahriman to the dark.

XX
EVERY WEAPON

The renegades came to his call, eventually. Silvanus looked around when he heard their steps shudder across the deck. They strode onto the bridge, spattered in blood and caked in ash. There were five of them: first the one called Astraeos, followed by the half-machine Kadin and the hunched one called Maroth, and behind them in turn two Space Marines with high-crested helms and scorched black armour. He could see a glimmer of green light from under the soot caking their eyepieces. The purr of power armour vibrated through his bones. They stopped on the edge of the clotting pool of blood and oil, looking up at the nest of cables and wires. Silvanus met Astraeos’s eyes, glowing in his blunt-snouted helm. He felt a tremble run under his skin.

‘She is alive,’ he said and heard the dryness in his own throat as he spoke. ‘At least, I think she is…’ Carmenta had stopped moving some time before, but Silvanus had held her dangling hand and tried to talk to her as the green light of her eyes dimmed and flickered. He had not known what to say. He noticed that Astraeos was looking at Carmenta’s blistered fingers. Silvanus looked away and met the slit green eyes of Kadin. The renegade was staring at Silvanus the way a feline predator might look at possible prey. The one called Maroth giggled. Something about hearing a Space Marine make such a noise made Silvanus want to run as fast as he could.

‘Get her down,’ said Astraeos, his voice grinding from the grille of his helm. Kadin stepped forwards, and Silvanus saw the flash of a blade. The nest of cables split with a crackle of sparks. Carmenta’s body fell, then jerked to a halt above the deck and was held at the end of the cables that connected to her body. She swayed for a second, hanging like a broken puppet. A second cut of Kadin’s blade tumbled her to the deck before Silvanus could catch her. He scrabbled forwards, and cradled her head in his hands. Her robes were soaked in blood and clinging to her half-machine body.

‘She needs help,’ he gasped. ‘She–’

‘Is a traitor,’ said Astraeos. Silvanus looked up at the Space Marines. All of them were looking at him. Silvanus looked down at Carmenta. He had met her a handful of times since he had been pressed to serve as the Titan Child’s Navigator. He did not like her, but she clung to life with shallower breaths, and nothing deserved to fade into darkness without someone fighting to save it.

‘How is she a traitor?’ he said, trying to hide the shake in his voice. Astraeos said nothing, and Silvanus felt the blood hammering in his muscles telling him to run. Then the Space Marine gave the smallest of nods.

‘There were enemies on this ship, and we found one of their gunships in the hangar bays.’ He pointed at Carmenta. ‘She betrayed us. There is no other way they could have got on board.’

‘She is still alive.’

Astraeos shifted his gaze to Carmenta.

‘Where is Ahriman?’

‘Ahriman,’ gasped Carmenta, and tried to move, her feet scrabbling on the blood-slick deck. Astraeos knelt and leant his face down so that it was only centimetres from Carmenta and Silvanus.

‘Where is he?’

‘Ahriman,’ said Carmenta again, and her head twisted, jerking out of Silvanus’s grip as she slid to the deck.

‘Tell me,’ said Astraeos, and there was something cold and relentless in his voice.

‘Amon.’ Carmenta brought the word up with a wet cough of dirty blood. ‘Amon.’

Kadin stepped forwards, the knife still glinting in his fist.

‘End this,’ he snarled. Silvanus tensed.

‘No,’ said Astraeos. Kadin froze. Astraeos removed his helm. The face beneath was no more comforting than the blunt lines of the helm: the right eye was silver crystal, the left shadowed beneath a scarred brow. Something in the cast of the lean features made Silvanus think of an old wolf, tired yet still dangerous. Expressions flickered across those features like the deep surge of ocean waves. Silvanus felt a tingle across his skin and smelled the sudden static charge in the air. Carmenta had stopped moving; her breath was low but measured, her gaze locked on Astraeos.

‘Ahriman will judge her betrayal for himself,’ said Astraeos, and straightened.

‘She is dying,’ said Silvanus.

‘Not yet,’ said Astraeos.

Silvanus felt Carmenta shift in his grip. Her feet scrabbled on the decking, then she rolled until she was on her hands and knees. He could hear her breath clicking and sucking out of her mechanical lungs. Slowly she stood. It was painful to watch, and she nearly fell twice. The first time Silvanus tried to catch her, but she batted his arm away. Finally, she stood upright, her robes hanging off her in red-soaked tatters. Her mechadendrites dangled lifeless down her back. Her head came up last, and Silvanus saw the light in her eyes harden.

‘The. Flesh. Is. Weak,’ she croaked. ‘But. I. Am. Not. Flesh.’ She paused and took a breath that sucked with a sound that belied her words. ‘I. Am. Titan. Child.’

Silvanus shivered. The words were the base monotone of a machine.

Astraeos turned to look at Kadin.

‘We need her,’ he said. ‘Judgement will come later.’

‘Need her for what?’ asked Kadin.

‘To take the Sycorax.’

Maroth spluttered and laughed. Silvanus just looked at the Space Marine with his mouth wide open. He had seen the fleet around Amon’s capital ship, and the size of that one warship alone was terrifying.

‘How?’ growled Kadin.

‘With every weapon we have,’ said Astraeos.

‘Cadar.’

The name slipped from Astraeos’s mouth before he could stop himself. The dark filled his eye and beat against his mind as he looked at the bound daemon. The creature hung at the centre of its web of chains. Frost textured its bare skin white, and its empty eyes had been staring at Astraeos from the moment he entered the chamber. He heard Maroth fall to his knees behind him. The broken sorcerer was muttering and mewling like a mother over a cub. Kadin had refused to come into the chamber.

‘Brother.’ Astraeos paused and swallowed in a dry throat, wondering if somewhere Cadar could hear him. ‘Forgive me.’

‘Don’t do this,’ Kadin had said.

Astraeos felt his heartbeats still to almost nothing, and calmness spread through his mind, a mirror reflecting the power of the warp. Ahriman’s teaching had never sat well with him; it had not fitted his soul, like a weapon made for another’s hand.

Until now. His mind rose through levels of focus, the possibility contained in those tiers of stillness unfolding before him. The creature in front of him was like a fold of cold starlight forced into skin. He could see and feel the shape of the bindings that ringed it, that held it in place. His mind touched those bindings. The bound daemon shook, and the chains shivered.

‘By the bindings upon you, I call you to my service.’ The daemon grinned its needle grin. Links of chain began to part. Maroth was screaming over the vox.

‘You do not know what this choice is.’ Kadin had stood in front of Astraeos, his reptile-green eyes unblinking.

‘I must,’ he had said. Kadin had closed his eyes and shook his head.

‘For an oath?’

‘For an oath.’

Kadin had looked him in the eye and then turned away.

‘Remember that, brother.’

‘I bind you to me.’ The words rang through the warp. The daemon’s head twisted from side to side, but its empty eyes stayed fixed on Astraeos. A feeling of red hunger spilled into Astraeos’s thoughts. He could taste blood on his own bared teeth.

‘I bind your existence to my soul.’ The frost was melting from the daemon’s body, the drops becoming crimson as they fell.

‘I bind your will to me.’ The chains holding the daemon shattered. It rose, twisting and juddering like a string of images from a broken pict feed. Astraeos felt one set of bindings dissolve even as his mind made them anew, anchoring them in his own consciousness. The daemon gave a single spasm, its body rippling like a cracked whip. Then it was still, and the darkness and twilight haloed it like a cloak.

Astraeos raised his hand and beckoned. The bound daemon drifted forwards. Maroth had gone silent. The daemon bared its teeth.

+Feed,+ said the daemon into Astraeos’s mind. He flinched at the sensation of its thought. He could still taste blood in his own mouth, and feel the creature’s hunger. Its jaw opened, and closed silently. +Feed,+ it growled again, and he realised that his own jaw was working.

‘You will feed,’ said Astraeos.

XXI
REMADE

The crimson Storm Eagle left the hull of the Titan Child and began a long burn aimed at the core of the gathering fleet. A dozen ships’ sensors saw it, registered it as one of Amon’s own and averted their gaze. The Sycorax itself had been expecting the craft and a hangar deck yawned open to receive its returning child. The gunship settled amongst others of its kind: craft of greater and lesser size, all crimson, all gleaming under the harsh white light. Tech-wrights moved around the other craft, caressing their hulls, connecting or disconnecting pipes and cables while muttering in a low hooting tongue. Bird masks of verdigris-stained bronze covered their faces, and ochre robes swirled around them as they moved. All of them were of the Cyrabor, a clan of long corrupted tech-wrights. Their masters had given their bond to the great sorcerer Amon, and so they served him, maintaining his weapons of war. Such service was a blessing of the many-eyed god, and the Cyrabor viewed the sorcerers they served with fear and awe. When they saw the craft enter, they noted its marks of status, identified it as serving the personal acolytes of Amon and moved to receive it.

The ramp in the Storm Eagle’s nose hinged open. Two of the Cyrabor moved forwards, then stopped. A figure stepped from the inside of the gunship. It wore red armour, and the robed figures recognised the horned crest and disk on the top of the helm as the mark of one of the twin acolytes of Amon. Rents and crumpled impact wounds marked both helmet and armour. The figure paused and looked at the waiting machine-wrights, then began to stride across the deck. Behind him two Rubricae followed, coal black in the stark light. One Cyrabor glanced at its fellow, hooting and clicking in a half-whisper. More of the machine-wrights began to move away, some staring at the red-armoured Space Marine. Many had seen the twin acolytes only once, from a distance, but they knew that they were never apart: where one went, the other followed. Yet here was one alone.

The mutters became louder. Across the chamber, more of the robed figures began to look up, and some began to move towards the docking bay’s exits. Weapon brutes began to pull themselves from niches in the chamber’s walls, weapons clattering ready at the end of slab-muscled limbs. Bronze plates covered their chests and torsos. Their heads were lumps of beaten metal with asymmetric clusters of multi-coloured rangefinders. They stalked forwards, their eyes fixed on the Space Marine who was still walking calmly across the deck. Low-level threat condition messages began to pulse across the Sycorax’s vox-net. Requests for more details came back from command nodes. The Space Marine halted, his gaze taking in the closing ring of weapon brutes.

Somewhere, a series of checks and questions hit a critical level of concern. A siren started to wail in the distance. A challenge began to burble from the weapon brutes. The Space Marine looked back at the Storm Eagle. His voice when he spoke was clear and calm.

‘Now,’ he said.

Astraeos began to run. Behind him, the two Rubricae raised their bolters. He could feel the ghosts of their movements in his mind. The creatures in front of him were tall, hunched, lumps of brass and bronze fused with spiral-tattooed flesh. A sweep of his mind counted twenty in the hangar bay. He sensed their crude thought processes shift from challenge to threat in a heartbeat.

Gun mounts roared. A lattice of fire converged on him. Astraeos did not stop. His mind re-formed reality around him. There was a stutter in time. He felt the rounds pass through him; they felt like the prick of needles. He was a ghost flicking between solid and illusion. Ricochet sparks scored the deck behind him.

+Fire,+ he sent. Behind him, the Rubricae obeyed. A weapon brute exploded, its flesh and blood burning before it could hit the deck. A tech-wright beside it became a collapsing torch of cyan and rose flames. Astraeos had a curved khopesh sword hanging from his belt, but his own straight sword was in his grip. The bolt pistol in his other hand roared. Another brute fell, its head a bloody crater. The rest kept firing, heaping the deck at their feet with shell cases.

Sirens screamed through the docking bay. Strobing yellow light filled Astraeos’s eyes, and then he hit the enemy line and was amongst the weapon brutes. The brute in front of him seemed to realise he was not stopping and tried to shuffle backwards. Astraeos’s blow split it from shoulder to hip, and he felt his blade become blood-hot in his hand as it cut. Slick pink offal spilled onto the deck. Astraeos pivoted with the momentum of his first blow and brought his sword around low. A second weapon brute collapsed, its legs severed at the knee. It fired as it fell, spraying rounds into the air as it scrambled to rise on bloody stumps. The remaining brutes were turning to try and bring their guns to bear.

Astraeos raised his hand. A wave of telekinetic force ripped out along a line from the point of his palm. Weapon brutes and debris spun into the air. Some of the creatures were still firing as they tumbled. A stray round found a fuel line and a red mushroom of flame thumped upwards. The weapon brutes fell back to the deck with cracks of snapping bones. Machine-wrights were running for the blast doors even as they sealed. A fresh cluster of weapon brutes lumbered from their niches at the far end of the bay.

A shadow was spreading from the open ramp of the Storm Eagle. It coiled along the deck and the snout of the gunship like an exhalation of frozen night. The figure of the bound daemon emerged from the craft’s troop compartment. It floated forwards, moving with serene slowness. The surviving weapon brutes registered its presence and swivelled to fire. A sphere of lightning flashed around the daemon as a storm of rounds rose to meet it, sheets of white blotting out the red alarm lights. A smell of sweet flowers and spoiled meat filled the air. An arc of lightning whipped out, and a machine-wright exploded. The lightning jumped on, running from body to body, snaking across the metal of the deck in thick ropes.

The creature was roaring in Astraeos’s mind, and he bit back the shriek of glee that was rising in his throat. His vision crawled with ghost images as his mind boiled. He felt a part of his concentration slip, and a blow crashed into his right shoulder. He staggered, caught himself and ducked the second blow. A weapon brute, its guns dry, had barrelled into him, swinging its flesh-metal arms as clubs. His mind reached into the daemon’s chest and crushed its heart. It collapsed to the floor with a dull thump of slack muscle.

The Rubricae were beside him now, shooting any of the weapon brutes that tried to rise from where they had fallen. He glanced back to the Storm Eagle. Kadin had emerged, and behind him was Silvanus, supporting the crumpled form of Carmenta.

+Ready?+ he sent, and Carmenta nodded stiffly. He switched his sending to Kadin. +Get her to where she needs to be.+ Kadin did not acknowledge the order, but moved towards a tower of machinery which rose from the hold’s deck. Carmenta and Silvanus limped after Kadin, keeping close to his back as if sheltering from a high wind. Astraeos saw rounds spark off Kadin’s armour.

They did not have long: a minute at best, a handful of seconds at worst. Amon and his servants would be coming. Against those numbers, there was no hope. Astraeos smiled behind his helm as he pointed his sword and flame washed across a weapon brute. Its skin flaked black, the meat of its muscle cooking as it staggered and collapsed. There was next to no hope as it was.

To his left, the daemon was drifting forwards. Lightning reached out from its body and crawled over the hull of a hunch-winged craft. The fuel feeds linked to the craft ignited, and it rose into the air on a plume of oil-stained flame. Astraeos felt the wash of heat through his armour. He dived to the side as the craft crashed down onto the deck. A second explosion blossomed and became a red and black cloud that spread across the bay’s ceiling.

Astraeos came to his feet. The docking bay was a fire- and smoke-smeared vision of hell. Bodies lay scattered in blackened heaps; weapons fire still stitched through the smoke. As he watched, another bolt of lightning bleached the drifting smoke white. He heard the daemon cackle at the edge of his thoughts. The two Rubricae walked through the flames, their heads and weapons turning to fire at targets that Astraeos could not see.

+It must be now,+ he sent. The vox crackled, and Kadin was speaking in his ear.

‘It won’t work, brother. She collapsed when she connected to the machines. We–’

‘I. Am. Here. Librarian.’ The voice cut across the vox. It was a voice made of the scratch of static and the clicking of gears. It shook Astraeos’s skull.

+Take it,+ he sent, and mag-locked his feet to the deck.

A weapon brute, its left arm severed, loped towards him. He measured the distance to the charging brute with a glance. It would never reach him.

The sirens fell silent. Every light in the hangar bay went dark. For an instant, before his helmet display compensated, he felt as if he were watching flames and shadows dance in a cave far beneath the earth. Then he felt the deck tremble as the external blast doors ground open. Starlight met firelight, and a wind began to howl. A second later, the atmospheric containment field cut out. The open blast doors exhaled the rolling cloud of flame and smoke. Bodies were dragged across the deck. The living flailed as they tumbled out into the night beyond the Sycorax’s hull. Then, the sucking wind was gone and Astraeos was standing in dark silence. He began to move, and the daemon and Rubricae followed him. He reached out and touched Carmenta’s mind.

+Find Ahriman, mistress. Find him and keep us alive+.

It took three minutes for the forces on board the Sycorax to realise the scale of the threat they faced. Cohorts of bronze-armoured Cyrabor wardens mobilised from their lodges deep in the Sycorax’s gut. Sorcerers breathed commands into hundreds of Rubricae and they began to march through the corridors of their ship, silent but for the ring of their feet on the decking.

Amon, alone in his high tower on the spine of the Sycorax, received a sending from one of his inner circle, and rose from his meditation. He had taken five paces across the chamber when the Sycorax began to shudder.

The Cyrabor machine-wrights felt it first. Attached to the Sycorax by cables and webs of half-metal flesh, they began to babble and scream. They felt a presence rise through the ship’s systems like a shark emerging from the depths. It spread like poison, flooding from minor system to minor system until it was pouring into the controls of entire sections of the ship.

The Sycorax had swum the lightless depths of the Eye of Terror for millennia; the warp had permeated its hull and heart, and in a very real sense, it was alive. Every drop of blood spilled on its decks, every restless dream of its crew, every battle it had fought, had grown inside its bones. It was a proud creature with a mind like a king predator, but it was unprepared as a black cloud poured into its systems. The cloud spread to machines, to cypher slaves and datastacks, it spread between parts of the Sycorax not connected to anything else, and it spread even as the Sycorax tried to contain it. And all the while, as it subverted systems and melted overrides, the cloud called a name.

‘Titan Child,’ it roared, as if calling for vengeance for the dead.

Across the ship, bulkheads slammed shut on troops running to respond to the incursion. Plasma reactor vents flooded sections with glowing super-heated clouds. Outer deck holds opened to deep space. Emergency hatches opened in sequence, creating open passages from the depths of the Sycorax to the cold void. Hundreds of slaves, machine-wrights, warriors and drone breeds died in the minutes after they heard the alert sirens. They died scrabbling for weapons; they died in the dark, half waking from dreams; they died muttering prayers to the god of fate that had betrayed them.

The Sycorax reacted like a beast clawing at its own flesh as parasites ate it from within. It activated defence turrets in corridors packed with its own slave crew. Power, gravity and life support fluctuated across the ship. Airless dark swallowed the bridge, and the human slave crew choked as the atmosphere was sucked from the chamber. Electrical discharges ran through the hull, arcing between walls and floors.

Only the Thousand Sons moved through the ship with unblunted purpose. The sorcerers melted through closed bulkheads with blue-hot fire, and jumped through barriers like insubstantial ghosts as they moved to meet the enemy. With them came hundreds of Rubricae, slow marching statues of red armour, the green light cold and obedient in their eyes.

A cold peace had come to Ahriman after Amon had left. He had slid back into his own mind until he was walking through the palace of memories. It was quiet in a way that he had never realised possible. His footsteps echoed as they carried him down passages he had not walked for a very long time. He heard old memories scratching at the doors. Occasionally he paused, listened, and heard the voices of friends long gone. Sometimes his hand went to push a door open, but he always hesitated, and then walked on. He walked until he found himself in front of a small door. A carving of birds spiralling towards the sun covered the door’s dark wood. Dust had accumulated in the recesses. There were older doors in the palace, but this was a door he had not opened since he had first closed it. He hesitated, then pushed. The door swung softly open.

A wide balcony extended away from him to meet a view of dry desert, and a sky divided between clear blue and a layer of ochre storm cloud. A boy sat at the edge of the balcony, swinging his legs into the warm air, his hair stirring in a sudden gust of wind. He was tossing stones into the air, catching them without looking at them. Occasionally the boy would close his eyes, and a stone would halt in its fall to hang in the air. He looked no more than ten, but there was a seriousness to his face that made him seem older as soon as he looked up at Ahriman. The boy’s eyes were bright blue. He smiled.

‘Hello, Ahzek,’ he said, and the stone suspended in the air in front of him dropped into his palm. Ahriman smiled.

‘Ohrmuzd,’ said Ahriman, and watched as the memory of his true brother turned away, closed his eyes and tossed another stone into the air. It hung, the black water-polished ovoid turning slowly in front of Ohrmuzd’s closed eyes.

Ahriman sat by his brother. He had no armour, he realised – just a pale blue tunic that was the echo of the one Ohrmuzd had worn in this memory. He looked at his twin. The lines of the young face were the mirror of his own. He had remembered every gesture and syllable of this moment since it had first unfolded. At the time, he had wondered why. Later, with Ohrmuzd gone, he had thought he knew the reason. Now, as he gazed at his twin again, he knew he had been wrong before.

‘Stop it,’ said Ohrmuzd without opening his eyes. ‘You are distracting me.’

‘Sorry,’ said Ahriman, and looked towards the horizon. The dirty yellow cloud had grown, eating up the blue of the sky. A fork of lightning flashed at the cloud’s edge. A warm wind swirled over Ahriman’s skin, and he could smell the storm charge in the air. He frowned.

‘There was no storm,’ said Ahriman.

‘What?’ said Ohrmuzd, a note of irritation in his voice.

‘There should be no storm. This is the memory of the day before we were sent as aspirants to the Fifteenth Legion. There was no storm that day.’

Ohrmuzd shrugged. His face was smooth, unmarked by any of the many changes that would come in the years to follow. Ahriman felt his lips form a weak smile; he was in a sense looking at his own face; they had been almost indistinguishable except for perhaps a tendency for Ahriman’s forehead to crease when he was in thought, or worried. He had been worried that day; all the dire possibilities of what was about to happen to them had crowded his thoughts, so that he could do nothing but roll them over and over and over in his mind. Ohrmuzd had known, he had always known.

‘It will be all right, Az,’ said Ohrmuzd. Ahriman blinked, then stared at his brother as he had in his memory. He had said something, too, some frightened little question. ‘Stop that,’ Ohrmuzd had replied. ‘You always have to think the worst, don’t you?’

‘I am sorry,’ said Ahriman, and knew that he had said the same in the past.

‘And stop saying sorry.’ Ohrmuzd had opened his eyes and let the floating stone fall into his palm. ‘Can’t you just be excited? Think of what we might become, what we might learn, what we might do.’ He gave Ahriman a sharp look. ‘Have you been dreaming again?’

He had, of course. He had always dreamed and, even when he was a child, those dreams had had a tendency to come true. Ohrmuzd sighed. ‘They are not necessarily true, you know.’ His voice dipped the way it always had when he had found an opportunity to impart serious knowledge. ‘To talk of fate is foolishness.’

‘You never could resist quoting to show off,’ Ahriman chuckled.

‘Fate is for us to choose, to make our own. If we are destined for a particular future, it is because we have chosen that end.’ Ohrmuzd gave the solemn nod of a clever child pronouncing truth. Then he grinned. ‘Anyway, we will be all right.’ He glanced at Ahriman and there was fierceness in his eyes. ‘I will make sure it is all right, Az.’

Ahriman said nothing. He looked away from his brother, back to the storm that had rolled over the view like a curtain. The blue sky was gone, and the light had a shrouded, dirty quality. Rain began to fall, first a few drops, then more, until water was trailing out of the sky and streams rolled down the faces of the dunes. Ahriman breathed in. There had been no storm that day, but the air still smelled of the storms that he remembered.

‘I wish you had been right,’ said Ahriman, after a long pause. Ahriman suddenly could not remember what his brother had said next. ‘I have reached the end. It would have been better if we had never begun… If I had never begun. It’s over now at last.’

‘No.’

Ahriman’s head snapped around. Ohrmuzd was looking at him, wide blue eyes laughing as the rain ran down his face.

‘What did you say?’ The rain was swallowing the sound of his voice. A sheet of lightning turned the world white for an instant.

‘No, Ahzek.’ Ohrmuzd smiled, and then laughed into the storm. ‘It’s not over yet.’ Ahriman felt the ground tremble. He could not see through the rain. The thunder shook him.

His head came up, and his eyes opened to the darkness as the cell shook again. Above him, the chains holding him chimed as they rattled together. His heart was hammering. A metallic shriek was pushing into his ears. The floor and walls were glowing, the runes and marks etched into the stone blazing too bright to look at. The shackles around his ankles and feet were burning into his skin. The noise soared higher and higher. He could feel pressure inside and outside of his skull.

The door exploded in a shower of molten metal. Ahriman felt the warp meet his mind like a flood tide. His head was spinning as he saw a figure stride through the glowing wound that had been the door. The figure wore red armour and his helm was that of a Thousand Son, and he held a sword in each hand: one a curved khopesh, the other a straight blade wound with golden serpents. Ahriman recognised him; the way the figure moved marked him as clearly as if he had shouted his name.

+Ahriman,+ sent Astraeos as he paced forwards. Behind him, the bound daemon floated, its form rippling with dark cords of unlight. The shapes of two Rubricae filled the door like stone sentinels. Their armour was soot-black. Ahriman felt a knot of ice bunch in his chest. Astraeos raised his sword, and cut down. Ahriman could see the arc of the blade, could feel the power in the cut, the total focus that burned along its edge. The chains above Ahriman’s head parted and he fell to the floor. He looked up as Astraeos removed his helm and looked down at him.

Ahriman looked to the daemon hovering above. It had grown long needle blades of bone from its fingers. Blood dripped from the talon’s tips. The bound daemon was smiling its shark smile.

‘What have you done?’ breathed Ahriman. Astraeos sheathed his sword, a grim smile twisting his scarred face for an instant.

‘Fulfilled my oaths,’ he said.

They ran down corridors lined in silver and lapis, past banners covered in the languages of mankind’s long past. Lights pulsed on and off. They ran through blackness, then brightness. Ahriman’s bare feet rang on the deck as he ran, the chains still hanging from his wrists and ankles clattering in his wake. Blood trickled down his side from the lips of the ragged shell wound. Astraeos was moving in front of him, bolt pistol tracking every pulsing shadow. The daemon followed them, its presence crackling over the walls in arcs of black energy. He could hear it hissing in his thoughts. There were other presences in his mind; he could feel them probing, running after them like hounds in the warp.

My brothers, he thought. I am running again.

Doors and hatches opened at their approach, and sealed again after they passed. Sometimes they would not open and Astraeos would mutter and start in a new direction.

The Librarian’s thoughts were cold, aligned on their path but spread across a dozen mental processes that spun like interlocking devices. At another time, Ahriman would have been proud. Now, his thoughts were numb.

Why do I run? What am I running to preserve? A life lived on the margins, persisting without any purpose other than to draw the next breath?

They ran into a wide-mouthed passage, its pipe-clad ceiling reaching far above their heads. A toothed door opened to greet them at the passage end. The air was thin, the pressure and oxygen levels low. His hearts surged to compensate, but he could feel his steps faltering. Sharp, jagged pains filled his chest and his breaths were wet with blood.

Their hunters were close behind them, now; he could feel them converging on their position.

+‘Ahriman.’+ The shout was both sound and psychic sending. He felt an armoured hand close on his arm. He turned and met Astraeos’s gaze. ‘Move,’ growled Astraeos, and pulled him, but he resisted.

They are my brothers. Ahriman stopped in the middle of the passage. Astraeos turned to look back at him, and the bound daemon drifted to a halt. Ahriman looked down at the shackles around his wrists. Symbols spiralled across the loops of metal, half melted and distorted but still visible.

I will not run. Not again.

He turned to look behind him.

I will stand against fate, even if it destroys me.

Thirty paces behind them, a section of the wall glowed from orange to white. It bulged, like a blister forming on charring skin, and then blew outwards in a spray of molten metal.

A dozen Rubricae advanced out of the glowing breach. They marched forwards slowly, their red armour appearing black in the low light. Ahriman felt his heartbeat filling his chest. He blinked, seeing them for a second under a red sun, emerging from a dust cloud. The Rubricae levelled their boltguns, twelve black circles looking at him like the eyes of the dead, like…

…a red sun with a serpentine corona. A raven circling, its wings a black silhouette against the fire.

‘Your fate, Ahriman,’ said a voice that was made of the roar of the sun and the call of carrion. ‘Your fate come around at last. Your fate. Your choice…’

His mind felt disconnected from his body, as if he were looking at what was happening from far away, from the other side of a memory.

…the sun was getting larger. Its boiling red surface filled his mind’s eye. He could feel the sun’s heat, the fury of its core. He could see a distant speck that was the silhouette of a raven…

‘It was always this choice…’ called the raven.

The Rubricae began to fire.

Astraeos grunted as a dome of energy expanded around him and Ahriman. The shield blistered with impacts, multi-coloured fire spraying across its surface. Astraeos juddered, as if each round that hit the shield was a blow to his body.

The bound daemon drifted forwards, and black lightning leapt from its eyes and hit a Rubricae. A flash filled the passage, turning light to shadow, and dark to bright white. Three Rubricae lay on the floor, dust spilling from rents in their armour. For a second, the Rubricae’s fire slackened.

A low shriek filled the passage, like broken glass grating together, like a gale howling through burned cities. On the floor, the dust began to drain back into the Rubricae. Slowly, they stood, worms of green light crawling over the holes in their armour. They stepped forwards and began to fire. The daemon hissed like a cat and jerked backwards.

Astraeos turned his face to Ahriman.

‘Run,’ croaked Astraeos. He was weeping blood.

…the red sun filled his soul. His mind was blind. He could only hear the raven. ‘There is nothing that cannot be changed. Nothing that cannot be overturned by knowledge and the will to wield it. You know this; you have always known this…’

Ahriman looked up; his movements slow, so slow. Beyond the dome of Astraeos’s shield, the Rubricae were moving, walking in with slow purpose. Astraeos collapsed, his limbs twitching. There was a burned sugar stench in the thin air. One of the Rubricae stepped forwards, its weapon rising in one hand, the muzzle of its bolter a mouth waiting to speak a last greeting. It was one pace away from him.

…a plain of dust beneath black glass mountains, a red sun rising to colour the dawn with blood. His brothers’ eyes looking at him, waiting.

‘You failed them,’ called the raven. ‘Is that the salvation you were looking for?’

‘Magnus,’ called Ahriman as he felt the raven’s wings beat around him. ‘Father, is it you?’

‘No,’ laughed the raven.

‘What are you?’

‘You know my name,’ called the raven.

Ahriman’s eyes stared back at the muzzle of the gun. His mind was clear. Everything was moving to a slow pulse. This was not the trained calm of battle, it was not the serenity of meditation, it was something else: a fulcrum moment, a blade-edge of time. He could feel the Rubricae’s finger begin to tighten on the trigger.

‘No,’ said Ahriman.

The Rubricae’s finger tightened. It shifted forwards as if leaning into a wind. The muzzle was a finger-width from his eye.

+No.+ The command pulsed out of him, washing across the encircling ranks. The Rubricae’s finger froze. Ahriman turned his head to look at the other Rubricae. They were completely still. He spoke their names in his mind, and heard their dead voices answer him.

Astraeos looked up at him, fatigue bleeding off him in waves. Ahriman bent down and pulled him to his feet. Astraeos glanced at the dozen Rubricae.

+What is this?+

+A beginning,+ sent Ahriman.

Kadin waited, his bolter cradled in his crude metal hands. It was quiet, but he knew better than to find that a good sign. He shifted on the tower of machinery and felt ice crack and fall from his armour as he moved. The hangar bay was void-cold and as dark as a tomb.

It will be our tomb, he thought. Amber target markers shifted as he glanced between the sealed entrances to the bay. Everything was a luminous cold green. Beside him Carmenta stirred. He looked down at where she lay. Cables snaked from beneath her robes to ducts in the tower top beneath their feet. She had been twitching every now and again ever since the hangar bay had gone dark. Silvanus squatted by her, his eyes closed behind the illuminated visor of his void suit. Occasionally, the vox cut in for a second, and Kadin could hear the man’s teeth chattering.

‘Be silent,’ he growled. The Navigator looked up at him.

‘What?’

‘Your teeth are making a noise.’

‘I am cold.’

Kadin shrugged.

‘That is not my problem. Your noise is.’

The Navigator looked like he was about to say something, then he nodded and clamped his teeth together. Five seconds later, the man’s whole body started shaking. Kadin nodded and turned back to scanning the hangar deck.

Light filled his eyes. A red glow was spreading across one of the sealed entrances like a blush spreading over a cheek. Kadin brought his bolter up. Target runes converged on the glowing red.

‘What is happening?’ asked Silvanus.

Kadin said nothing. The door was glowing a poured-iron orange now.

‘What–’ began Silvanus. The door burst apart. Hot globules of metal spattered across the deck. Air rushed through the glowing breach into the vacuum of the hangar bay. It met the void’s cold and became a vast breath of white fog.

Kadin started raking the opening with a dispersed pattern of fire. Shapes moved forwards through the explosions, heavy armoured shapes that moved with slow purpose. A red targeting rune spun above one of the shapes, and he put a trio of rounds into it. It reeled, then fell. His eyes flicked to the next and he fired again. Five had come through the breach and he could see more behind them. He could hold them at the breach for two minutes, he reckoned, then another three for them to cross the deck to the tower.

Then Kadin saw the first figure he had put down rise from the floor. More came through the cooling breach. He could see red armour glistening like fresh blood. At that moment, a second of the sealed entrances burst open.

‘What’s happening?’ screamed Silvanus.

‘We are getting ready to die,’ replied Kadin, as he fired another burst.

Ahriman’s unarmoured skin bleached white in the cold as he strode onto the hangar deck. He could see gunfire spitting across the hangar from a tower of machinery. Astraeos followed on his left, his swords drawn and lit with cold fire. To his right, Rubricae and sorcerers were spilling into the space from a hole melted through a blast door. Behind Ahriman, his own Rubricae followed him in lockstep.

Lines of fire crossed the darkness towards them, burning in a rainbow of colours. The bound daemon drifted above them, surrounded by a halo of sheet lightning. Bolts of darkness fell from it as it ascended. Fire rose to meet it, tearing through its lightning aura. It began to shriek, twisting like a broken-winged bird. Ahriman kept walking towards the centre of the hangar bay. Fire flicked towards him and he deflected it with a twitch of his thoughts. Power flowed through him and radiated outwards in a halo of blue flame. It was so simple, like having been half blind and now able to see again.

Ahriman could see Kadin, standing on the gantry at the top of the machine tower, fire spitting from the barrel of his bolter. Carmenta lay on the floor behind Kadin. Cables crawled over her from where they spilled from access panels and data ducts. Silvanus crouched beside her; he had his eyes screwed shut.

Ahriman stopped. He was at the centre of the hangar bay now, at the base of the tower from which Kadin was still firing. Ahriman’s dozen Rubricae formed a circle around him, facing outwards. A thought from Ahriman and they stopped firing. A metre beyond their circle, explosions danced across an invisible barrier. Astraeos looked at Ahriman with a flicker of concern. The hangar was full of Amon’s forces, hundreds of Rubricae encircling them in an unbroken wall.

+This will work?+

Ahriman smiled.

He looked at the army of Rubricae gathered in the hangar. He spoke their names, rolling them through the warp like the notes of a song. Other minds rose to oppose him, but he poured his will into the song of names. The warp felt like a river of fire as it flowed through him. The Rubricae stopped firing.

Astraeos looked at Ahriman as if he had never really seen him before.

+It’s not over yet,+ sent Ahriman. He could feel the sorcerers who stood at the back of the ranks of Rubricae recoiling in shock at what had just happened. There were thirty-six of them. A good number and all were powerful, but not powerful enough.

The air became heavy, laden with static and the scent of ozone. He felt the wills of the thirty-six sorcerers push into the warp. Huge pieces of wrecked machinery rose into the air as if pulled on invisible chains. Ahriman nodded to himself as if impressed.

The pieces of wreckage hurtled towards him. His mind reached out and plunged into each piece of twisted metal. He felt their weight, their dimensions, and the spinning of their atoms. He formed a thought, and it caught in the warp like a spark set to kindling. The wreckage dissolved as it flew, falling to the deck as a rain of fine metallic sand.

+Enough.+ The thought rang through the warp. Silence fell. A new presence had entered the vast chamber; it burned like a newborn star, shining with fury. +Ahriman.+ Amon’s thought voice rippled through the warp.

Ahriman turned to look to where the thought voice had come from. The thousand luminous eyes of the Rubricae turned with him. They parted, forming a corridor to a high door at the far side of the hangar bay.

+They are not slaves, you said,+ laughed Amon’s thought voice. +I thought your beliefs were stronger than this. A shame, they held a type of honour if nothing else.+

Amon walked forwards. The tip of his staff clicked on the soot-covered floor in time with every step.

+I cannot let you destroy our Legion,+ sent Ahriman, his voice rolling through every living mind in the chamber and far beyond. Throughout the Sycorax and the fleet of ships gathered in the void, they heard him. +You have fallen, Amon. You have allowed despair to blind you to hope. I understand this, I know why, but it is a path of lies. There is another way.+

Above Ahriman the bound daemon shrieked, its scream spilling through the air as it descended like a comet. Amon raised his staff. Then there was a blur of white light, a sound like glass shattering, and the daemon was falling, smoke and frozen blood vapour trailing behind it. Beside Ahriman, Astraeos fell as if struck by an axe. A wash of blood vomited from his mouth and Ahriman heard bones crack.

Amon looked down, continued walking between the ranks of Rubricae. The silk of his robe rippled with each slow stride.

Ahriman turned at a low growl of pain. Astraeos was trying to rise from the deck. Blood had pooled in his eye sockets, and his hands and legs were scrabbling for purchase. Ahriman reached down and placed a bare hand on Astraeos’s shoulder.

‘Be still, my friend,’ he said quietly. ‘Be still. You have paid your oaths. I need no more of you now.’ He glanced to where Kadin crouched behind a bank of machinery, the still form of Carmenta at his feet. He looked back to Amon advancing towards him. ‘But I do need your sword,’ he said, and took the blade from Astraeos’s hand as he stood. The sword was unfamiliar in his hand, its serpent-etched blade a dull weight. He pulsed his mind into its crystal core. The golden serpents began to burn and writhe along the blade.

Amon had stopped nine paces away. A nimbus of light played around the curved horns of Amon’s helm and the top of his staff. Ahriman felt the pressure building behind his eyes at the magnitude of power held in check within Amon.

+You are unarmoured,+ sent Amon.

+A minor impediment,+ replied Ahriman. The wound in his side was bleeding freely now, and he could feel the silver shards shift with every beat of his hearts.

+I would have given you a good death. Not the end you deserved, but a last gift from a friend.+

Ahriman felt the sorrowful smile bound into the thought.

+It has to be like this,+ sent Ahriman, and raised Astraeos’s sword. The chains hanging from his wrists clinked. +It has to be. All power is ritual. And this is ritual, Amon. Fate decided by the sword at the centre of the circle, beneath the eyes of all.+

+Always teaching,+ laughed Amon, a real laugh that cracked the still air.

Ahriman levelled the sword with both hands. He flexed his fingers against the hide-bound grip. His mind was clear, no ritual patterns of thought, no architecture of power held on a trigger in his soul. Just the moment of waiting, extending in slow heartbeats.

White fire shot from Amon’s eyes. Ahriman met it with a wall of force. The fire sprayed out in mid-air. Ahriman felt the fire surge against his mind, released the shield, swallowed the flame into his soul, and spat it back out.

The fire washed over Amon, soaking into his body like water into sand. Ahriman raised his sword and paced forwards. He could feel the path of the blow, every feint, every intention. He cut down. Amon’s staff spun in the air, the serpentine sun at its tip scything towards his legs. Ahriman’s sword met the blow, and he felt the muscles tear in his shoulders. Half-clotted blood spat from the wound in his side, and silver-edged pain shot up his spine. He turned his wrists, let the staff slide past, and spun his sword to cut again.

Amon stepped back, spinning his staff. A razor of invisible force sliced from Amon’s mind and opened a bloody line across Ahriman’s arms. Suddenly, his hands were sticky with his own blood. More blood blossomed across the fabric of his robe. He whirled forwards, his movement, blade and mind folding together to one point. Staff and sword met in a blink of supernova-bright light. Ahriman stumbled, and his mind opened for a second.

Amon’s mind leapt from his body and battered into Ahriman’s mind before he could recover. It was a thundercloud of raw energy, lit from within by veins of red fire. Ahriman fell, his sword sliding from his grip. Amon’s mind tumbled through Ahriman’s consciousness, raking lines of fire in its wake. White heat ran along Ahriman’s nerves and filled his head. He was burning from inside, body and soul. Bright, cold pain stabbed in his chest. He tasted silver on his tongue and felt sharp edges slice towards his hearts. Had he risked too much? Would he fail even now?

Fire uncoiled from Amon’s limbs where he stood above Ahriman. The light in the hangar darkened. Amon grew taller, and taller, an outline in heat and black oblivion. He rose to his feet and then into the air. Ahriman could taste burning meat in his mouth. His tongue was blistering, his veins were clotting with red ice. He looked up at the burning outline of Amon.

+You will be as you have made us.+ Amon’s voice filled Ahriman’s mind. +Dust.+

His body shaking, Ahriman shook his head slowly.

+The Rubric.+ Ahriman’s voice was clear and cold. +You were right about the Rubric. It is a part of all Thousand Sons now. It is bound into our beings.+ Amon went still, and Ahriman saw that he finally understood. +The Rubric runs through us all, linking us, sustaining us.+ Amon tried to pull his mind back from Ahriman’s, but could not. +And its power is in my hand.+

The final words of the Rubric, old before mankind had dreamed, sprang from Ahriman’s lips. Amon heard them, and was screaming even as he burned brighter and brighter. Ahriman no longer saw the hangar, just a black void, and the ghost impression of Amon outlined in golden light. Glowing cords connected them together, binding them closer as Amon writhed.

+‘Amon,’+ said Ahriman with tongue and thought.

Amon’s shriek rose through the air, higher and higher.

+No. No, you cannot.+ Amon’s voice rang in Ahriman’s head. A gale was rising, spiralling into a cyclone around the glowing form of Amon.

White light flared around Amon. Ahriman felt his brother’s last breath as his flesh became dust, like a peal of thunder on a desert horizon.

Amon’s armour came apart, each component pulling away from the other, spilling grey dust into the turning wind.

The vortex enveloped Ahriman and lifted him from the ground. The separate pieces of Amon’s armour orbited Ahriman, aligning over his splayed body. Then, one plate at a time, they slid into place over Ahriman’s flesh. Finally Amon’s horned helm slipped over Ahriman’s skull. He saw the world bathed in data and overlaid with auras bleeding from the warp. He floated down to the floor.

Every eye was on him, both living and dead. The minds of the living sorcerers were teetering on the edge of indecision. The dead simply waited.

He felt his tongue move in his mouth, the settling beat of his hearts, the slight shifting of his muscles. He closed his eyes for a second.

Now it is done, he thought. Now there is only one way, and that way is forward.

Ahriman raised his hands. Flames leapt from the floor. Red lacquer peeled from the armour of every Rubricae and sorcerer. The tatters of paint spun in the flames. Polished silver armour plate reflected the fire for a long moment, shimmering like the surface of burning oil. Then the flames flickered blue, and the silver armour became polished sapphire. Ahriman looked across the ranks of blue armour. Somewhere at the back of his mind, he heard a raven call.

Slowly, he knelt and bowed his head.

‘I am sorry, my brothers.’ He looked up. The slits of his helm flared with cold light. ‘Now we begin again.’

EPILOGUE

The bridge of the Sycorax was quiet for all its vastness, a place of soft, mechanical clicks and the whispered commands of the Cyrabor machine-wrights. The seer crystal floated at the centre of the bridge’s nave, a sphere as wide as Ahriman was tall. It sang in Ahriman’s mind, like a glass bell struck by a silver hammer.

Images of battle clouded the crystal’s depths. Ahriman watched as a spear-hulled ship spun against the distant stars. Its engines fired in ragged blasts. Burning vapour seeped from fissures in its hull. It fired, ragged scatters of brightness spattering into the dead void, hitting nothing. A macro-warhead hit the dying ship. The view in the crystal blinked white as the warhead detonated. The ship tore into pieces, each one burning as it spun away into darkness like a torch tossed into a well.

Ahriman’s mind pulled the view back and vision within the sphere broadened. Las-fire latticed the blackness; the stars were lost amongst the detonations of torpedoes. He could trace the formations of ships moving together, cutting through the void to circle and kill their prey. The bright splash of a high-mass plasma explosion drew his eye for a second. Some would escape, there was no helping that. Fate would find them, he was sure.

Many of Amon’s assembled fleet had transferred their loyalty to Ahriman. Some had not. A handful of renegades and mongrel warbands had answered his call for fealty with cannon fire. Others had fled. Ahriman had sent one order: run them down.

Of such necessities are monsters made, he thought. But it was necessary; there would be blood and ruin before the end of the path they now walked. It was unfortunate: a waste, but one that they would recover from. Most of the warbands drawn to Amon’s flame had seen little issue with transferring their loyalty to another lord. Ahriman curled his lip.

Of the Thousand Sons, only two groups had refused to bend their knees to him. Calitiedies, lord of an order of sorcerers from half a dozen Legions, had run before any other. The Second Circle had not fired but had not responded to Ahriman’s call and had taken two dozen of his brothers beyond his reach. He had let them go, ordering the hunters to different targets.

Ahriman turned away from the crystal, and the image within the sphere clouded. Carmenta sat in the command throne, her flesh and augmetics hidden by a thick robe of red velvet. Her head was bowed, the light of her eyes dim within the cave of her cowl. Cables ran from the deck to slither over the throne and vanish within the robes. The cables buzzed with a teeth-aching purr. She had been there ever since they had disconnected her from the machine tower in the hangar bay. Even that had nearly killed her. That did not worry him – it was to be expected.

‘Mistress,’ he said clearly, and stepped to the base of the command throne. Her head came up slowly. Green light ignited beneath the cowl, growing slowly brighter. A drone of machine code came from her hidden mouth. She paused. Ahriman heard something rasp in her throat, and then she shivered.

‘You wish to tell me that I will live,’ said Carmenta, her voice a halting monotone.

‘Which speaks, the Titan Child or Carmenta?’

‘Which answers, Horkos or Ahriman?’

He laughed, then wondered if it was supposed to have been a joke.

‘My intention was humorous,’ said Carmenta as if following his thoughts. ‘It was a poor effort.’

He nodded, then reached up to pull the horned helm from his head. He took a breath, noted the odd scent of cinnamon in the air that seemed to follow the Cyrabor everywhere.

‘The Titan Child will be destroyed before we leave,’ he said carefully.

‘Before the fleet leaves,’ intoned Carmenta, the emphasis a sudden rise in volume. ‘What need do you have for one husk of a ship now?’

‘It is–’

‘A place of memory and discarded pasts.’ Carmenta raised her machine eyes to Ahriman’s gaze. ‘Let it burn.’

‘You will be the Sycorax now,’ said Ahriman, looking across the bridge as if to indicate the bronze and silver instruments, the soft movements of the machine-wrights. A clicking pulse of machine code breathed from Carmenta, and then she shook her head slowly.

‘No. The Sycorax will be me.’ She coughed a stream of numbers. ‘A fitting punishment.’

A pause hung in the air.

‘Why?’ she said. ‘Why forgive my betrayal?’

Ahriman gave a tired and crooked smile.

‘We must all hope that betrayal can be forgiven,’ he said and turned away.

After he had gone, and his footsteps had faded, Carmenta nodded once to herself. Her head lowered, the light in her eyes dimmed, and she began to mutter the dream song of her machine.

‘It should be destroyed,’ said Kadin as they watched the silver doors shut on the bound daemon. The screaming faces of gargoyles carved in high relief covered the doors, their cheeks and eyes incised with runes. A cluster of blue-robed acolytes began to mutter, and the runes began to glow and crawl across the silver, sealing the daemon’s power within.

‘It can’t be,’ said Astraeos. He watched as the final ward burned with amber light. He wanted to turn away but he kept watching the door. He had watched as the daemon was bound and its cell sealed, and felt its presence shrink in his mind. The connection was still there, it would always be there. He understood that. ‘We are bound together, it and I. Entwined. And somewhere inside its shell Cadar might still linger.’

Kadin shook his head and turned away from the door. The sound of pistons and gears briefly broke the quiet of the narrow passage. Kadin’s armour was still blackened and gouged. He had refused to recolour it. Astraeos thought that it looked like the cracked surface of skin. His own armour was blue, and he held a high-crested helm in the crook of his arm. A snake of fire coiled on his shoulder.

‘Was it worth it?’ asked Kadin. Astraeos said nothing, but also turned away from the door. They began to walk, their strides out of rhythm, under the yellow flames of the glass oil lamps which hung from the passage’s ceiling.

At its end, they passed through a small door back into the rest of the ship. They moved through corridors and chambers filled with strange faces and stranger voices, carrying their silence with them until they came to a viewport set into the hull of the ship like a vast eye watching the stars. They stopped. Beyond the crystal the Eye of Terror looked back at them, its bruised glare unblinking.

‘What now?’ asked Kadin after a long moment. Astraeos did not look away from the Eye. He thought of what Ahriman had told him, of what came next.

‘War, Kadin,’ said Astraeos and let out a long breath. ‘A war against fate.’

Maroth hurried through the corridors of the Sycorax. His armour hissed in time with his heavy muttering breaths. Sometimes he had to stop and feel his way by touch, or by sniffing through the muzzle of his helm. He passed scribes, initiate acolytes, warrior slaves and machine-wrights. Many looked at him but none challenged him or allowed their eyes to meet the sightless holes in his helm. The creature, for it could be no Space Marine, had Lord Ahriman’s mark upon it and its life belonged to Ahriman alone.

When he found the passage and door he sought, he gave a small whimper of pleasure. A passing cluster of yellow-swathed serfs hurried out of sight. Only when they were far beyond seeing or hearing did Maroth raise his hand to the door and mutter. It was a small door, deliberately unobtrusive, but if any had seen him undo the wards bound into it, they would have done more than wonder. The orange light of oil lamps lit the narrow passage beyond.

With the door resealed behind him, Maroth straightened and began to walk. His movements were silent. If there had been anyone to see in this utterly silent corridor, they would have noticed that his shape seemed to bleed into the shadow, and that the flames grew and burned the green-blue of glacial ice as he passed.

At the silver door he stopped, and made a sound like the hoot of a night bird. The gargoyles worked into the door snarled with silent anger, and runes in their eyes burned with blue light before settling to contented inactivity. He raised a hand and pushed the door open.

His master was waiting for him, bound in chains, the husk of its physical form as pale as white marble. It smiled at him. It always smiled. The door sealed behind Maroth. He looked up at a face that had once belonged to a mortal named Cadar. He would have laughed, but he rarely laughed truly. He did not really see the point.

‘Our endeavour succeeded,’ said his master, its voice like the crackling of ice across lightless water.

‘Yes,’ Maroth replied. ‘Yes it did, sire.’

THE TALE OF CTESIAS

I
THE DEAD ORACLE

‘To leave is to arrive.

To arrive is to leave.’

– words inscribed within the Temple of the Corvidae

These words are not written to be read. They are written so that something will remain, so that I may still remember something of my life when memory fades and flesh becomes dust. It has not been a kind life. I do not say that from resentment – the universe is a cruel cradle. Kindness, happiness, contentment, these are the lies that we wrap ourselves into as we stagger through the hungering night. We are nothing but candles burning down to darkness. This is the truth. To believe anything else is to be blind.

I lived, though. I cut a path through existence, one breath, and one heartbeat, at a time. When I look back from the gate of oblivion, I would see the road behind me. I would know how I lived. And so I write that I may remember.

I was not born on Prospero. I was not born on Terra. My name is not the name I was first given. The soul I have is not the one I was born with. I was many things that I am no longer. I was a warrior. I was a scholar. I was a loyal son of a loyal son.

What am I now?

I am the universe’s spite poured into a vessel for its own amusement. I am a servant of many masters, a summoner and binder of creatures that neither live nor die. I am an old demi-god, withered by knowing, and weighed down by living. I am this tale’s teller. I am Ctesias, and this road that these words walk was mine.

There are many ways that I might start this journey, but I will begin with a return. I will begin with the Dead Oracle.

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.

I woke to the smell of burning flesh. It was my own. Thick ropes of oily smoke climbed above where the silvered manacles held my limbs in place. The alchemical feeds that had been dripping false sleep into my veins had melted, and hung in blackened tangles from the brass armatures above me.

I tried to move my head. Some of the skin of my neck ripped away as I moved – it had fused to the metal loop beneath my chin. I could feel my flesh struggling to blot out the pain. Other warriors of the Adeptus Astartes would have shrugged off such sensations, but not me.

I was old even then, and my flesh had withered on my bones. The strength of muscle and blood is just one thing that I have given up as payment for power. I could still wield a sword, though I preferred a staff, and I could shatter a skull between my fingers. But these are small things for our kind. They do not undo the truth that then, as now, my skin was a wrinkled mask over a frame of thinned bones and spindly limbs. Lank, white hair hung from the shrivelled root of my head. My pale eyes were just as they were when I was born, but fragments of emerald and gold had replaced my teeth. A kaleidoscope of inked sigils covered me from head to foot, hiding the scars beneath letters and pictograms from long dead languages. In body, as in soul, I was a memorial to my own mistakes.

The room in which I hung, bound to a frame of silver and cold iron, was a cell. Warding marks and patterns were cut into its narrow walls and floor. Most of the wards had bled outwards, like wax blasted by a fusion torch. I knew the meaning of each symbol, and knew that they should have stopped the daemon manifesting in my dream, just as they had stopped me summoning aid from the warp. They, and the silver manacles, and the alchemically created coma, were supposed to hold me until I agreed to serve Amon, or until another end was found for me. I had refused to serve and so had lain, chained in sleep, in the heart of the ship Sycorax.

Now the chains had fallen and I was awake.

I moved my head again, and this time the pain came clear and bright. I let out a hissing breath.

‘Brother,’ said a voice from just out of sight.

I froze. I knew the voice, but its presence was an impossibility. It simply could not be.

I was very still. The pain of my burned limbs and the stink of the room said this was no dream, but such is the subtlety to truly great lies – they appear more real than reality, more true than truth.

‘Ctesias,’ said the impossible voice. And then, just as impossibly, he stepped into sight.

The first thing I noticed was that he had not changed. His face was just as it had been: blue eyes set in a proud face, features held so still that he appeared always to be listening to something just out of hearing. So many of our kind are touched and twisted by the winds of the Eye that to see one so untouched by mutation is almost disturbing.

‘Ahriman,’ I breathed.

He nodded.

My eyes shifted over his silver-blue robes, azure armour, and the horned helm held in the crook of his left arm. I recognised both armour and helm – I had last seen them worn by Amon, my jailer, and their change of ownership could only mean one thing.

‘So,’ I said, ‘Amon is no more.’

‘Our brother…’ began Ahriman, but I could already hear the sorrowful words he was going to voice without hearing them.

‘Please spare me whatever you think you need to say.’ I looked into his cold gaze. The pain from my burns was needle-shrill. I ignored it. ‘I do not grieve for him. He was a fool, as are you, Ahzek.’

His flat calm face did not twitch, but he looked as if he was going to reply. I saved him the effort.

‘You have either come to free me, or to ask for service,’ I said. ‘Or you are salving your conscience before you add me to the tally of our dead brothers.’

Understand that I am not a creature of emotions. My blood does not rise and fall with talk of brotherhood, of honour or heritage. My days of loyalty, of feeling bound and compelled by kinship, ended long ago. I am a creature of the true universe – my bonds are bonds bought and paid for, my loyalty to nothing more than the expansion of my own ability to persist from one moment to the next. Ahriman knew that. He could scarcely have forgotten.

After a long moment, he nodded. The wards and manacles holding me flared with fresh fire, and I felt the touch of his mind ghost over me. It was pure agony. I made sure that the renewed pain did not touch my face. To show weakness is to invite enslavement.

‘I need your help, Ctesias.’

‘My help? And what can you offer for that help? More to the point, why do you need it?’

‘Things have changed.’

‘Where Amon stood, now you stand. You are master of an army of our exiled kin who, until so recently, were hunting you across existence. An unenviably difficult position. And if that is the case, as I suspect it is, then you still have not lost the habit of understatement.’

He nodded once. ‘I do not know if I can trust them.’

‘But you know that you can’t trust me, and that makes me… what, trustworthy? The irony is quite pointed, don’t you think?’

‘Will you follow me as you once did, brother?’

I let my head rest back against the frame holding me. ‘What do you offer?’ I asked, and let my eyes flicker closed. The warp was a thin, aching presence against my mind, its full weight held back by the remaining wards.

Silence grew in the moment, swallowing the beat of my hearts, and the sound of my own breath. Everything was suspended, held in place as though by the touch of a hand. And beyond that silence, Ahriman’s mind hung – a cold star drawing heat and light into its core. The power of him almost stilled the breath in my mouth.

I am not blind to Ahriman’s failings. I do not like him, and he returns that scorn in full measure, I am sure. We are different in every way that matters. But any who deny that he is the most terrifying being to walk the mortal plain is a liar, or a fool.

I opened my eyes.

He had not moved, but his focus had hardened. I felt as though he was inches away from me, breathing my air, looking through the windows of my eyes, seeing the ambitions in my broken soul. Cold needles slid through my mutilated memories, and I knew that he was seeing every bargain, every scrap of my life traded for the one thing that I needed above all else. And I knew that he saw why, and I knew that he understood.

I hated him in that moment, hated him more than the simple dislike of two siblings made to make all the wrong decisions for different reasons. My hatred fumed from me in the silence, answering and pleading in equal parts. That sudden, bright emotion surprised me – it felt like the return of a life I had cast away.

It was, of course. That was exactly what it was.

‘What do I offer you, Ctesias?’ he said at last, his voice low. ‘I offer you everything you have searched for.’

I know that my eyes went wide at that, because he nodded.

‘I offer you your dreams.’

I would understand later why Ahriman truly needed me. It had nothing to do with trust, or power, at least not as I had thought of it. He knew me better than I knew myself, better than he knew himself as a matter of fact. He always saw others so clearly, and himself so dimly. At the time, though, I thought of his offer as one of old fashioned simplicity: the promise of reward, and the threat of retribution for betrayal. It was enough.

‘Free me,’ I said, ‘and I will serve.’

‘As you wish,’ he replied, and I felt the warded silver of my restraints shatter. Pain lanced through me, as metal fragments showered into the air, and then stopped dead. I fell to the floor and lay in a tangled heap, breathing hard for a long minute.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

Ahriman had already turned away. He paused at my words, and turned his head to cast a single-eyed stare back at me.

‘You are starting something,’ I said, peeling myself from the floor. ‘That is what you are doing, isn’t it? Why Amon is dead, and why you wear his crown? I can feel it on you, Ahriman. The old dream made anew. So where do we begin?’

‘We are going to see another of our brothers,’ he said. ‘We are going to see an oracle.’

The black moon hung in folds of glowing madness, its glass-smooth surface reflecting back the brittle skins of decayed rainbows. The planets which it orbited hung behind it, vast and pale, like cataract blinded eyes looking up through silt-clouded water. The laws of nature had long fled this place. We had come deep within the Eye, to a land that existed on the blurred boundary between this and that, between the real and the other.

Our fleet had not left the warp as it arrived. There was no reality for it to return to. The Sycorax and its carrion flock had simply slid over an invisible boundary within the tides of the aether, and there had been the black moon – watching us, as our warships settled to stillness around it.

There were at least a hundred craft, each one different, each one marked by the Eye’s poisoned tides. The geometry of nightmares cloaked the bones of what they had once been. Gun muzzles snarled at the void with tooth-ringed mouths. Azure stained silver clung to the hulls of some, while others were sculptures of pale bone and wet gold. Swimming in the warp-thickened orbit of the black moon they looked like fish from a diseased ocean. In a sense, that is just what they were.

Between them they had enough firepower to break planets, but that power meant little in the shadow of the warp. This was our realm, the realm of paradox and possibility. The realm of sorcery.

+It is waiting for us.+

I turned from the view in the floating crystal sphere. It hung in the steam-fumed air beside the open hatch of the gunship. Astraeos – the mongrel battle psyker whom Ahriman had adopted, for no reason which made sense to us – stood behind me, his blunt face set in an expression as bitter as it was burdened.

+We came here before,+ he sent again. +Something was waiting for us then, and something waits for us now.+

+I did not realise you had a poet’s soul,+ I sent, and turned away.

He was right though. Something was waiting. I could feel it – most likely every soul on every ship could feel it, even if they could not understand it. My skin was clammy within my armour, and the sweet taste of vomit lingered on my tongue. Had I not warded myself many times over in preparation, then the sensations would have been much worse. Strips of tanned skin bearing seven hundred and twenty-nine incantations written in blood hung from me like feathers, rustling as I moved. A mortal had died to create the wards, but it was a small price to pay. Without them perhaps I would have felt the skitter of insects on the inside of my eyeballs, or the shiver of blade tips over my tongue. There are other ways to hold the touch of the beyond back, but I have my ways, and while Ahriman did not like them he did not object to their use.

I wondered how Astraeos was coping. Perhaps he was not. Perhaps that was why he looked as though he was trying not to explode. I hoped so.

+What he has asked of–+ Astraeos began.

+What he has commanded of me,+ I corrected him. +Ahriman does not ask. He is a master, and masters see their will enacted by others. They do not ask. If they do, it means only that they feel the tug of a velvet cord preferable to that of a chain.+

+What he has asked you to do,+ he sent, his dislike bleeding across the mental connection, +it is… vile.+

I may have smiled behind the twisted bronze of my face plate. +Yes. It is. That is why the task falls to me. He considers some of the necessities unpleasant enough to let others do them, but do not think that it means he will hesitate to use any method to reach his end. He never did. Even before his principles murdered our Legion.+ I smiled again, and let the image of it flow to Astraeos. +Surely you have noticed that about him? He is an idealist, but beneath his high and guiding light all the dark deeds of the soul may walk in his company.+

+You are…+

+I am surprised that you consider my arts so unpalatable. After all, what is that barb and thread I can read in your soul?+ Shock radiated from him, darkening his shadow in the warp. It was pleasing to taste. +Tell me, did you bind the creature to you, or are you also bound to it? The first is dangerous, the second endearingly idiotic.+

He was very, very close to trying to kill me. I saw the taint of it within him.

+Yes, it has some of you, doesn’t it. I see that now. Tell me, how much of your soul did it take? Please tell me you know the answer.+ I said.

His hand moved to the sword at his waist. His mind burst its bonds with a thunderous roar. I staggered. He came forwards, his will flooding the edge of his blade with fire. I admit that I was surprised – his mind was strong, stronger than I had guessed, and its power was an avalanche fall of fury.

The idea of a kine shield formed in my mind, and became real, but slowly – much, much too slowly. I am a warrior of knowledge, most particularly knowledge of the creatures that swim the depths of the warp, creatures that most call daemon. Their calling, binding and bidding are my tools. I can destroy entire civilisations, given time. Astraeos was a killer of less sophistication, but a hammer blow will not accept its own bluntness as a reason to not kill you.

The sword touched the edge of my kine shield, and I felt the barrier shredded before I could even change the pattern of my thoughts.

+Brothers!+

Ahriman’s thought-voice was almost a physical touch in the warp-thickened atmosphere. Rebuke, entreaty and regret rode in that one word. It was enough to drain my focus and send me back a step.

Astraeos stopped dead, his halo of power vanishing like a doused fire. He stepped back, his sword flickering cold.

Ahriman walked towards us across the deck of the hangar bay. The Rubricae followed him, two lines of blue and gold armour, their movements locked into a single pattern.

+Ahriman,+ I sent, with a tilt of my head. As I have said, weakness only invites slavery or treachery, and excessive deference is the surest way of showing weakness.

Ahriman did not acknowledge my greeting. He did not acknowledge me at all. He is many things, but never weak.

Astraeos sent something that I felt but did not hear. I was looking at the other figure who walked at Ahriman’s side.

Sanakht returned my look. His movements were relaxed, yet precise. His face was hidden by the silver-fronted helm that he had worn since the fall of Prospero. His twin swords hung close to his hands, the hilt of one the head of a jackal, the other that of a hawk. Besides Ahriman himself there was only one other of our brothers that I would have been less pleased to find still breathing.

He said nothing. And for that, at least, I was grateful.

+This is all that you are taking with us?+ I asked.

+This is all that is needed,+ replied Ahriman.

+You are lying, brother,+ I sent to him alone. +The aether here is bloated. It is ready to tear. Your tamed renegade is right. Something has waited here for you to return. You cannot be blind to that.+

He did not reply, but I could feel his thoughts turning over. He had received my words. +You are not blind to it, are you?+

We boarded the gunship in silence, and the world became the thrum of its engines and the red-stained light of alert lamps. Ahriman was a still statue, his face hidden beneath the high horned helm, his thoughts behind hard walls of will.

+It is not all that is needed, is it?+ I needled at him, my own thoughts turning in my head as my fingers tapped the silver half of my staff. +You do not want anyone else to see, do you? You want what we are here to do to remain a secret.+

Ahriman turned his head to me. Beside him Astraeos and Sanakht stirred, and the gunship shivered on through the void.

He did not answer.

The silence followed us through the moon. A tunnel threaded its substance, leading ever deeper, though with every turn we had felt as though we were travelling further from the centre. We walked from the gunship, mist coiling around us, swallowing the passage beyond and hiding what waited. The eyes of the Rubricae glowed with green halos, and voices seeped from them, whispering just beyond hearing. Ahriman remained quiet, and Astraeos followed his example. Sanakht alone had reacted to the deadness of the place. He had drawn his swords, and walked with them held loosely at his sides.

+Was it like this before?+ I asked, and my thought-voice echoed as sound in the mist.

…like this before?

…before?

Ahriman half turned his head.

‘No,’ he said with his true voice, the sound of it flat and dead in the still air. ‘It was not like this.’

‘That does not give you pause?’ I halted in my stride. Ahriman did not stop or deign to answer. After a second I followed, my staff clicking dully on the passage floor.

‘Well that is reassuring,’ I muttered to myself.

It was not the nature of the moon that troubled me. I am a creature who has lived many lives of mortals in a realm saturated by the stuff of manifest insanity. I have walked between worlds with a single step, and seen cities raised from nothing with a gesture. The warp is a place of horror, make no mistake, but it holds no terror of strangeness for me. But within that dead-glass moon my instincts were screaming to turn back, pact with Ahriman or no.

The warp was there – it lapped through the air and the polished glass of the walls. The substance of the place itself buzzed with the stuff of impossibility. What worried me was that it was quiet, calm, and as featureless as the surface of a deep, stagnant pool. The warp is life. It is change eternal, and the power of unbounded possibility, but here it hung over everything like a lank shroud.

And as I followed Ahriman, the Rubricae walking in lockstep behind us, the worse thing was that I was beginning to recognise its texture.

I was opening my mouth to speak when we reached the Oracle.

One moment we were walking through the mist-filled tunnels, and the next we were standing in a spherical chamber of polished stone. No door broke the sphere’s inner surface. We had simply arrived without need of an entrance.

The Oracle hung at the sphere’s centre, arms spread wide. I recognised the shape of power armour, but the warp had woven its mystery over its form. It glinted with a mirror polish, and its helm was featureless, without eyes or mouth.

The Eyeless Oracle, I thought, and it echoed through the space as though I had shouted aloud.

The Oracle’s true name was Menkaura, and once he had marched to war with the rest of the Thousand Sons. He had changed much since then, though. We all had.

He had left his name and Legion in the past, and grown to become what now hung above us. Eyes orbited his blind body, like planets around a parent star. I had heard of him, of course, and long known that he was one of my gene-brothers, but I had never come to his temple. I had never felt the need to know the future.

The Oracle did not move as we walked to the centre of the chamber.

‘Menkaura,’ said Ahriman, his voice neither raised nor whispered. ‘I have returned, brother.’ He paused. Beside him, Sanakht and Astraeos shifted. ‘I have questions.’

Still Menkaura did not move.

Prickles rose on my skin. Something shifted at the corner of my eye, and I turned my head to look at the curved wall. A distorted image of myself gazed back at me. I licked my lips carefully, tasting the slight tinge of acid in my spit. I wanted to extend my will into the aether. I wanted to pull at the stilled mirror of this place, to stir it, to send it churning. But I did none of these things. Even though everything was telling me that we had walked into the heart of something that we had not anticipated, I restrained myself. Instead I began to prepare for the deed that I had been brought there to perform.

Menkaura. I spoke his name in a chamber of my thoughts.

Men-kau-ra. The syllables spilt and echoed within separate compartments of thought.

Men.

Kau.

Ra.

Each sound became a separate box, labelled and sealed, like a body sliced and portioned into grave jars. My mind spun over each fragment of name, preparing mental ciphers and patterns that would snap shut when I willed it. Names are more than titles. They pin our existence in place. Unname something, break its title, undo its calling, and you pull it apart. Ahriman did not want to talk to the Oracle – he wanted to chain him, and he had brought me to forge the links.

Binding a daemon is not a simple matter. It is creating a prison for a creature whose being is corrosive to existence. It requires subtly, brutality, and knowledge. One misstep, one faltering instant or error, and you do not die; you become the toy of torment for a creature of infinite spite and imagination. Many fail and are enslaved by the beings that they seek to master. So when I say that binding the soul of a living creature is of another order of difficulty, you should know what I mean. Life fights to be free of the tyranny of others. Even life twisted by and shackled to lies will claw, and thrash, and shriek before it allows another being to put a collar around its neck.

Vile.

That was what Astraeos had called what I was preparing to do. He was right. It was vile.

The formulae spread through my mind like snares set in the long grass to wait for a lion’s tread, like razors set out beside a dissection table. Silently, unseen, held ready but not brought into being, it took seconds to make the bindings ready, and all the while I looked up at the unmoving, unspeaking shape of the Oracle, and knew that I was about to break what remained of its soul.

‘I come to you now twice, brother,’ said Ahriman, and the Oracle turned to face him. ‘As I did before, I demand the truth that is owed to all who enter this place. I submit to the ordinances of this temple, and will not pass from its doors without truth received and payment given.’

+You should not have come, Ahriman.+ The psychic voice was thin, as if forced out between dry, cracked lips.

‘I need answers, Menkaura. We are at a new beginning. I need to find a path into what will be. My sight is clouded, storms hide the way ahead. I need your eyes. I need you to see for us.’

+You…+ The Oracle trembled where it hung.

At the edge of the chamber, something moved, just on the edge of sight. I ignored it.

+You… need…+ hissed the Oracle.

The shape in the corner of my eye was growing, bloating like paper soaking up black ink, like a tick feeding on blood. My skin suddenly felt very warm. I could not help it. I turned and looked.

+You need to run…+ said the Oracle.

My eyes touched the thing that I had not seen, and I saw it then. I beheld it.

And the curtain of the world shredded.

Blood-threaded pus poured from the walls. The mirrored surface crazed. Dozens of tiny hands were scrabbling at the cracks, pulling them wider. Trees of rotting iron rose from the mire forming under our feet, shaking crowns of flayed-skin leaves. Broken backed figures stood amongst the trunks, weeping blades gripped in shivering hands.

The whole tableau unfolded with delicate slowness, but no time passed. It had been there from before we had set foot upon the moon. Everything our minds had seen had been the dried skin of a corpse left as a mask over a skull. The power to blind us was staggering. It implied something greater and deeper than the manipulations of daemons. It spoke of the hand of a god.

Time returned, and we began to fight for our souls.

Ahriman was the first to move. He turned from the Oracle, his aura the flare of a new sun. He became flame. A lance of white heat split the air. Daemon flesh burned with vapour. The leaves of the rusting trees ignited.

Sanakht was the next to react, fire and lightning running down his blades as he sliced through tentacles writhing from the cracked walls. Tiny figures shaped from infected fat dropped from the ceiling, cackling as they fell. Astraeos had his own sword in his hand, the air about him blurring with storm pressure. A tentacle whipped down towards Ahriman, but Sanakht’s swords stuck it three times before my eyes had seen him move. Daemon blood began to fall, fizzing to smoke as Ahriman panned the torrent of flame across the chamber.

No, I thought, this cannot be right. They could never hope to destroy us like this. But it was as though my mind was watching from behind a thickening fog. Everything was all happening with a poured syrup slowness.

The Rubricae began to fire into the figures advancing beneath the growing trees. Bolts exploded in flesh. Cyan and rose flames spiralled around blackening bones. The warp was a clotting mass of despair, tar-thick and oozing. More famine-wasted figures were rising from the swamp, their limbs forming from the charred soup of their burned kin. They stepped towards us over sizzling heaps of fat and flesh.

Astraeos extended his hand and a line of force razored through the air. Bloated bodies split into a shower of jellied filth and entrails.

And still I had not moved. My thoughts were stuck, like the cogs of a broken clock.

+Ctesias.+

The voice was so weak that it was just a whisper crushed by the noise of battle. +Ctesias,+ it spoke again. I looked up. The Oracle hung still in the air. Black corrosion had spread across its silver armour, while foul fluids leaked and bubbled from the helm. The eyes that orbited him still turned, but cataracts now clouded them, and black webs of clotted veins spidered their surfaces. +It is… This is not the…+

It could not find the strength for the next words, but it did not need to. I understood the warning, even as I cursed myself for not having understood it before. Menkaura was powerful, god-blessed and warp-favoured. The power which had laid this trap for us had overwhelmed him and taken this place into its domain, but it had not been able to overwhelm Menkaura utterly. Something of him still remained even as he was consumed, inch by inch, and that part of him was fighting to warn us that the true trap had yet to close about us.

He began to shudder. His armour split. Black fluid drizzled both downwards and upwards from the cracks.

+Ahriman!+ I called, but he was a pillar of brightness, his physical form a soot shadow at the core of the inferno. The daemons were falling back, and Sanakht blurred beside him, swords weaving in arcs of ghost and storm light. Bolt-rounds lashed dead flesh in a deluge as the Rubricae fired and fired. As my gaze passed over the scene I saw a bloated daemon, with the body of an insect, fly at Astraeos. The renegade turned and cut in a single movement. The daemon split in two, its momentum driving it onto the killing edge. It fell, wings buzzing as the two halves tried to lift themselves back into the air. Astreaos stamped down, mashing chitin and blubber beneath his boot.

+Ahriman!+ I called again, and I saw him turn, as he sensed at last what I had seen.

He was just in time to see existence turn itself inside out.

The Oracle’s body ripped down its centre. The sound sawed through the warp. Blood sprayed from the split corpse, each drop a liquid black hole, a splatter of negative space falling through reality. The whole chamber shimmered, and stretched upwards. The ranks of daemons became silhouettes of smudged colour, their mouths holes into another darkness beyond.

We were no longer straddling the barrier between the real and unreal – we were within a garden of decay. We were within the warp.

A psyker is a creature whose mind is a doorway to the aether, a conduit for paradox. We touch the ineffable, but we are still flesh, still made of the dirty clay of base reality. When daemons step into the real world they begin to die, just as a fish pulled from the sea will drown in the air we breathe.

But when we, base creatures that we are, dive into the Sea of Souls, we do not drown.

We burn.

The inferno around Ahriman spread out in every direction. His shape blurred, dissolving into bright particles at the edges. Sanakht fell, convulsing, arms and neck snapping out as though a lightning bolt had passed through him. Astraeos froze, his limbs locking even as he fought to move. Screaming haloes surrounded the Rubricae, howling with faces formed from splintered light and billowing dust. I do not know how I appeared in that moment, I only know how it felt – it was as if every thought I had held in mind was being pulled by hooks, drawn out of me, and spread across a gulf which grew wider and wider. Everything that made me was a thin sheet of ideas, and memories and will. The daemons were no longer creatures of rotting bone and skin. They were the mirrors of my despair and hope, thin-faced nightmares pulled from every regret I had ever had.

Into this garden of decay slid the being that had been waiting for us. Its shape and form began as a slick bulb of pale slime. Fat and muscles bloated into being, and it swelled, taking on shape and texture like the stuttering image of a plant growing and flowering, then compressed into a few seconds. Its body was a huge mound of moist and torn flesh, its head a mass of broken horns. I could taste burning, the thick, heavy stink of rendered fat and bone soot. The power radiating from it was suffocating. The other daemons fell back, sliding beneath the surface of my sight. It was all I could do not to let my soul spin away into the vast creature’s orbit.

I knew it.

I know of many daemons. Some I have bound, others I have glimpsed, many more I have only heard of. Lesser creatures often spin names and titles for themselves, cloaking their weakness in false infamy, as a beggar who imagines himself a prince will wear a coat of bright feathers and silk. Others have no need of such adornment – their existence resounds through the warp. Titles gather to them like flies over a midden, and their power is second only to the Dark Gods that spawned them. This was one such creature.

Maggot Lord, Lord of the Plague Pit, The Seventh Leech of Sorrow, The Crow Worm – I had heard heralds weep its glory in the depths of the Eye, and seen its shadow in death of billions.

It looked at me. Not at Ahriman, not at the others.

Just at me.

It had blisters for eyes.

It spoke, the words shaking the cloud of my mind.

‘Do you hope to bind me, little witchling?’ It smiled. A thick bead of blood-marbled pus oozed from its lips. Maggots squirmed in the roots of its teeth. Its tongue was a mass of dried skin and hair.

I simply shook, fighting to gather my thoughts back into myself, to hold on to what made me.

The Maggot Lord chuckled, and patches of its skin split as its body rippled. It turned its great head to the others. The fire had fled from around Ahriman. No other sorcerer I have ever met could truly rival him, but even he does not challenge the most exalted of daemonkind unless there is no other way. Watching him, I knew that he would be searching for a way out even as the beast loomed above us.

‘You do not know me,’ croaked the daemon. ‘We have never met, but I have watched you. I have seen you rise and fall, and rise again.’

‘Where is our brother?’ asked Ahriman, his voice cold with control. ‘Where is Menkaura?’

‘Gone, exiled son, gone down to the pits to feed the fresh-born. Gone down to become no more.’

‘No,’ said Ahriman. ‘Your kind consume, corrupt and corrode, but you do not destroy.’

‘Do we not? The corpse mires of history and the tears shed beside graves sing a different song.’

‘Give him to us.’

‘No. No, I do not think I will,’ said the daemon, and shook its head. White worms and tatters of flesh scattered from its rolling chins. ‘This gathering is not for demands. It is for offers, for the consideration of possibilities.’

‘You have nothing to offer us.’

The daemon’s laughter boomed out, great balloons of skin pulsing in its throat. It licked its lips.

‘Oh, but that is a lie.’ It raised a huge hand and indicated the Rubricae, and their haloes of scattered pain. ‘You are the lord of a dead brotherhood. You tried to save what you cared for, but there is only one who can end such suffering.’ Its voice had become the glutinous rumble of mucus filled lungs. ‘We would see an end to your hollowness, Ahriman. We would see you and your brothers rise from their dry graves. You feel pain for what they are, for what you did, and for what you think you must do. That pain can end. There needs to be no more sorrow. You can save yourself, and save your brothers.’ It raised both its arms, fat fingers open, appealing. ‘All you need to do is ask. Let it go. Let the chains fall. You do not have to embrace this release. You just have to let it embrace you.’

Sanakht was forcing himself back to his feet. Defiance screamed in his every agonised movement. The daemon turned its gaze to the swordsman as he rose.

‘And you, Sanakht – broken swordsman that you are, would you not see the wounds to your soul close? Astraeos, sweet suffering child, the needles of guilt in your heart are lies. They can be plucked out. You can know hope again. Not just the promise of it, but the sweet, wet nectar of its truth.’ The daemon looked back to Ahriman, and nodded slowly. ‘All this, the Lord of All offers to you.’

There was no mention of alternatives. They did not need to be put into words. The hungering silence of the daemon throng told of what any refusal would mean. I was also not surprised that it made no offer to me. There is little meat on my soul to satisfy a daemon of any kind. I have bound and broken too many of their kind for them to offer me anything but retribution.

‘We shall leave this place,’ said Ahriman, his voice clear and hard.

The daemon shook its head again, its tattered face heavy with sorrow.

‘That cannot be,’ it said. The daemons encircling us heaved forwards.

‘No,’ said Ahriman, his voice the ring of a hammer on steel. ‘By the terms under which we came to this temple, I deny you. This is a fane of oracles, daemon. You have corrupted it, you have made its seat your own, but its chains still bind you. You sit where the Oracle once sat. You have taken that throne for your own purposes, but it is not a seat of power. It is a cage’.

The daemon’s jaw shook with anger. Folds of rotted fat trembled. It was afraid.

For just as I saw the truth, so too did the daemon.

The rotten bowl of the chamber shimmered back into sight. Its excrement-slicked walls pulsed in time with the great daemon’s panting breaths. It was trapped. It was a creature of power, of might, but it was blind to the greater subtlety. Those currents lay in another power’s hand.

‘You who sit in the seat of the Oracle, I demand truth,’ said Ahriman. ‘Name yourself.’

‘Sac’nal’ui’shulsin’grek…’

The syllables broke from the daemon’s lips. The sound ripped through the empyrean, each a broken tooth of spite. The daemon reared up, mouth moving, its face splitting as it fought to keep the words inside. Blisters of blood formed and popped in the air. Its left fist crashed down in front of it, as its right rose above its head. It had to speak its name to us, but it intended to kill us before that name was complete. A great, rusted cleaver grew in its grasp as it lunged forwards.

‘…ih’hal’hrek…’

Sanakht met and turned the blow, his paired swords hissing as they kissed the cleaver’s tainted iron. The daemon pulled its blade back and charged, liquid bulk rolling. Sanakht spun aside, slicing as he moved. Ribbons of yellow fat and congealed blood fell from twin wounds.

‘…nh’gul’rg’shargu…’ The bloody words poured out as the deamon’s cleaver chopped down again.

Astraeos’s sword was a tongue of white and blue flame as it cut the beast’s arm at the wrist. The cleaver and severed hand hit the ground. Ropes of sinew lashed out from the daemon’s arm, and tried to drag the hand and weapon back onto the stump.

‘…sal-hu’ne’gorn’shu’sai’sa…’

It reached up with its remaining hand, fat fingers ripping at its own tongue.

Still the links of its name came from its mouth.

Ahriman had not moved, but now he turned his head to me. ‘Bind it, brother,’ he said.

And then – in that cold instant – I knew that I should never have agreed to serve him.

‘…vel’rek’hul’scb’th’rx.’

The last syllable fell from the daemon’s lips, sliding into the air like a scorched snake. I looked at Ahriman for an instant that felt like eternity. My mind was ready. The divided cells of my memory and psyche, intended to hold Menkaura, stood open. I had heard each beat and splintered tone of the daemon’s name. It was mine. A net of chains lay in the fingers of my will.

I turned to the daemon. Its lesser kin had begun to move again, slithering and scrabbling forwards, blades scraping, teeth champing. The Rubricae fired: cobalt light exploded soft skulls. The daemon inhaled, its stomach and throat bulging. It vomited. Blood, bile, and shadow gushed towards us. A dome of flame met the deluge. Black smoke and yellow steam tumbled up through the air.

I was still hesitating, still unsure that I wanted to play the part that Ahriman had created for me in this layered deception.

+Ctesias, now!+ Ahriman’s thought voice split the warp-flooded chamber like a thunderclap.

I spoke the daemon’s name. The syllables tore my tongue and lips. Frost bloomed across my helmet. Blood was running down my throat, filling my lungs as I forced air from them.

I kept speaking, feeling the chain of sounds draw the daemon’s essence into my hand link by bloody link.

The daemon crashed forwards, hammering its bulk down upon the burning dome above us. Flesh flashed to smoke.

As each syllable left my lips I split it from my memory, and locked it within the divided walls of my mind. Others use grimoires, arcane ciphers or other ritual emblems to hold the daemons they bind. I use my mind, and write the keys of summoning on my psyche.

The daemon tilted its head back and bellowed. The rotting throng surged to answer the call.

I was drowning in my own blood. Blisters had grown and burst on my tongue. The chamber around me was lost in a fever blur.

I chewed the end of the name out, and suddenly I was on the filth soaked floor, shivering.

The others were still fighting, still hacking, still burning as the lesser daemons threw themselves at us.

Above us the daemon held still, flesh pulsing in a mockery of breathing. Its name was within me, divided and locked away, like a weapon broken into parts until it is needed, until it is allowed to be whole again. It looked down at me, hatred in its blood and pus-filled eyes.

‘Be gone,’ I said in a cracked voice. ‘Come not again, until I call.’

Its shape broke apart, shredding from the edges, reducing until it was nothing. It watched me until the last gust of the invisible wind took its eyes.

I passed into blackness then, unconsciousness falling across thought and sensation like a knife.

The voice came from emptiness. ‘You are owed a question.’

I recognised it. It was a voice I had not heard speak with a tongue since… since… a time, the memory of which I have bartered away.

‘Menkaura?’ I asked, and the image of the dead Oracle appeared as though created by the name. He no longer wore his silvered armour, or eyeless helm. An open, simple face watched me from above the red armour of the Thousand Sons Legion.

I turned my gaze, and looked into the flat nothing of… wherever I was. I could feel nothing but the turning of my thoughts. It did not feel like a dream, but it did not feel real either. It did not feel like anything.

I looked back to Menkaura.

‘Ask your question,’ he said.

‘You are dead,’ I said. His face did not even move. ‘Your soul was taken by the daemons of the Plague Father. You were unmade.’

He just looked at me, unmoving, his expression blank.

‘What is your question? A question was bought, payment was made. It must be asked.’

I shook my head. My thoughts were clear, but seemed to be coming together with frozen slowness.

‘It was Ahriman’s question, and he asked it of the daemon that had taken your place.’

Menkaura did not move or speak. I smiled grimly to myself.

‘He knew that something would be there, but he kept that from me while making me ready to bind you. Lies, and half-truths, hidden ends and greater purposes. He has not changed.’ I laughed, the noise flat in the black space. ‘But he was right. If he had asked me to bind one of the exalted ranks of the neverborn I would have refused. I would never have stepped into such a trap, not for any promised reward. I should have expected the deception. I should have known. And now I have turned a creature sent against us into my slave.’ I paused, hissing breath between my teeth. ‘Our slave. That was what he wanted, what he needed me for. Why dirty his hands with such things? Why swallow the poison himself?’

‘He is afraid,’ said Menkaura. My gaze snapped up to him, the words of the questions still lingering in my mouth. ‘He is afraid of what he has begun. A destiny awaits him. A chance to be many things draws closer with every step he takes. He can see that. It is like a mountain of fire burning the sky beyond the horizon. He sees its light, but not its shape. He knows that others see it too, powers that move in the mortal and immortal realms. And he fears them. He fears that he might fall on his journey, and that he might reach the end of it.’ Menkaura paused, nodding slowly as though in agreement with a voice that only he could hear. ‘He is right to fear.’

I knew then that what I was seeing and hearing was not a dream. It was something else, a scrap of unfinished time resolving itself, a conversation that needed to play out for fate to be satisfied. The Dead Oracle’s words passed through me, cold, shivering with implication.

‘That is it? He is arming himself against… against what?’

‘Against everything that could try to stop him.’

‘And he makes me a weapon for that war.’

‘He neither adds nor takes away from your nature. You are as you are.’

Menkaura began to fade as he spoke.

‘There should be payment.’ I called after him. ‘Those are the bindings on you, brother – an oracle’s words must be bought.’

He shook his head as his features sunk into the blackness.

‘The payment has already been given,’ he said, and was gone, as though he had never been.

I stared at the void.

Then I found myself looking into the face of Ahriman. There was no blink, no transition, just the brightness of lights, and the sound of the Sycorax suddenly in my ears. I sat in a chair of black granite, in a chamber of tarnished bronze. My armour hung from the walls in polished components, and my staff rested in a rack of bone.

+You dreamed deeply and long, brother,+ Ahriman sent.

I did not reply. I was flicking my awareness through my mind and body searching for a sign of how much time had passed.

Ahriman spoke again, this time with his true voice. ‘You have my thanks, Ctesias. I know it cost you.’

My body felt leaden, my thoughts sluggish in my skull. Fatigue washed through me. Bright colours smudged my eyes. My tongue was a dry leaf in my mouth. Any wounds I had suffered had gone, but the shadow of the binding hung over me, pressing in through every sensation. One does not simply swallow the true name of an exalted daemon and then shrug it off. Everything – as never fails to be proved true – has a price.

‘You lied to me,’ I spat back at him, my anger suddenly raw and fresh. He tilted his head, the gesture half an acknowledgement, half a question.

‘I did what I had to, brother. As did you.’

‘What are you doing Ahriman? Why did we go to the Oracle? What do you intend for us now?’

‘Us?’ he said, and the thinnest hint of a smile touched his eyes. ‘I thought you were not part of anything beyond yourself.’

I shook my head, suddenly feeling deeply tired. Ahriman nodded, and turned towards the chamber’s door.

‘Rest, brother,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Rest, and dream.’

‘I do not dream,’ I protested, but he was already gone, and the words rang hollow in the still air. ‘I do not dream,’ I said again, more quietly, shaking my head as my eyelids flickered over my sight. My mind and limbs felt heavy, as though the act of returning to consciousness had used up my full store of energy. I was draining down into blank oblivion again, the features of my new chamber sliced away as my eyes closed.

In the black flicker of my eyelids I saw again the face of Menkaura, and heard words I was not sure had been real.

‘He is arming himself against… against what?’

‘Against everything that could try to stop him.’

II
FORTUNE’S FOOL

Those who think the gods uncaring know nothing. The gods care for us all: for each pitiful spark of life born in screams, each life lived in lust and ambition and each soul passing in silence. They care for us as we care for food, water and air. We are their life: our dreams are their strength, our weakness their existence. They care for us. They need us. But to need and to care does not require kindness.

– Numious, The Illuminator of Hilicia,
executed for heresy

The second service I did for Ahriman was to kill one of our own.

I am not a creature given to sentiment; that should not surprise you. But if these words I write have come to be read by another, you will know me to have been led by his thirst for power. I do not feel guilt at the lives I have taken or the deeds I have done. I have killed many, thousands certainly, millions perhaps; the number is as irrelevant as any claim that those deaths damn me, or any counterclaim that they were justified. They are beyond justification, and my soul is forfeit because I want power that mortals should not have. I am willing to seize that power.

I am a binder of daemons and dealer in terrible truths. Others call our kind sorcerers, but I am the truth of that word given form. I have flayed eighteen mortals to tease a Prince of Excess into giving me its true name, and sold my first memory for a single sigil from a lost language. I have even starved and poisoned myself so that I could talk with the daemons of despair. Yet, having done all these things, and more, I have never flinched from any of them. But that one… murder I did for Ahriman all that time ago – when we were all so different, and so much was yet to happen – haunts me still.

+Greetings, Ctesias. You honour us by your presence, and your master favours both you and I by sending you.+

Ichneumon practically purred the thoughts at me as I stepped from the gunship. He did not kneel, but bowed from the waist. His slaves were already folded flat to the floor, so I could not tell if this was to mark my arrival, or if they were always like this in the presence of their lord. I watched them for a full five seconds, and let Ichneumon hold his bow. Sometimes it pays to play the game of power even over petty matters, and I had a feeling this was going to be one of those occasions.

Sugraiis, I whispered to myself, through my teeth. +I am most pleased to see you, brother,+ I sent, resting weight and sincerity on the last sentiment. I was not attempting to hide my thoughts, and the sending would have been heard by all those gathered in the Nonogramiton’s main hangar deck. I sensed the prostrated throng shiver with appreciation, and caught the subtle movement out of the corner of my eye as warriors in green and gold armour shifted in approval. +The majesty of your welcome exceeds everything that could be expected.+

Another mental rustle of approval. I bit the lie off, making sure to shield my deep thoughts. There were minds within the chamber watching me, strong minds. Not as strong as mine, but powerful enough to steal truths I wanted to keep my own. Not that there was much in my thoughts at that moment that could do more than insult them. The truth was that the throng abasing itself before me was very far from impressive. There are carnivals of the Plague Father with more magnificence. Most of the throng were only nominally human. Beneath the wrappings of saffron, yellow and blue, their flesh was pale and twitching. Toothless mouths mewled and drooled silver spit from the back of one figure close to where I stood. Another seemed to have no head, that is until I realised that he had two: one on his chest and another on his back. Quills stood out on the limbs of several of them, making them seem like stillborn chicks stretched into the shape of men. Space Marines of a renegade breed lurked at the edges of the chamber. I had no desire to look at them more closely than I had to.

Ichneumon straightened and pointed with his staff. A corridor opened in the press of mortals.

+Come, please, honoured brother and voice of Ahriman.+

I walked the last few steps to the edge of the gunship’s assault ramp and moved onto the Nonogramiton. The lapis and jade tiles set into the floor shimmered to gold beneath my feet. I tapped the base of my staff on them as I went, and Ichneumon fell in beside me. He stood taller than me, much taller in fact, as though his substance had stretched upwards. Yellow robes hung from his chest. His armour held some of the lines of power armour, but its exact shape and colour altered as the light played over it. The staff in his hand was carved emerald, and a thread of lightning ran up and down its core. A crest of blue hair rose above the faceplate of his helm and ran back to the base of his neck. The aura that clung to him was a rainbow of paradox: anger, joy, despair and pride. He was exactly as I had thought, and everything about him made me wish that this task had not fallen to me.

+Our master wishes one thing from you, Ichneumon,+ I sent, spoken to him alone, as we passed the throng.

+Your master, most honoured voice of Ahriman,+ he replied. I caught an edge in the syrup of his sending. +And we will speak of what he wishes later.+

We walked the rest of the way in inner silence, while behind me I heard the mortals cry out at their lords leaving. The cries were those of wounded birds.

+Why do you not go yourself?+ I had asked Ahriman. +He has come to you after all to give you a blessing, or for some other, equally ridiculous, reason.+

Ahriman nodded, slowly, his face calm in a way that must have been gifted to him as a means to frustrate others.

+You are right. Even though he is our gene-brother, he has become–+

+Vile.+

+That is a strong judgement, even from you.+ His lips twitched, and for an instant I almost thought he had smiled. +But I cannot fault your logic.+

+Then why countenance even his presence amongst the fleet?+

+Everyone has their uses, Ctesias. And have I not already accepted others into my service that are just as–

+Vile?+

+Flawed,+ he continued.

I shrugged to concede the point. I am not a noble soul, and by my deeds I might be accounted as amongst the worst of the adopted children of hell.

+What does he have that you want?+ I asked.

+A way out, Ctesias+

I blinked.

+A way out…+

+Of the Eye of Terror,+ he sent, and then let the thought ring like a struck bell. +I have not gathered forces to my hand just to spend them in needless battle, nor to see them lost trying to breach the Cadian Gate. I have gathered them for a particular war, and a particular purpose, and both of those lie outside of the Eye. We are not embarking on a crusade, Ctesias. We are searching for exodus.+

I began to understand, and closed my eyes. I am no seer, but I could feel the future opening before me with all the comfort of inevitability.

+The Wanderer of Paths?+ I asked.

Ahriman nodded, and I returned the gesture with weariness.

The Eye of Terror is a place of paradox, and those who dwell and war within it are creatures of pride and hollow ambition. Every warrior dreams himself a Warmaster, every demagogue thinks themselves a worthy princeling of Chaos and every witch-sighted fool thinks they alone can master the warp. Though some rise to touch the edge of their dreams, few hold them in their hands, and those that do can often only watch as they drain between their fingers. But all, from aspiring lord of slaughter to doomed master of sorcery shout their pretension with the names and titles.

The honorifics of some champions weigh them down like a prisoner’s chains. Even I have names that follow me: The Eater of Shadows, Whisperer of the Ninth Gate, Lord of Nine Thousand Silences, and so on. Most adornments, including my own, hold no meaning. A few though – a rare few – reflect a deeper truth. Such true titles, and the deeds and power they reflect, are terrifying.

The Wanderer of Paths was a title of truth rather than pride, and it belonged to the former Thousand Son who had just sought us out. Few others have travelled as far within the Eye, or know more of its secrets, than Ichneumon. If any knew how to leave it without passing through the Cadian Gate, it would be him. His sudden appearance was worrying. Good fortune is not unknown in the Eye, but here it has meaning.

+You want him to lead us out of the Eye,+ I sent.

+No,+ Ahriman sent, and waited for the frown to twist the wrinkles on my face. +I want him to tell us of a way out. He cannot lead us.+

The frown clung to my face.

+This still does not explain why you are sending me to him. You could call him here, and take what you want from him, willing or not. Or would that be distasteful?+

Ahriman remained silent for a long second. I shivered.

+You will go to the Nonogramiton bearing my words of greeting to Ichneumon,+ he sent at last. +You will call him brother and afford him every courtesy. He will give to you as a gift knowledge of a way out of the Eye. Then you will destroy him.+

It was my turn to stare and be still.

+Why?+ I said at last.

+Because it is my will, Ctesias,+ Ahriman replied.

+So,+ sent Ichneumon, +Ahriman despatched you rather than come himself. Should I feel slighted, Ctesias?+

+No slight was intended,+ I replied. +You are most welcome, and your presence does us high honour.+

+I am sure that respect was all that was intended,+ he sent with amusement.

+Of course,+ I said.

I was wondering where we were going; an audience chamber, I presumed, but I could not be sure. In other circumstances I would have extended my mind to read the space around me, but Ichneumon would have known and that might have affected the delicate charade of courtesy we were both weaving.

We walked on. The bronze carvings covering the passage walls twisted, as though echoing Ichneumons amusement. Silence closed over us the further we walked from the hangar deck. The air had changed too. Incense smoke clung to the ceiling, heavy with notes of cinnamon and burned paper. Carvings of bronze, crystal and bone covered every wall and ceiling. Endless patterns of feathers and the serpentine rune of the Changer of Ways slid in and out of focus on each surface I looked at.

My left hand caught the edge of a bronze wing that projected from the relief on the passage wall, sharp enough to bite into the ceramite.

Nekasu, I hissed to myself.

Several paces behind us, nine warriors in emerald and gold power armour followed, amber pendants and silver chains clacking against ceramite as they moved. They were not Rubricae, but living warriors. Their weapons and armour plates had a sheen of moisture, like sweat-slicked skin, and they moved with a total disunity, their steps and movements never synchronising even for an instant.

+It is kind that you call me brother, Ctesias. It is sometimes pleasant to remember that I once had brothers.+

+It is a fact, Ichneumon. You are still one of us.+

+One of us…?+

+One of the Legion.+

+You lie beautifully, Ctesias. The Changer of Ways sees this in you. Sees, and is pleased.+

I was grateful for my helm. It meant that I did not have to hide my lip curling.

+You…+ I began, but he cut off my platitude before it could form.

+Your pretence, though gratifying in its attempt, is unnecessary. You think me a fool, a credulous simpleton who has given himself over to the veneration of false gods.+

+I never thought you a simpleton.+

+Whether I am or not is irrelevant. The gods are real, Ctesias. You know this. The Changer of Ways watches over us, and holds our fate in his eternal eye. You are his servant as much as I, more perhaps. You hungered for knowledge and power even before the Wolves came to Prospero. He cherishes you for that, guides you in thought and dream, and your successes are the Changer’s as much as they are yours. Your choice to deny that fact does not alter the truth of it.+

I bit my mouth closed and clamped my thoughts shut inside my head, wishing very much that Ahriman had sent Kiu, Gaumata or even Astraeos to do this. I tried to think of ways of finessing the exchange, of sliding over the chasm that existed between us. In the end I gave up.

+You are right,+ I sent. +You are a simpleton.+

The nine warriors behind us snapped into sudden movement, guns rising, crystal swords sliding into the air.

Ichneumon glanced at them, and they froze. Then he looked slowly back at me. Violet amusement, red rage and black control warred in his aura.

+We were both sent here by the will of others: you by Ahriman, me by the Winds of Change. The difference is that you do not know if you should be here – you only know that it is Ahriman’s will, but I know that I must be here. You serve because you must, and I serve because I am a servant of the eternal.+

I tried to give a small nod to indicate a concession, but I could not do even that. It was more ridiculousness than I could bear. You might think that this sentiment was at best hypocrisy and at worst a form of wilful blindness. Perhaps you might be right; after all, the gods are real as well as their daemonic servants. These are facts, of which I am sharply aware, but for all that they exist and – as much as I draw on their power – I refuse to sully myself by offering them devotion that they neither need nor deserve. Those like Ichneumon who devote themselves to one of the great powers – for he is far from alone – hold a special place in my catalogue of contempt. Perhaps it is because of the gratitude with which they accept the gifts. Perhaps, it is because I do not like to be reminded of the lies I tell myself. Either way I do not like those who exalt in their service to the gods. In that, Ahriman and I agree.

+Whatever the reason, it is… good that you came to us,+ I managed at last.

+On the truth of that we can agree,+ he replied as he turned and gestured for me and our escort to follow.

+Truth?+ I sent, and let my amusement touch the sending. +Would your god approve of that word?+

Ichneumon glanced over his shoulder as he walked before me.

+Let us see,+ he sent.

+Behold.+ Ichneumon raised his hands and tilted his head back as though bathing in the fire’s warmth – it was hot. My armour warning systems chimed with low-grade heat warnings as I stepped up next to him. +Is it not magnificent?+

+This…+ I began, but the thought trailed away.

+It is the Eye of Change,+ he sent, the thought almost purring, and lowered his hands. +It is the heart of the ship, and the heart of everything I have given to the Master of Fortune. It is my heart.+

I remained silent. In honesty I did not know what to say.

The chamber was spherical with a circumference large enough to swallow the central plaza of a major city. Its walls were ribbed metal, and so thickly covered in soot that they seemed moulded out of night. We stood on a walkway that wound around the inside of the walls. Before us, in the central volume of the sphere, a mass of flame coiled and pulsed like a blind dragon. It was a singularity of change and wild power. The warp rolled at its heart, raw, wild and hungry. Sheets of burning parchment tumbled endlessly through the fire, turning to ash and then reforming from nothing. The necks of avian gargoyles projected from the walls of the chamber, breathing torrents of burning gas into the air.

I pulled my helm off, letting the full heat of the fire hit my face.

‘Haassuvir…’ I breathed aloud.

+What?+ Ichneumon shot me a glance, and his sending was sharp. Just on the edge of my eyes, his bodyguards twitched where they stood. Ichneumon stilled them with a pulse of will. He knew that the sound I had made held no real power, but he did not understand the words I had spoken. He did not like that.

+A expression of surprise, brother,+ I sent,

+Truly? I do not recognise the language.+

+It is a language that died with the civilisation that created it.+

Sweat was prickling my skin. Without my helm the heat was a deluge. I spat, and the saliva was fizzing to steam before its acid began to eat the metal of the platform.

+How did this civilisation die?+

+I destroyed it,+ I sent.

He tilted his head, and I tried not to blink as the sweat ran into my eyes.

+For their language?+ he asked.

+For their impudence.+

He was silent for a second, and then began to laugh. Behind him the mass of fire flared and writhed.

+Is that a threat?+ he sent, the thought rolling with amusement. +Oh, what a beautiful jest!+

+Not a threat,+ I sent.

+I am sure it’s not,+ he sent. +But now that we are here, under the Eye of Change, let us talk terms?+

+Terms?+ I sent.

+Yes, Ctesias. Terms for the exchange of what Ahriman needs and what I will receive.+

+Ahriman offers–+

+He wishes to leave the Eye of Terror,+ he cut through me. +And he wishes to do it without braving the Cadian Gate that is now garrisoned by the might of the Imperium.+ I formed a thought in reply, but he raised a finger to halt me. +I know this. The fire and wind gave its truth to me. And I…+ he paused, looking up at the boiling cloud of flame. +I have the means to give Ahriman what he wants.+

The fire twisted and changed colour: blue, purple and green flowed into the red and gold. Clefts opened up, and vortices formed from roaring heat. An image of the Eye of Terror hung above us.

+They call me the Wanderer of Paths,+ he continued, +but I wander only where I am guided, and the paths I walk are gifts from the Great Knower of All. I will give that knowledge to Ahriman as a gift.+ He paused and the image of the Eye collapsed back into a tumble of wild flames. +But I wish a gift in exchange.+

It was my turn to laugh.

+So that is it? For all of your millennia of devotion you are still just a mercenary like the rest of us.+

He shook his head, and then, slowly, removed his own helm. The head beneath was monstrous. Even in the limited manner of those raised from mankind to the ranks of the Legiones Astartes, it was no longer anything that even mocked its original humanity. Eyes clustered across one half of its front. Circular mouths full of teeth covered the other. Tendrils of soft, pale flesh hung from its scalp like locks of twitching hair. It was an image of abomination, an echo of the curse that we had once followed Ahriman to undo.

+I want to come with you. I want to serve Ahriman,+ sent Ichneumon, the teeth in his mouths twitching. +You see, I am our true face, Ctesias. Under the skin, you are all still like me.+

I did not know what to say. The Rubric had shed the curse of mutation from the Thousand Sons, at least from those of us who lived. But cure is not immunity. The warp is subtle, and though we do not crawl with tentacles and chimeric flesh, there are many amongst the Thousand Sons whose flesh still changes. That is to be expected given what we are, and where we make our home. But Ichneumon’s face declared that he was not afflicted with the influence of the warp; he embraced it.

He tilted his head, and his mane of flesh lengthened and coiled together like a knot of worms.

+What say you? Will Ahriman take me into his service? Will he let me be a part of the future he chases?+

I blinked, and breathed out. I honestly did not know what to say, so I asked the question that was ringing in my mind.

+Why would you want that?+

+Does it matter? You want what I have, and this is what I want in return.+

+It does matter because you know that it is a request Ahriman would refuse.+

+Yes, he would.+ Ichneumon pulled his helm back on, the face of horror vanishing beneath gold and carved bone. +He would deny me because of what I believe, while keeping court with creatures like you, and accepting the service of a horde of mongrel warriors. There are some ships amongst this fleet that harbour creatures whose flesh is so blessed with change that it barely holds a single shape from one second to another. I know this, and I know that he would deny me in serving him.+

+Yet you still want to follow him?+

+He is the fulcrum, touched by the Great Sorcerer, watched by the Court of Change. Where he goes the glory of change follows. To be at his side, and aid his work, is to serve the Grand Conspirator. There are none more high in the champions of change than Ahriman. Only he would deny that, and the paradox of his denial only sweetens its truth.+

+You are insane.+ I shook my head.

+Of course, but who amongst us is not, Ctesias?+

I shook my head. Sweat had started to pour down my skin inside my armour. The heat of the Eye of Change was cutting right through my armour now. My will touched the warp. It was boiling, bubbling with wild currents. I felt my thoughts flood with heat as they hooked power to them.

+No,+ I growled. +I will not accept your terms, and he will not accept your service.+

+Then you will leave without what you came for.+

+I will not,+ I said, sending a hammer of telekinetic force through the air. Ichneumon sensed my attack, and his sphere of force met mine with a blink of blinding light. The Eye of Change flared with plumes of flame above us. The nine bodyguards exploded into movement: blades free and bright, and guns arming. Ichneumon’s mind was changing, reshaping the warp faster than I could follow. I felt him pull strength and fire from the Eye of Change. Serpents of white heat blinked into being in the air around me. The first bolt shell roared from the nearest bodyguard’s bolter. I was outclassed and outnumbered, and in a fraction of a heartbeat I was going to become a smear of smoke on the air.

I am not a warrior, not in the defined focused way that Astraeos was, or Gaumata is. I am a Space Marine, but I was not facing fragile mortals. Though fool he might be, Ichneumon was powerful. Stars of malice, he was powerful! His mind unfolded into the warp like a flock of vultures, each flutter of wings a thought fused with power. There was no way I should have lived through that instant and survived. I should never have begun such a fight. As I say I am not a pure warrior.

But I had time to prepare.

I spoke the word that had been circling my subconscious. It was not from a dead language, but from the secret encoding of the universe – old before lips first spoke it.

Silence and stillness exploded from me.

Time slid out of focus.

The warp rippled. Ichneumon’s blaze of power froze.

The bolt shells crept closer to me.

The Eye of Change was a sculpture of heat. I could not move: the same chains I had just conjured into being bound my body. My thoughts were free though, and, while the same was true of Ichneumon, he had to react. I did not, and my next thought rose into my mind.

I blinked sidewise in reality. Bile touched my tongue.

Ichneumon’s thoughts reshaped. I felt heat bubble in my veins.

The time dilation vanished. Bolt shells exploded where I had been.

Invisible fingers scratched over my flesh inside my armour.

My bolt pistol was in my hand.

The bodyguards were a juddering blur.

I fired three times into the air and deck in front of the charging warriors.

The full weight of Ichneumon’s mind slammed into my flesh.

The shells I had fired exploded.

I fell as bubbles of heat raced to my heart and head.

There was a flash of perfect distorted light, and then a shriek.

The force that boiled my blood faltered.

Figures made of pink flame and glowing flesh were ripped into being from where my shells had shattered. Each shell had held a vial of deep blue fluid at its core, held in place by marks carved on the shells’ silver jackets. The literal of mind might have called the fluid ‘daemon blood’, but daemons do not have blood. No matter what you call it, the effect is the same.

I rose as the writhing mass of bounding, hooting creatures unmade the bodyguards. Flames in a dozen colours ate their armour, turning their limbs to glass and ice as it flowed over them.

Ichneumon raised a hand. A jet of white fire leapt from the Eye of Change and cut through bodyguards and daemons like a blade. The line of fire made a sound like ringing glass as it washed back and forth. Then it was gone and Ichneumon was turning back to me, the fingers of his hand smoking.

+Please tell me that there was more to your plan than that?+

I gripped the deck, my gauntleted fingers scoring into the metal. Fatigue beat through me with every hammer blow of my hearts.

Nessutha…

+You can stop babbling to yourself,+ he sent, and his raw will pulled me from the deck like a broken toy in a child’s grasp. +You think I did not realise that your muttering was you placing trigger thoughts into your unconscious? Your ways are crude, Ctesias. I am chosen by the Changer of Ways, and in his sight I see that all sorcery is one, no matter the mask it wears.+

I grinned to myself as I hung in midair. I could taste blood between my teeth and in my throat.

+I was going to cut open your thoughts and take what we needed before you died.+

+And Ahriman thought you would succeed?+

+He was sure of it.+

Ichneumon shook his head.

+He lied, Ctesias. He knew you would try, but it was a test. A test for me, to see if I was more than a mage with a…+ he turned his head as though reading the parchments that hung from my armour. +…With a clutch of old tricks and worn secrets.+

+He does not want your service, Ichneumon,+ I hissed in thought.

+No? Ask him. Send your thoughts to him and ask. I will permit it.+

He gestured, and lowered me to the deck. The remains of the bodyguards were a jumble of debris under a slick coat of cooked ectoplasm. I glanced at them and then at Ichneumon, standing like a stretched shadow before the Eye of Change.

+Go on,+ he sent.

I did as he asked. I told Ahriman what had happened, and he replied. I breathed for a long moment afterwards. I was starting to shiver.

+And?+ Ichneumon asked.

+He says yes,+ I replied. +He agrees to your terms.+

Ichneumon nodded as though acknowledging a truth he had long known.

+It is good. I will go to meet with him now–+

+Not yet,+ I sent.

+I will not be– + he began.

+The fleet is readying to depart. Once we have made passage then Ahriman will welcome you into the circle.+

Ichneumon paused, standing still. I could feel his senses stretching out, trying to feel the edges of lies or obscured truths.

+You give me your bond, Ctesias?+ he asked at last. +You pledge the truth of what you speak?+

I disconnected my left gauntlet from my armour. The hand beneath was shrunken and skeletal. I moved it to where a sharp edge of silver rose from my right pauldron. A swift movement and a red line opened across the palm. Blood welled up and ran over my fingers, and I shook it onto the deck.

+With my blood I mark my word, and the words spoken in this place. By my soul, and the powers of the great ocean, I pledge their worth.+

Ichneumon looked at my hand then up at my face.

+Very well,+ he sent.

+And what do you pledge as surety, Wanderer of Paths?+

+ Surety?+

+You have my words and blood. What do you give as sign of our accord?+

He was silent, then he raised his hand. A rope of fire unwound from the Eye of Change, and reached out to his open fingers. He pulled it free, and the flames settled into a ball in his palm. He raised it to the side of his head as though listening.

+The Antilline Abyss is the passage we must use to leave the Eye. Use any other and rivals will destroy us before we see the void beyond.+

+The Antilline Abyss…+ I repeated carefully.

+That is my gift of surety. I will guide you there, but now you know where we must go.+

I made my head bow.

+Thank you, brother,+ I sent.

+It is done?+ asked Ahriman.

I stepped from the gunship to the deck of the Sycorax without answering. He was waiting for me, flanked by the silent figures of his Rubricae guards. I avoided looking at any of them.

+We will need to translate the fleet to the warp soon,+ I sent.

+Did you get it?+

+The timing is important. Also I cannot guarantee that he will not detect it. He is more powerful–+

+Ctesias!+ His sending pulled my head up with its intensity. +Is it done?+

‘The Antilline Abyss.’ I said it with my true voice, letting my weariness roll with the words. ‘We have to seek the Antilline Abyss.’

Ahriman nodded slowly. We had a name and that would be enough for us to draw a thread to where we would leave the Eye.

+He gave the name as a gift?+ he asked as I limped down to the deck.

+As you said he would.+

He nodded, and I let him take confirmation that I had attended to my other task from my thoughts.

+Good,+ he sent. +We will translate to the warp within the hour.+

I walked on in silence. I would go to my chamber, take off my armour and sit on my granite throne and do my best not to think anything at all. When the Sycorax and the rest of the fleet slid into the warp’s embrace I would be silent and alone – not thinking about what would be happening to the Nonogramiton.

I am not a warrior. I have said this, but what I am is a caller of daemons. I wield their power in place of my own. I could tell Ichneumon had noticed my whispering phrases as I passed through his ship. That is why I had needed the display of inadequate psychic violence, so that he would have a reason for my muttering. If he believed he had the truth, he would think no further. Truly, power can blind us all.

Each string of the muttered whispers was a component of a greater whole, each innocuous on their own, but together created something far more subtle and far more dangerous than Ichneumon could conceive. I had marked and bound each phrase into the skin of his ship: tapping scratches into the deck with my staff, marking it with my acidic spit, clawing it into the platform as I rose from my defeat and marking it with my blood. Dangerous, dark work; just the kind of thing you would send a creature like me to do.

I reached my chamber and stripped off my armour. Taking my chair, I settled my back against the black stone. It felt cool on my skin. Far off, the Sycorax’s engines woke and sent their low vibration through the air. All across the fleet the same low note of tension would be running through the flesh and bones of the living.

As I waited, the image of Ichneumon’s mutated face came back to me, lit by the light of the Eye of Change.

+We were both sent here by the will of others,+ he had said.

I thought of the god he worshiped and gave his mind and soul to, and I wondered if Ichneumon had been sent here to give us what we needed and then die believing he had won.

+The Changer of Ways watches over us and holds the fate of us in his eternal eye. You are his servant as much as I. More perhaps.+

Those words still live with me now, long after Ichneumon went to the abyss. Even now I cannot help but wonder if he was right.

As the dreamless dark closed over me, I heard laughter in the night

Ichneumon would be contemplating the glory of his god as his ship began its last journey. It would not be long now. The Nonogramiton would go into the warp, and then the phrases threaded through it would do what they had been crafted to do – they would call out, the daemons of many gods would come, the ship’s protections would crumble and then it would cease to be. None would ever know what happened. I alone would know of the agreement with Ichneumon and Ahriman’s violation of its terms. Me… and the warp, its powers silent in their mirth. It would be a pure, and perfect, murder.

III
HOUNDS OF WRATH

‘Do not ask which creature screams in the night.

Do not question who waits for you in the shadow.

It is my cry that wakes you in the night,

And my body that crouches in the shadow.’

– Karazantor the Vile, the Traitor of Xian

Know this, the daemon is a lie.

The daemon claims supreme dominion. They claim that in time all will be their slaves, that reality will lie broken, and that they shall rule the realm of mortals for eternity. They say that it is destiny. They say, in the paradox time of the warp, that this has already happened. These claims, like every part of their nature, are false. 

The daemon’s existence is a dream. Its power is the stolen strength of mortal minds. Its shape is an image painted onto existence so that we may look on them and know that our sins have returned for us. Though they have power it is a power which eats itself. The high daemons, which some call gods, squabble of souls and dominion, betraying each other and themselves. They are not predators. They are carrion.

Yet, for all its falsity, the daemon has the ability to twist the mind of the living, to make flesh a mockery, to defy death, and bring ruin on the works of mortals. When the warp waxes, and the neverborn walk through the veil, they have the strength to break armies and cast down heroes. They are always there, watching from the edge of thought, and the corner of sight.

The daemon is a lie, but it is a lie that can unmake reality. 

I say this because I have made my life in the calling and controlling of these creatures. I am Ctesias, and I above all know the price for believing in the power of the gods and their children. 

Arrogance is the mark of the sorcerer, and those of the Thousand Sons more than any. We make the mistake of thinking that because we are not slaves that we cannot be prey. This is a tale of how I made that mistake, and the price that I paid.

The Fall of Ignorance spun in the fires of its death. Its hull had split from prow to beneath the bridge. Its stern hung from broken bones of girder. Standing upon the bridge, I watched as a splinter of iron and stone the size of a hab-stack tumbled slowly through the void.

+Geller field failure.+ 

I looked up. Astraeos knelt on the deck

I shook my head and looked away without replying. The bridge was a cave of twisted metal open to the vacuum. Spheres of machine oil and blood drifted past me. Corpses, or rather parts of corpses, spun in lazy arcs. Portions of servitors hung from tangles of tubes and cables, still tethered to their systems. My eyes found pieces of power armour amongst the debris: a silver gauntlet set with a spiral of blue stones, a peg of severed bone projecting from within.

I sniffed. Inside my helm I could taste burnt meat and bitter ash 

+No,+ I sent. +It was not the Geller field.+

 I reached out with my staff and sent a severed hand spinning with a gentle tap. Its fingers twitched at the psy-active contact. 

+You seem very sure,+ sent Sanakht. He was standing on a crumpled wall section above me, feet mag-clamped to the metal. The swordsman looked bored, his hands resting on the pommels of his paired blades. He was ready, but this was a place of the dead and there was nothing to threaten him. 

+Seeming does not come into it,+ I replied. +I am sure.+

+The neverborn were here.+ Astraeos stood, his fingers dark with half frozen blood from the deck.

+A crushingly obvious fact,+ I sent, and I could not keep the weariness from my words. I closed my eyes for an instant. They stung with tiredness.

We had translated from the warp only four hours before, and the passage preceding it had not been kind. We had passed outwards from the central volume of the Eye of Terror. Storms had battered our fleet and minds.

I took a long slow breath inside my helm and felt my hand twitch with the instinct to pinch my forehead with my fingers. Bright motes of red light were dancing on the edge of my sight.

+There were neverborn here,+ I sent, +but that does not mean that the Geller field failed.+

+Then what did happen?+ sent Sanakht, his thought voice not hiding his impatience with both Astraeos and myself. I bit back a retort, and instead gave the most accurate reply I could.

+Something else,+ I sent.

+What?+ Astraeos asked, his eyes fixed on me, contempt bleeding off his aura in grey coils.

+I am…+ I began, then paused. The Fall of Ignorance had arrived an hour after the rest of the fleet, cast back into reality, still burning, the echoes of its death trailing after it in tatters of red warp skin. That in itself was a puzzle, a worrying puzzle. How had the daemons got within the ship if the Geller field had not failed?

+I am not certain,+ I finished.

Sanakht gave a cough of laughter across the vox. I was about to reply when another voice filled our minds.

+He is right.+

We all turned as one as Ahriman entered. He did not walk, but floated, guiding himself with threads of telekinetic force. Wreckage spun past him, sometimes so close that I was certain it would hit him, but it did not, and he did not change his speed or direction. A film of ice sparked on the high horns of his helm, and in the weave of his silk robes. A squad of Rubricae followed him, their feet locked to the deck as they marched in dull unity. He stopped in front of us, and we bowed our heads. The ache in my skull was still bright.

+Ctesias is right,+ sent Ahriman. +The shields did not fail. When the crew died they were fleeing from something that came from within. Their doom was with them when they passed into the aether.+

+The damage…+ began Astraeos.

+One of the command crew overloaded the plasma couplings. Courage, or madness, it cannot be known.+ Ahriman paused, pivoting in the space above the burnt and twisted deck. +I can hear the screams still – they cling to the hull. But it is a storm without order, only the colour and texture of terror. And amongst it…+

His sending trailed away, and that hesitation sent ice across my skin.

+Master?+ sent Sanakht into the empty moment.

Ahriman shook his head, and turned his gaze on me.

+Discover what happened here, Ctesias. We make passage to Samatis in two cycles. You have until then.+

A protest began in my thoughts, but it died before forming fully. I could feel the skin of my face prickle inside my helm as Ahriman’s gaze held steady on me. I knew without testing the feeling that this was not a command I could refuse. Of his Circle, I was the one who knew most of the ways of daemons. I was most suited to getting him an answer. Our kind does not like mysteries; they damage our pretensions of infallibility.

+As you will it,+ I replied, bowing my head.

Ahriman nodded and gestured to Sanakht.

+Sanakht will watch over you, and keep you alive should there be need.+

I could tell from the swordsman’s posture and silence that he had already received the command from Ahriman by thought, and liked it less than I did. I nodded at him, once. He turned away.

+Two cycles, Ctesias,+ sent Ahriman, as he floated towards a ragged hole in the bridge wall. The firefly lights of circling gunships moved against the night beyond. I saw one craft change course and begin to close on our position. +Two cycles and then you will have an answer to what happened here.+

I worked through a sunless cycle of day and night. Sanakht watched over me, his half broken soul filling the edge of my senses with itches of impatience. I moved through the dead ship brushing its every wall and rivet with my mind.

Emotions are the currents of the warp. Strong emotions send ripples through it, and leave a mark on the place they occurred. Most marks are shallow, and fade quickly. The strongest emotions leave more permanent impressions. The Fall of Ignorance was a tattered wound, a confusing blur of impressions, so thick that it took hours to tease out shadows of what had happened on board.

Ahriman was right, of course; the ship had died within the warp, and its Geller field had not failed. The daemons that had destroyed it had come from within, and its explosive death had come at the hands of its own, panicked crew. But amongst the wash of terror and the dark splashes of death, there was something else.

The Fall of Ignorance had been the ship of a warband ruled by a priesthood of psykers, who worshipped a selection of poorly chosen daemons and aspects of the Changer of Ways. Like many of the warbands that had been drawn to serve Amon and had then transferred their loyalty to Ahriman, they were not Thousand Sons, but opportunist and mercenaries drawn to power and the possibility of more of it.

Rather like myself, in fact.

Even their most potent sorcerers were weaklings and children compared to Ahriman and the rest of the Circle, but their powers were still considerable. And in all the churned mess of death, fear, rage and desperation I could find no trace of their arts. The wounds left by conjured lightning and the imprint of infernal fire were absent. They had died without raising their most potent weapon in their defence.

That worried me.

I kept moving, trying not to linger on possibilities.

A pattern emerged as I walked and floated through the wreckage. At first it was faint, but the deeper Sanakht and I went the clearer it became. The destruction and terror on the ship radiated from a single central point, like the blast imprint of a bomb detonation. At the centre of the pattern was a corridor. A bare strip of walls, floor and ceiling in an area of the ship which had been inhabited by higher orders of human crew: skilled serfs, favoured attendants, and thralls. It looked like nothing, just an empty corridor, with sticky splatters of blood adhered to the walls. It was the start though, the central point, and if I was to give Ahriman answers then it was the place I needed to truly begin my work. There I would call back the past to witness for us.

I breathed out the last word of my conjuration, and it formed a glowing cloud in the airless void. The cloud solidified, squirming over itself like a snake. I watched it. Static fizzed across my helmet display. My inner eye saw it grow, the coils of light thickening until it was a fat knot in the dark. I could see other shapes within it now, hands and faces stretched into ropes of grainy light.

+Do you take pride in what you have become?+ Sanakht asked as he watched me.

‘Pride?’ I replied in my mundane voice. ’A strange question to ask.’

+A fair one, given what you are.+ His sending nudged my thoughts. The conjured image before me flickered. Angry black cracks formed across its edges.

‘Please stop that. I realise that your capacities are even more limited than they were, but this is both delicate and difficult, and prone to unpleasant results if it goes wrong.’

I spoke a string of silent sounds, and the shadows in the corridor flickered and thinned.

‘Given what I am…’ I repeated his words carefully, aware that I should just ignore him, but let my annoyance override prudence. ‘I take it you know what I am then?’

‘You are an agent of your own desires – a creature without honour, who has sold himself over and over again. A failure.’

‘Failure?’

‘You have bartered away all that you had for petty power. Nothing exists in your universe that you would not sell to take another breath. You are the greatest of failures. You are a shell where a warrior once stood.’

‘Strong words, brother.’ I let the last word slide from my lips like a slug. ‘You are of course a warrior of ideals, without weakness or failing. I can see that in those you gave your loyalty. Tell me, did Magnus lack something greater and more worthy? Was that why you decided to defy him? Were Ahriman’s high motives so fleeting in your soul that, when Amon came and offered a future of oblivion, you took to it without pause? And when he fell to Ahriman, did the new dream take the place of the old before or after Amon’s corpse hit the floor?’

His swords were a blur in his hands before I realised he had drawn them. I pulled a fragment of my will away from the construct, and slammed it into him. It was not much, but it was enough to rock him backwards for an instant. The sphere of energy bulged and flickered. Frost flicked up the walls, and I felt sores open on my skin as I fought to keep my mind aligned.

‘Careful,’ I said, softly. ‘Remember, this is not something either of us wants to be close to if my concentration slips.’ He looked at me, the edges of his swords sparking in the pale light. He shook his head, and sheathed the blades. To be honest I do not think he intended to kill me. If he had, then this tale might have been very different in the telling.

‘Am I proud? That was the question wasn’t it?’ I asked. The psych-construct before me rippled. ‘Proud of my skill? Proud that, against the odds, I still survive while living in the underworld of a universe that is populated only with enemies?’

I turned my head towards him, and the knot of pale light unravelled. Tendrils of ghost energy whipped through the dark and struck the walls, floor and ceiling. Growths of shape and shadow spread outwards, churning with blurred shape and movement. Whispers and broken voices began to babble in my ears. Sanakht flinched as the backwash from the manifestation hit his mind.

I smiled.

‘Proud? Yes, I suppose I am.’

He turned to reply, but then the past filled the corridor before us, and stole what he was going to say from his tongue.

A human made of shredded light rose from the dark. The ghosts of robes and limbs blurred at his edges. The vision was not real, of course. It was an imprint left by what had happened here, pulled from the warp and cast into being like an image projected onto a wall. I could see a face, but it was not the face that he had worn in life. Pit-black eyes bulged above a billowing slit of a mouth. It was the face of his soul. The face of a human psyker, not powerful, but one of those kept by some of Ahriman’s followers as thralls. And he was running for his life.

I watched as he turned and looked behind him, the image exploding in splinters of light as his mind shattered with fear. I heard the ghost of his scream, faint and distant, as though it was coming from far away. I looked behind us, at where he had looked.

In that moment, just as the image of a dead man looked behind him, I saw a shadow blot out the darkness.

And I heard a howl.

+What was that?+ sent Sanakht. The ghost images were draining away into the airless dark. I was shivering, my fingers rattling inside my gauntlets. Cold danced on my spine. +Ctesias, did you hear that?+ In my head the sound of the howl rose again and again. +Ctesias?+

I was breathing hard, the blood a rising drum beat in my skull. Sanakht’s swords were drawn and he was turning his head as though trying to catch a sound.

+I hear wolves,+ he sent.

+No.+

I reached for the bolt pistol at my waist. I carry it because I have always carried it, but I seldom use it. My mind is the only weapon I need. Ice was still coiling my spine. It had all become very clear just what had happened to the Fall of Ignorance and, as ever, the truth once known is never comforting.

+Not wolves, brother,+ I sent. +That was the call of a hound.+

And, as I sent the word, two eyes opened in the dark-like holes cut into a furnace, and the hound howled as it bounded into reality.

Everything in the universe is balance, or so Magnus once said. For every sorrow there is a joy. For every light a darkness. And for everything that clings to life there is a predator. It is the oldest of balances and the oldest source of fears. The growl from the dark beyond the firelight, the ring of teeth rising silent from dark water, the wings of the raptor circling against the sky. We of the Thousand Sons imagine ourselves transcendent amongst mortals, our powers akin to those of gods. So they are: our arrogance is not unfounded, but we are not separate from the herd of mortality. There are creatures that hunt us, ever hungering for our souls. Of these, the hounds of the Lord of Skulls are perhaps to be most feared.

The hound formed as it leapt. Its head was a cave of flame, its teeth the tips of broken swords. Blood-caked fur and molten scales skinned its red muscle. Its presence filled the passage with the reek of hacked meat and hot iron.

Sanakht reacted before I could form a thought. His swords lit as he cut, bright streaks of lighting and fire. I saw the blows hit, saw the power and beauty as his force sword stabbed into the hound’s muzzle, and the perfect timing as the power sword’s edge opened its flank. I saw the hound land, molten-brass blood spreading in spheres in the dark as it crumpled. Except it did not happen.

The tip of the force sword rammed forward, and the fire in the cutting edge guttered like a blown candle. The power flowing through the blade vanished. The hound dipped its head in midair, and met the dead metal tip with its forehead. The blow sheered into empty air. I could smell burning sugar and meat. A collar of barbed brass circled its neck, glowing with forge heat and hatred. I saw it and wanted to scream. The warp was draining into it, fleeing my mind and leaving me naked before the hungering void. The hound was a hole in my mind’s eye, a stretched shape of shadow.

Iron claws shrieked on plasteel as the hound pounced. Sanakht spun to turn the momentum of his blows back, but his feet were mag-locked to the floor, his movement slowed. The hound arched its head back. Sanakht flinched back as its jaws snapped shut where his neck had been. He released the mag-clamps in his feet and spun into the space above.

I fired my bolt pistol. The hound leapt up the wall, claws gouging into metal plates as it shed the pretensions of gravity. My bolt shells exploded in its wake. Sanakht’s feet hit the ceiling, and clamped to the plating. The hound bounded off the wall, muscle flowing like pistons. Sanakht twisted and slammed the dead metal of his force sword into its muzzle. The blow twitched the head aside, and the jaws snapped shut a hair’s span from Sanakht’s face. If it had been anyone else, I would have thought it a second lucky escape, but while Sanakht was many things, I would never deny that with a sword he was closer to divinity than mortal.

He rammed his power sword up under the hound’s jaw. The lightning sheathed blade exploded through bone and muscle. The hound’s body scrabbled at the air, claws skittering off the ceiling plates. Sanakht ripped the sword down, back through the head and out of its muzzle. The collar around the hound’s neck flashed blue with heat and shattered globules of flesh and liquid brass exploded outwards. Sanakht flinched back, disconnected his feet from the ceiling plates and pushed off.

I heard another howl and had time to turn as a second hound slid from the shadows. I fired. The round hit its shoulder, and ripped a crater in its bulk. Splinters of crimson scale exploded into the vacuum and hissed to ectoplasm. I squeezed the trigger again, just as the hound hit me.

The lack of gravity saved me. If I had fallen, the last thing I would have felt in life… was…

The hound’s paws and chest slammed into me, its mouth yawned wide to bite down on my head. I pitched backwards, and my boots unclamped from the floor. The hound’s jaws closed. A single tooth caught my forearm and slit the armour open like skin. I tumbled down the corridor. Beads of blood scattered after me. Bright, white pain exploded in my skull. Blackness was seeping into me as blood poured out. The warp fled into the distance. Ceiling, walls and floor hammered me as I tumbled over and over, still clutching my staff and pistol.

I could hear the hound bounding after me, its claws ripping metal as it sprung down the corridor. Its hunger filled my mind and I knew that it would never stop, that it would drag my soul back to the blood-soaked dark beneath the Throne of Skulls. It was inevitable. It had been ordained. I raised my pistol, targeting spinning runes as my world turned over and over.

A sword blade hacked down into the back of the creature’s neck. The power field activated just before the edge met flesh. Scales, flesh and bone sprayed out, as the blade cut down and down.

My back hit the wall. I punched my hand into the metal and jerked to a stop. Sanakht was tumbling beside the daemon, pushing his blade deeper into the hounds lower neck. I raised my pistol and fired. Three bolts ripped the creatures head free and blew it into splinters and froth.

I let out a breath as my thoughts and the warp reconnected. That, more than still being alive, was a sublime relief.

Sanakht struck the wall next to me and gripped onto it.

+Are you injured?+ he asked.

+Your concern is refreshingly unexpected,+ I managed. Blood was still pumping from the slit in my arm. +I am functioning.+

+Can you move?+

By way of reply, I kicked off the wall and shot down the corridor. We had to reach our gunship. We had to get back to the Sycorax. My mind reached out, trying to find Ahriman, trying to speak to him, but the only answer was the fading cries of the dead. Sanakht followed, kicking off walls and gantries in the spinning silence

+This was not a random attack.+ I sent as we hurtled through the dark. +They were waiting for us. This was their message. The hounds have been loosed to hunt us, to hunt him.+

It was one of the moments of my life where my capacity for something approaching loyalty surprised me. I should have known better. I should not have been so naive.

+Which power unleashed them?+

It was a good question, and I should have seen that it was the only question which really mattered. Hindsight makes us all seem fools.

+Pick one,+ I spat back.

On the edge of my mind I could hear more howls rising from the distant night.

Ahriman was waiting as we jumped the gunship. I had managed to connect to his mind only minutes before we docked, blurting out a warning as my body fought to staunch the blood flowing from my wound. Sanakht had his swords drawn and lit as we hit the floor. Blood scattered from me as I rose from where I landed. My eyes took in the rings of Rubricae covering the hangar deck. Astraeos and the rest of the Circle stood beside Ahriman, helmed and armoured.

Surprise spilled through me. It was so calm. So still. No blood. No howl of hounds. Bright stablights reflecting on azure armour. I felt myself sway.

It was wrong.

Or was it I that was wrong?

+Ctesias,+ sent Ahriman, stepping forward.

The hounds were coming. I had heard their cries. They had tasted my blood, and I knew that they were coming with total certainty.

+Ctesias?+

I heard the thought, but it was distant. I blinked and tried to form a sending, tried to open my mouth. But nothing happened.

The world was cracking. Smears of red marked the light touching my eyes. I felt one of my legs slide out from beneath me and the deck met me as I fell to my knees.

Red. Everything was calm, but all I could see was red: the red of thick blood rippling in a pool, the red of a sun hidden by the smoke of a burning world and the red of a sword pulled from the forge. The world was drowning in crimson and I was drowning with it.

And then a portion of my stupidity fell from my mind. I should have known. Of Ahriman’s entire Circle I should have known, and seen, and not been so blind. I am, it seems, not immune to my own form of hubris.

I tried to rise, but I could not.

I felt hands touch me, and try to pull me up.

I forced my mouth open.

‘They…’ I began, and felt thoughts try to reach my own, but my mind was a blur of sharp edges and heat. ‘They are coming,’ I rasped. My breaths were coming fast. The air in my lungs was smoke and cinders.

‘We are ready for them,’ said Astraeos.

‘They need a scent,’ I said, and with each word I heard the patter of my blood on the deck. I think they understood then, because I felt them draw back, and heard the sound of weapons crackling to life.

The hound had not failed in its purpose. It had maimed me, and tasted my blood so that it could have my scent.

So that they could follow me from beyond the veil.

The howl rose within my mind. First one, then a second, then more than I could count. I could feel fire in my blood. The whirl of crimson was all around me, a wall of blood fog and black smoke, and I knew that my long and pitiful life was at an end.

But I knew that I was not going to meet my end on my knees.

I stood and forced my eyes open.

For a second everything was as it had been. Ahriman, Astraeos, Sanakht – the ranks of Rubricae – all facing me with weapons drawn. Then, with a last howl in my skull, the hounds fell upon us.

They bounded from the edge of sight. Crimson bodies flickered into being. Lightning formed around Astraeos, lashed out towards the forming shapes, and vanished before it fell. Light stuttered and ripped into shreds of black and glowing red. I saw a hound, the first to take full flesh, leap into the air as the Rubricae fired as one. The bolts exploded in midair, the blue and pink fire within flashing out and collapsing in an eye blink. The hound landed amongst the Rubricae, its jaws locking around the chest of one and tossing it into the ranks behind. Dust fell from the pierced armour. I could hear high, dry screaming in the warp.

Sanakht was running to Ahriman’s side, his swords a blur. More hounds bounded into sight. I heard the stutter of bolt-rounds, and the splash of explosions. The Rubricae began to jerk to stillness as the presence of the hounds severed them from the power animating their armour. Voices called across the vox. I saw Astraeos battering down a creature with the pommel of his lifeless force sword. Ahriman was calling to us as he wove amongst the devastation, firing with each step.

‘Ctesias!’ he called, and my head turned. A hound cleared the immobile line of Rubricae, and loped towards me, muscles bunching to pounce. I pulled the pistol from my thigh. My fingers were wet with my own blood. Blazing orange eyes fixed upon me – they were already too close, and my hand was still rising.

A figure in blue armour cannoned into the hound from the side, pitching into it with raw physical power. The hound landed, its claws raking the deck for purchase. Then Astraeos straightened and fired, his bolt pistol breathing rounds into the creature as he walked towards it. The hound came apart in spills of red smoke and jellied flesh.

He turned. Hissing blood coated his armour and robe.

‘Thank you,’ I managed.

He turned away, already firing. Blurred shapes, cries and the roar of weapons rolled like a storm through the air. I looked for a target, but my limbs were moving as though I was wading through water. Blood fell from my arm. It fizzed with fire as it fell through the air.

The one possibility that I had overlooked came to me then, and I cursed myself that I had not seen it sooner.

I focused my mind and turned it within, reaching down into the base beat of life within my veins. I felt the blood pouring through me, and the dual beat of my hearts became the roar and clash of battle. Like all daemons the hounds were of the warp, even if their brass collars and the blessing of their lord made them immune to our powers. The warp is their existence, and at that moment their existence in reality hung by the thread of blood they had followed. My blood.

They felt it as my mind began to reform. They howled and turned towards me. I was fighting to stand. I saw Sanakht cut the legs from one as it turned from him and bounded towards me. Formulae were unfolding in my mind, multiplying as my will gave them life.

The hounds were steaming towards me, closing with flickering bounds. Frost covered the deck beneath their feet, and their blood spun into the air as smoke. Gunfire and blades cut into the pack, and some fell or blew apart. They did not stop or turn aside. They knew what I intended, and they would bring me down before I could complete my plan.

The formulae of banishment are old, their secrets known for millennia and forgotten many times. Their preparation should be done with care, their use controlled with every precaution. But I did not have time, and I did not have the strength for caution. I unleashed my thoughts and let them pour across the blood bond.

The hounds screamed but their howls died in their throats. Their bodies began to burn. Flakes of ash peeled from them. Their scales cracked. The fire in their eyes blazed. They were choking in reality, and mine was the hand on their throat.

Ahriman, Astraeos and the others began to fire. Bolt-rounds struck crumbling flesh, and blew it into grey clouds. For a second I thought I had succeeded, that I would survive.

A hound leapt over the powdering form of its pack mates and landed before me. Molten brass bled from its flanks and the edges of its shape were a haze of cinders and ashes. The last segment of the formulae completed in my mind, and I felt the warp buckle as it reached in to reality to yank the hound back into its own realm.

The hound’s mouth opened. Its teeth were black slits in the world. I could hear shouts and the stuttering boom of gunfire. The hound’s body broke apart as surged towards me. The sound of its howl swallowed my mind.

Its jaws closed on my neck.

Silence rushed up to meet me as the clamour and colour of life vanished, and then I died for the first time.

IV
THE FIRST PRINCE

‘There is power enough in man to overturn all creation, were not for the shackles of pride holding our souls.’

– Fatidicus, founder saint of the
Temple of the Saviour Emperor

The light is fading. My eyes which have seen so much, struggle to see these words as I write them. It will not be long now until I die for the second, and final time. My soul will go to the reward that a life of wielding forbidden knowledge has earned me.

I say that it will be my second death, and that is true, after a fashion, for in the three thousandth and eighty-first year of my life I died for the first time. It was not the end, though. After all, here I am.

My name is Ctesias, once of the Thousand Sons, and this is a story of lies and deceit, and of why I lived through one death to die again. I was not this tale’s creator. That dubious honour falls to my then-master Ahriman. This is his story, though I was its witness.

And it begins as razor teeth ripped my throat open, and I fell, screaming, from reality…

Death is silence. The place between here and there, between the noisy beating of heart and blood and the hush of eternity. Blank blackness surrounded me, total and complete. All I could feel was wind and the touch of dry dust. I could not feel my body: not my face, not the weight of my muscles, or the ache of the bones in my hands. And I could not remember who I was, or how I came to be there.

‘Greetings, Ctesias.’ The voice was so sudden that it did not seem real. ‘Here we are at last, old friend.’

I did not know the it, though I knew that I should. I tried to open my mouth to ask the speaker who they were. Nothing happened.

‘Do not speak, Ctesias,’ said the voice. ‘You have no tongue for it. Not here. Here you are nothing but a silent name.’ I did not know what the voice meant, but I knew it was right. I felt its truth like the cold edge of a knife on my skin. ‘You know where you are, do you not?’

I remember then. The memory came slowly, pouring into me, wet and sharp. My body was lying on a metal deck, on a ship called the Sycorax. Blood was spreading in a slowly clotting pool around my broken limbs. I was not breathing, and both of my hearts had just drummed their last beats.

‘Yes, that is right. You are dying. You are on the threshold of the gate of souls. All of those centuries crawling away from it, and here it is, open beneath you, waiting for you.’

The rest of my past came, all the broken and bloody details of a life lived too long. I remembered that I was born a man, and raised to become a demi-god in a time when men no longer believed in them. I remembered that I had been a warrior and a scholar who had become a peddler of atrocity. I remembered that the last moments before I began to die were filled with the howl of hounds, and the reek of burning blood.

‘I would ask if you saw it coming, said the voice, but you were never a soothsayer, were you, my friend? No, that art was never to your taste.’

Ice folded through me. I knew who was speaking to me as well, and why, and as soon as I knew I wished I did not.

‘I am here for the debt that lies between us, Ctesias. I am here by the power of the bindings you laid on yourself. I am here for the last thing that is yours to give.’ It chuckled, the sound a dry rustle of cracked skin. ‘Forgive the formalities, you understand. You always knew the power and importance of words. I always admired that, a mortal who could make such chains of words and names that he could not move for the clinking of pacts and bargains. Clink-clink, clink-clink…’

I could hear it smiling as it spoke, lips pulling back over sharp teeth, tongue sliding over the points. I could not see its face, but I did not need to. Some things are best known but not seen.

‘I am sorry, Ctesias, it purred. I will miss you… I will miss watching you.’ Something touched me then. The sensation of flesh and skin formed around the claws as they dug into my soul. ‘I would ask if you wished to live again, but I am afraid that you do not have anything left to bargain with. At least you had this time. A small thing, but all I can give.’

The claws began to cut deeper.

‘Leave him!’ A new voice echoed in the blind void. I felt heat and for an instant the blackness was smudged by white light. I knew the voice, but it was impossible that he was there. It was impossible that he would come for me now. I tried to call out, to warn him, but the silence still held me. ‘You will go from this place, daemon, and send my brother back to the living.’

‘A mortal shade, oh what a delight. Should I quiver with terror now, or would that not be appropriate?’

‘I make this offer once. Go now.’

‘And who are you to make such an offer?’

‘My name is Ahzek Ahriman.’

The daemon snorted.

‘Of course, the beggar thief of secrets. This creature you call a brother lies in my debt, his bond pledged in willing exchange. I am here for what is mine, sorcerer, and you do not have the power to prevent that.’

The darkness vanished. Thunder split the world. Pain became me, and I screamed in silence as the lightning lashed on. I could hear Ahriman’s voice resonating as it cast words into the storm, and the daemon hissed and roared.

Then the storm was gone. The darkness returned, and with it the daemon’s voice.

‘Impressively foolish.’ It did not sound angry. It sounded like it was enjoying itself. ‘The Court of Change cackles in appreciation of your subtlety, Ahriman. The Plague Children fear the fire of your power. Even the dogs of the Skull Throne curb at the sound of your name. Yet you do not realise that that I have unrivalled power in this place. I am disappointed.’

‘What are you?’ growled Ahriman.

‘A good question. The simplest questions are so often the best and the last asked, do you not find? I am the heir to the warp. I am the death of kings. I am the first son of the gods.’

‘An impressive collection of words.’

‘You should know that words are never just words.

‘You are a creature of the warp, nothing more. Even with power you are the slave of false gods.’

‘I am not theirs.’ The daemon’s voice was a whip crack of anger.

‘Yet here you are, a princeling coming to pick a soul from a carcass like carrion.’

‘I am not here for his soul. What use have I for rags? No, I am here for something greater.’

The daemon’s words hung in the empty wind, like a baited hook in water.

‘What?’ asked Ahriman.

‘That is a secret I will not speak, and Ctesias… cannot speak to tell you. But…’ I felt the tip of a claw brush me again, and again the fire of pain burned bright. The daemon sounded disinterested, almost bored. ‘But I will offer you something else. You care for Ctesias, a broken, vile thing though he is. You want to see him live, and I will see that done, and withhold my hand from collecting what is mine. I will do this for you… but such things are not gifts that can be given without an exchange.’

‘What is the price?’

‘A pact, your bond for his. Take his place in my debt and you can have him… what remains of him.

‘I will not accept that.’

‘In that case I shall be about my business.’

The claw touched me again. The feeling of muscles and flesh flashed into existence an instant before the razor tips plunged into me. I screamed. In the physical world I can endure pain that would kill mere humans. But there, in the gap between substance and emptiness, I was just the mind of an old man. So I screamed, and screamed, but made no sound.

‘Hold!’ called Ahriman

The claw withdrew. Cold numbness flooded me.

‘Control is made of knowing what we have, and what we want,’ said the daemon, and I felt an echo of its satisfaction shiver through me. ‘Power is having something that someone else wants and cannot have.’

I tried to force a voice into being. Ahriman did not know what he was facing. I have never seen the like of his power, but the daemon who had come for me was of another order –older and more terrible than any being beneath the Dark Gods themselves.

‘You cannot destroy me,’ said the daemon. ‘Such a thing is beyond you. So do not try and pretend that it is within your power.’

‘Your coin is false, daemon,’ sneered Ahriman. ‘Its glitter no more than the shine of lies believed by fools.’

‘Know the value of a thing before you refuse it. I can offer you much, Ahriman. Kings have burned their heirs and offered up their realms for a fraction of what might be yours.’ I felt the daemon’s presence move away from me, as though it coiled closer to Ahriman as it spoke. ‘I know you, Ahriman. I have glimpsed your deeds, and heard great Lords of Change speak of what you yet may be. Others have made offers to you. The greatest servants of my four sires have courted you, and failed. But they did not hold what you feared to lose, and they could not offer you what you truly desire. Only I can do that.’

‘Lies.’

‘Truth. Something won by lies is worthless. I will give you only truth. If you refuse then I will take my due from Ctesias, and go. You may leave without harm or loss.’ The daemon paused, its voice sliding into sweat, poisonous, honey. ‘Come Ahriman. Do you not wish to know what I can offer?’

I wanted to shout into the silence that followed the daemon’s words. I wanted to warn Ahriman. To tell him to leave me to the fate I had made for myself. I waited for him to refuse the daemon, to go. But the moments lengthened, and I felt the daemon smile.

‘Show me,’ said Ahriman, and in my blind mind I imagined the daemon bowing its head in obedience.

‘As you wish.’

Dry wind swirled and rattled around me. Stains of rust-red and orange spread through the darkness. The colours grew, split, and cleaved along hard lines, until a great flat pattern of wild colour and shape had swallowed the black.

‘They say all things begin with song, or light, or blood. All incorrect, even as metaphors,’ said the daemon, but its voice came from behind me, as though it stood just behind me. ‘Everything begins not with a spark, or blast of trumpets. It begins with chance.’

And, as the daemon spoke, the flat image before me grew into three dimensions. Planes of jagged ochre and brown grew to mountains. Pools of blue and swirls of white unfolded into a sky scuffed by clouds. Knots of black lines and fragments of bone became towers and paved avenues flanked by stone-faced buildings. Green blots grew into trees in full leaf, and threads of muddied colour settled into rivers flowing from the mountains and through the city.

‘I do not know this place,’ said Ahriman.

‘No,’ purred the daemon. ‘Though it is familiar, is it not? I could have chosen a small observatory on the birth worlds of the eldar, or the first necropolis of the necrontyr. It does not really matter where it is, only what happens here. This is a city which ruled a small piece of a world. From those towers its kings looked out and dared to think they ruled all that could be ruled, while beside them their priests looked to the heavens and dreamed that they knew all that could be known.’

‘If you are trying to point out my own hubris, the parallel is clumsy.’

‘Nothing like that,’ said the daemon with a chuckle. ‘This does not represent hubris, Ahriman. Those figures which you can see moving in the streets, all clad in blue, red, and gold, they don’t feel pride in their delusion. Their domination of the world is simply a fact to them. No one takes pride in facts. No, the people of this city have something else. Would you like to look closer? If you look into their eyes you might see it.’

Ahriman must have nodded, for the city grew closer. The people, who had seemed so small, grew. Smudges of colour became robes of billowing fabric. I began to hear their voices, long strings of sound that I did not understand, but comprehended completely. Each phrase was a snippet of a life scattered in passing. Then we were amongst them – myself, the invisible presence of Ahriman, and the daemon. Smells of sweat, spice, and stagnant water mingled as the crowds brushed past, close enough to touch.

Then we rose again, and skimmed the tops of the buildings. At the peak of the highest tower we came to a woman sat alone underneath an awning of wood and fabric. Her face was just beginning to show the lines and creases of age. Her eyes were dark, the irises two circles of polished cedar set in ivory. On a low table before her lay sheets of parchment, and she held an abacus of glass beads suspended on a bronze frame.

The woman’s eyes never rose from the paper, and beads clacked back and forth on the counting frame. As we watched, a servant in a polished glass mask silently placed a jug of scented water and a cup by her elbow. She did not look up and the water remained untouched.

‘She can undo any part of the lives of any of the men and women we saw in the streets, and she can do it with a word,’ said the daemon. ‘Her people call her the Sun Queen, because from her comes all that lives. People in lands far from here quake at rumours of her anger. Like her forebears she has broken enemies and taken their lands as her own. Here, in this small slice of existence she is not a human. She is a goddess.’ The daemon breathed, and I felt its rank presence shiver though me as it shook its head. ‘And in a few moments the most important thing she has, will be no more.’

‘Is this a demonstration of your power?’ sneered Ahriman. ‘You killed them and left all they made in the dust?’

‘Oh, no, no… This kingdom will live for centuries more. In a millennium it will cover the planet it was born on. In three millennia it will burn planets that defy it. In ten… well… that is another story.’

My eye suddenly caught something at the edge of my sight. Out beyond, on the edge of the blue dome of the sky a new, bright star began to glitter. The star swelled, growing brighter with every second. Somewhere down in the streets a cry rose over the city’s murmur. The star became a ragged sphere of white light. The sound of the distant crowd was now a swelling chorus of panic. The woman, who was a queen, looked up at last, a frown on her face. Her eyes found the bloated star. For a second she stared, and then she was across the tiled roof, shouting for her servants as the star grew and grew. The cries from the streets below were howls of terror now, and the summit of the building was crowded with figures, and shouting voices. The star was a second sun.

‘Enough,’ said Ahriman. ‘I do not need to see this.’

‘But you do,’ said the daemon, ‘and you bade me show you what I can offer you.’ The star was no longer a star. It was a shrieking wall of white light dragging across the sky. ‘Watch.’

And then it was above the city, and the cries of fear became silence.

A rippled ceiling of light hid the sky. Growths of fire, and smoke rippled across it. Vast spurs of blackened metal cut through the fire cloud like shark fins through an inverted sea. And then, as fast as it had arrived, it was gone. After a minute it was a fading star on the opposite horizon.

Then everyone was shouting, and calling out.

Amidst the clamour, the queen stood silent and still, staring at the abacus on her table.

‘Do you see now?’ asked the daemon.

‘The fire of inspiration falling from the sky,’ said Ahriman. ‘The manifestation of something so great and terrible, and outside of comprehension, that it opens these peoples’ eyes to the limits of their knowledge. If you know me as you claim, then you should know that this illustration of the power of enlightenment is wasted. ‘

‘Yes, but no. Look at her face. Really look at her face. Think of the strength that was in those eyes before. There was worry of course. Doubt, naturally, but what is there now?

‘Fear, determination, anger, curiosity.’

‘And what is gone that was there before.’

‘I… do not…’

‘The consolation of ignorance Ahriman. The simple comfort of knowing that no matter the terrors and possibilities that the world offers and threatens, those things are understood, measured. Known.’

‘Why show me that?’

‘As a gift. As a warning. As an offer.’

‘There is no value in ignorance,’ said Ahriman.

‘No? Are you certain? Would you like to see what I will show you next?’

The daemon did not wait for a reply. The city, and the queen, and the sound of new-born enlightenment, vanished.

A figure stood before us, bent over a lectern, his face lit and shadowed by the light of the flames. He wore black robes edged in white. Pictograms ran down the fabric, coiling in gold and silver stitches.

‘To be mortal is to be made of the past,’ said the daemon, ‘all the moments of what has been piled up to make the present.’

A scroll covered the face of the lectern, the handles of the twin spools of parchment turning in the figure’s hands. He looked human at a glance, but he was not. Behind him a suit of crimson and ivory armour hung from a chrome frame, like a snap shot of a dissected man.

I knew him. I knew the hunger and focus in his stare. I knew the smile that touched his lips as the scroll passed before his eyes. I knew that at this moment he knew nothing of what awaited him in the centuries to come. I knew him better than a brother or a father.

He was me.

‘This has no value,’ said Ahriman. ‘I remember Ctesias as he was. I remember them all, living and dead.

‘Yes, they live in your memory don’t they? All the dead who fell, all the ghosts of mistakes and dreams gone astray.’ More shapes appeared, sketches of armour, limbs, and faces drawn in smoke – a Legion of the lost spread out to a vanishing point. ‘This is how you see them is it not, Ahriman?’ I saw faces I knew and had not seen for centuries: Khayon, Hathor Maat, Phosis T’Kar, and beyond them hundreds more. Thousands. Tens of thousands. ‘The measured wisdom in their eyes, the nobility in their aspect, the ideals of illumination clinging to their every breath. So noble, so misunderstood. Worth something. Worth everything. Worth saving.’

‘They are as they were,’ said Ahriman, and I heard the catch in his voice, and then the bitterness. ‘But do not claim to be able to turn time back to this. That is beyond the power of the gods you serve.’

‘I do not serve the gods, and your vision is reassuringly narrow. The past is not what I am offering you. I said that I would only show you truth, and so I have, and so I do…’

Names began to rise out of the dark, a rolling litany of names chanted by unseen voices.

‘….Gilgamos, Ohrmuzd, Ctesias, Iskandar Khayon, Magnus, Tolbek, Helio Isidorus…’

The Legion before us began to shine. Light grew out of them, and spread above their heads and shoulders in halos of golden light. Their skin and armour became translucent shells over the blaze within.

‘…Mabius Ro, Nycteus, Menkaura, Gaumata, Amon, Zebul, Ketuel, Ankhu Anen, Jehoel, Midrash, Arvida, Kiu…’

They rose into the air and their faces were not noble, but proud, and cold, and hungry. Cords of congealed flesh hung from them, connecting each of them to a great tangle of oily light which hung above.

‘…Zabaia, Siamak, Ignis, Sanakht, Khalophis, Atharva, Phosis T’Kar, Auramagma, Hathor Maat, Uthizaar…’

Sickly bright colours moved through the knotted mass. Eyes winked from within its coils, and mouths chattered in countless half-heard voices.

‘See them,’ said the daemon. ‘See them as they were.’

‘No,’ breathed Ahriman. ‘This is not truth. I saved them. I saved them from this. They were not like this, they were never like this.’

‘They were and are as you see them. They have not changed. It is you who have changed.’

‘This is–’

‘Truth. Remember the gift of ignorance, Ahriman. Remember that. You can have the lie if you wish. It can even be made real. You can remake your Legion as you remember them. It will be a lie, but lies can easily be believed, just as truth can be forgotten.’

Ahriman did not reply, and the legion of glowing figures began to flicker, and their names faded with them.

‘Silence,’ said the daemon, ‘is as good an answer as any. You both believe me and don’t. Such delicious paradox. So you do not want truth, nor lies, nor ignorance. What remains for me to lay at the feet of Ahriman, greatest of sorcerers, greatest of fools?’ ‘Let us see. Let me show you my last gift.’

The sky was fire and jagged light. Black towers broke the horizon. Streaks of silver rose from the ground, tearing into clouds of creatures pouring from a dark rift which split the burning sky from horizon to horizon. Flat shapes of skin and teeth spiralled in the air. Armies covered the ground, glinting with armour, blood, and blade edges. Huge beasts strode amongst the sea of warriors, their hides scaled in rusted iron. The air vibrated with gunfire, and thunder strikes.

‘Where is this?’ asked Ahriman

‘A battlefield that has yet to be,’ replied the daemon.

A warrior in blue armour stepped into view, and buried a fire-edged axe in a creature of rotting skin and tentacles. The creature exploded, and flies and maggots swarmed up the axe-man’s arm as he drew back. Yellow pus smoked as it ate into his armour. The sound of great wing beats filled our ears and a shadow fell across the battlefield. A towering figure landed before us, wings folding an instant before it swung the cleaver in its fist. A circle of warriors in blue crystal armour fell, blood flickering out, burning and curdling as it touched the air.

The figure was huge. Its jaws lolled in a wide cave of black meat. Pus seeped from between its cracked teeth, and its wings shivered as it looked around. Smoke boiled from it, pulsing and shimmering like a living veil… and an instant later, I released that it was not smoke. It was a cloud of coal-black flies. Gunfire plucked at the figure’s flesh and rang from its armour. It turned its head to the sky and bellowed.

Its rattling cry shook the air with challenge. A second monstrous figure dropped from the sky. Twin pinions spread from its shoulders, each feather a tongue of blue flame. The down draft of each sweep shimmered with heat, and smelled of incense. Blue fire sheeted from it as it dived.

It struck the first figure with a sound of breaking bone and vaporising fat. The pair cannoned through ranks of warriors in a tangle of blades, claws and fire. The bloated creature roared as claws ripped chunks from its arms. They rose from the ground, wings of feather and skin beating. Their hands locked around each other’s necks. 

The image froze, and silence replaced the clamour. 

‘Do you recognise them?’ asked the daemon.

‘I do not,’ said Ahriman.

‘You knew them both once. You know one of them still.’

Ahriman did not answer, and I knew that he would be doing as I was, staring at the two monsters, wondering who they had been. They were daemons, immortal princes of the Changer of Ways, and the Father of Plagues. Both had once been mortals, but their devotion to their chosen gods had bought them ascension to the circles of the neverborn.

‘The one made of dead blubber and poison is Garthak,’ said the daemon, ‘once called the Last Blade, Chieftain of the Death Sight cohort of the Sons of Horus. You–’ 

‘I shared the field with him at the fall of Marnicia,’ said Ahriman. ‘I remember. A good man.’

‘Not now,’ said the daemon with a chuckle. ‘Now he is just a slave.’

‘And the other?’

‘You do not recognise him? Well, I suppose he is different to how he seems to you now. If you do not see the resemblance I will not spoil the eventual surprise. We are not here for him though, or for poor Garthak. We are here so that you can see the battle they fight.’

‘This could be any one of a million battlefields on a thousand worlds. Many more than these two have fallen. Their tragedies are not unique.’

‘You are correct. This battle is not exceptional, and that, my clever mortal, is the point. This is not just a battle between two creatures of the warp – it is a clash of greater powers written small. This is part of the war fought by slaves to darkness on uncountable battlefields. Fought not because they chose to fight, but because they have no choice. Fought by creatures such as you.’

‘I am not–’

‘Not what? A slave? You are, Ahriman. Every beat of your blood, and every conjured thought in your skull, serves the Changer of Ways.’

‘You speak–’

‘From the first moment you saw the stars in the sky you served the God of Change. Every beat of your life has happened for its amusement.’

‘I am no one’s slave, and no one’s son!’

‘It burns, does it not?’ laughed the daemon. ‘Truth, ignorance, power, there are no things deeper, no things darker, no fires more fierce. You are a slave. Your choices are not your own, no matter what you may believe. I offer you freedom, Ahriman. Take Ctesias’s place in my debt, and the chains will fall.’ Its voice was low, crooning, like a mother offering comfort to a child. ‘No other can promise you this. No other has broken those chains themselves. I alone am the salvation you crave.’

The tableau of battle was dissolving, and the daemon’s presence was a suffocating coil of pressure – squeezing tighter, anticipation and hunger seeping from it like heat from a fire. I could feel Ahriman’s presence then, the hard crystal of his mind resisting the slow strangling. He was strong, but if I had been able to speak I would have told him that he was not strong enough.

‘This is a trap,’ breathed Ahriman. ‘You never wanted Ctesias. You knew I would come for him, and so you sent the daemon hounds to kill him. You have been waiting for Ctesias to fail, so that you could engineer this moment. You are here for me.’

‘The great intellect revealed at last. The gods will fall, and the warp will howl at the foot of my throne. You may join me in that future, Ahriman. It can be yours.’

‘No.’

‘Then you will lose what you came to save.’

Needle points of ice pierced me and ripped downwards, and the daemon’s anger and spite was roaring through my blind soul like a wind of knives. And then I heard something that terrified me more than the pain of my torment.

Ahriman laughed.

‘So certain,’ he said, and there was no humour in his voice. Only iron. ‘So used to power. So much a slave yourself that you cannot see that your delusions are the amusements of the gods you rebel against.’ I could feel the daemon’s anger and confusion. ‘And so certain of your power that you forget your nature and limits. You have lingered here too long… Be’lakor. And while this is a trap, it is not yours.

‘No!’ roared Be’lakor.

Cracks of white and blue light split my sight, blinding me, pulling me down. Be’lakor howled and blackness howled with it. I was coming apart. I was shreds of thought separating under a blade. I was a single, long shriek of agony.

And then colour and sound and feeling rushed in, and I had an instant of numb disbelief before I began to drown in my own blood.

Chanting voices poured into my ears. Flame light spiralled around and above me. I could see a ring of figures in blue armour and white robes. Their hands were raised, fingers linked by chains of lightning. I was lying on my back, blood pulsing from the wounds in my chest and neck, pink foam frothing as I gasped. Ahriman stood above me, his horned helm a crown of brilliant light, his open hand splayed above my eyes. His voice echoed as he called

‘I call you from the shadow of this soul, Be’lakor.’

Darkness vomited from my lips. The spaces between the lights dimmed. A black cloud swelled through the air, caged by the fire and lightning.

‘I call you into the light!’

The shadow cloud twisted, searching for a way out. Shapes formed within it, sketches in shades of midnight.

‘I call you!’

The cloud rushed outwards, and then snapped back into something that had shape, something less and more real than smoke. And at last I saw Be’lakor. I had never seen him before. He was many things at once, images and forms overlaid and combined, all the same and all separate: a withered skeleton with twisted horns of rotting bone, a towering creature of bare flesh and red flame, a figure of flowing obsidian muscle, a shadow like the flutter of great wings. He loomed larger than sight, his presence ice and cold oblivion.

‘You will burn, sorcerer!’ roared Be’lakor. ‘I will make your dreams ashes!’

‘I have an offer for you, daemon.’ Ahriman sounded utterly unconcerned. ‘A trade.’

‘I will drag your soul through the garden of knives. I will stew it in the pools of decay, and burn it on the fires of wrath.’

‘Control is made of knowing what we have, and want we want. Power is having something that someone else wants and cannot have. I make you a simple offer. You release Ctesias from your debt, you heal his wounds, and you grant me the answer to one question. For this I will give you freedom.’

‘You dare–’

‘If you do not accept this, I will bind you into Ctesias’s corpse, and bury that corpse beneath stone, and fire, and leave it there until the stars turn cold.’

‘You do not have the strength.’

‘I do. It might cost, but what does not have a price?’

Through the haze of blood and fading life, I saw Be’lakor, the First Prince of Chaos and Master of Shadow, shake with rage, and then become still.

‘I…’ it hissed. ‘I accept your terms.’

‘You submit to release my brother Ctesias from all bonds made between you, to return him to life, to give me the answering of one question I will speak to you?’

‘I do.’

‘Pledge it!’

‘By the hidden marks of my name, by all the power that is mine, by the fortune of all that I will bring to being, I answer and am bound by your gift.’

‘Good… now make it so.’

The daemon twisted, its substance spiralling into a column of fire and black smoke. I felt my heart beat a last time, and felt thousands of invisible hands grip my flesh and begin to pull me down. And with the last scrap of life I heard Ahriman speak his question to the daemon, and I heard Be’lakor laugh as he answered, and then I felt the memory of both question and answer vanish as the blackness finally took me.

I woke to the quiet beat of my twin hearts, and found Ahriman alone standing above me. My blood had caked to a crust on my face. I touched my throat and chest where the death wounds had bled before, and found smooth skin and flesh inside the breaks in my armour. I looked up at Ahriman.

‘We have much to do, brother,’ he said, ‘and once again I thank you for your service.’

‘Do not expect my thanks in return. You…’

‘I did what I needed.’

‘And what did you need from such a creature?’

‘A curious question from you, Ctesias, and one I will not answer.’

I began to rise. My body did not feel pained or damaged, but it did not feel wholly connected to me, as though it were a graft still bonding to my senses. I turned and walked away from Ahriman, treading over the remains of the ritual marks burnt onto the deck.

‘What did the daemon promise you the first time?’ asked Ahriman from behind me.

The question made me pause, and I considered for a second not answering.

‘You mean that you did not know that as well?’ I asked, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice. ‘Can there be something that is beyond your knowing, brother?’ I took another step, and then paused, and turned back to face Ahriman. ‘It promised that it would keep me from what awaits my soul when I die. All the daemons I have bound, all of them I have enslaved, they wait for me beyond the veil. That is what it said it would spare me. That when I died it would come for me, that it would keep me from them.’

‘And what did you give it return for that gift?’

I did not answer him, but turned away and walked from his presence. We all have our secrets to keep, and mine are my own.

V
GATES OF RUIN

‘Do not pity those who are lost on the path. Pity those who reach its end, and see at last what they were seeking’

– Malcador the Sigillite,
Admonitions to the Solar Lords

I am a follower who followed his lord.

My lord was Ahriman, and I am Ctesias. These are the stories of my time in his service, laid down in words as I watch my life fade with the candle that lights these pages. I will die soon, and with me so much of the past will die. There are others that were there, at Ahriman’s side, in that lost age: Kiu, Sanakht, Gaumata, Gilgamos, and later Credus, Ignis and the rest. Some perhaps still live now, but how many remember how things were in that time between the fall of Amon and the search for the Athenaeum?

Time has a habit of burying lesser events under the weight of later calamity and triumph. The extraordinary seems diminished when compared to the momentous, but it is still important, it still has meaning. So it is that I choose now to write not of the grand and terrible endeavours which would come later, but of the steps which took us there. This is the story of one such step, of how Ahriman took us out of the Eye of Terror for the first time, on our first exodus from the hell that is our home.

The creature tried to raise its head from the altar. Silver chains clinked as it moved, and symbols on the altar glowed brighter. White candles burned with a steady green light at the edge of my sight, but they did nothing to banish the darkness of the chamber. The only true illumination was the cold glow of my staff, and the glow coming from within the chained creature.

I say creature, because that was what it was. The spite of the daemon had swallowed the flesh of the human that I had given it as a host. Its limbs had grown and bent with new joints. Black quills had sprouted from its back and shoulders, and the face was an explosion of fangs and red, lidless eyes. The skin stretched over its bones was transparent and the colour of amber. Within its body, organs floated like jellyfish and blood vessels were threads of red light. The man I had taken from the Sycorax’s machine decks remained only as a twitching pulse of soul light, shrinking as the imprisoned daemon ate it.

The creature strained against the chains for a second, and then flopped back onto the altar. It hissed at me, its face pulsing.

I sighed. It was the fourth daemon I had bound and put to the question, and so far each of them had proved as unhelpful as the last. It was not the most powerful daemon I could summon, but it was cunning and knowing. I had more, thousands more, all bound by their true names that I broke into fragments and kept in my memory. The shards of those names scratched at the edge of my thoughts, like insects in boxes. They wanted me to let them out.

If things did not start going better, some of them might get their wish, I thought. How many more times would I have to go through this tedious cycle before Ahriman at last accepted that there was no way of finding what he sought.

Knowing him, I was not sure that we would ever reach that point. I was more likely to run out of human hosts, daemons to questions and patience long before he would admit defeat. He had given this task to me and to me alone. While he sat in his tower and cast his mind into the realm of dreams, I had to find a way to do the impossible. I had to find a way out of the Eye of Terror.

‘Give it to me,’ I said, and the moisture of my breath fell as a frost through the psychically charged air. ‘Give it to me and I will release you, and burn the memory of your true name from my mind.’

The creature hissed, and strained against the chains again.

‘Very well,’ I said, and closed my eyes for a few seconds. I was really very tired.

I moved away from the altar to where the shadows hid iron shelves worked into the chamber’s walls. My hand found the stone jar I was looking for, and my fingers tingled as I picked it up. My mind formed a series of words, and the pictograms on the jar’s surface lit with a molten glow. I let go of my staff and it began to rotate in place beside me. The jar’s lid came free in my hand. The smell of grave rot filled the air. I walked towards the creature on the altar. It had shrunk. The iron quills bristled from its flesh. Every one of its eyes fixed on the jar in my hand.

Daemons do not feel fear. They do not feel anything that we might consider emotion. They are emotion. A daemon is hate, desire and rage all congealed into things that want nothing more than to burn the mortal world that created them. They don’t fear any more than a fish drowns. But rules and rivalries run through every mote of their existence, unbreakable and undeniable. And because of that nature there are things that even they cannot bear. There are things which, if they were mortal, we would say terrify them. I could banish the daemon. I could bind it for aeons, but both those were not threat enough. So instead I was going to give this daemon to another of its kind. I was going to let its essence be consumed by its antithesis. I was going to feed it to a daemon of decay.

‘I know my feelings on this are both irrelevant and incomprehensible to you, but I would really rather not do this.’

I stepped up to the altar and looked down at the creature. It was very still. For a second it almost seemed like a living thing.

‘I do not say that from pity. Just in case that was a point of confusion. It is more that while this will be as bad as such things can be for your kind, it will cost me as much to replace the resources that I am expending on this question.’ I reached into the jar. The thing which emerged between my fingers looked like a scorpion made of polished bone and dried sinew. Its legs shifted with a dull creak as it clung to my hand. ‘But needs must.’

The creature of the altar exploded upwards, screeching, limbs writhing, skin stretching. The chains snapped tight, and sigils flared on the altar. I muttered a word and dropped the thing of bone from my fingers. It grew as it fell, bone legs snapping out, sacks of yellow venoms swelling across its back. It landed on the creature. Scraps of flesh and skin sprayed up as it scrabbled into the creature’s torso. Oily black smoke poured into the air with overlapping cries of birds. The creature was juddering, its flesh crawling with blisters, its veins clotting to black rot.

‘Give it to me,’ I spat. The creature on the altar was shaking from side to side so fast that it was a chained blur. The click of bones and the hiss of venom beat in my ears as the scorpion dug deeper into the red meat. ‘Give me the way to find Antilline Abyss.’

‘Gates… of… Ruin…’ The words rose from the creature. I raised my hand over it and spoke a silent word. The thing of bone and decay went still inside the creature’s mangled torso.

‘The Gates of Ruin?’ I repeated softly.

‘All those who tread the path you seek only reach it through the Gates of Ruin.’

‘That is fascinating, and I thank you for the additional detail, but it does not suffice.’

I begin to murmur a fresh set of syllables, and the thing of bone squirms to life again.

‘The Gates of Ruin are the way you will find it!’ it howls. I pause and the bone thing clatters to stillness.

‘Explain, or I will let it drag you into the gardens of decay.’

‘What you call the Antilline Abyss is a hole threaded through our dominion, a tunnel through the tides of what you insist on calling the Eye of Terror. Its edges are bound by the scraps of souls caught in the tides. They scream. The Gates do not just mark its beginning. They call to those that can hear them.’ The creature on the altar smiled, and dozens of sets of lips peeled open across its body. Sharp white teeth gleamed at me. ‘The Gates of Ruin sing, and sing without end. If you hear them you will find what you seek.’

I looked at the creature for a second. Daemons are lies, and the one I had bound to answer to the altar was a princeling of tricksters. But I have had millennia of binding such beings and cutting away their ability to deceive. It is my art, and I would hazard that there are few who can rival me in its mastery.

‘Why do the Gates sing?’ I asked.

‘That I cannot answer,’ it said with a chuckle that dribbled black blood from its grinning mouths. ‘But I can give you the ears to hear their song.’

I do not answer for a long moment. You must understand that the Eye in which the warp and reality mingle is ringed by storms and currents. Ships that try to pass that border are likely to be ripped apart. There are ways through the storms. The greatest and most stable of these is the Cadian Gate, but the Imperium stands guard over that pass, and those not wishing to sacrifice vast armies cannot hope to go that way. That leaves the other, more dangerous, ways that are concealed by myth and lies. Ways like the Antilline Abyss.

I do not, and never have, seen the need of so many of our kind to return to the Imperium. We are lost and this hell is both our reward and our sanctuary. We are beasts of the Eye, and what can the realms outside it offer us but the taste of revenge? But Ahriman had commanded me to find a way, and I had agreed to serve his will. For a price, of course.

I nodded at last, and flicked my hand above the creature on the altar. The thing of bone and venom pulled from the rotting cavity it had made in the creature’s chest and flew to my hand. It shrank as it tumbled through the air, and curled into my palm when it landed. I slid it back into the jar.

‘Give me the means to hear the song of the Gates of Ruin,’ I said, ‘and I will free you, and give you back your name. You have my bond.’

The creature chuckled.

‘Agreed,’ it said. Then its back arched and it began to shake. Muscles swelled and shrank along its torso, pulsing as one of its mouths opened. The chains snapped taut. A great gush of blood fountained from its mouth, and spattered down onto the altar and floor. Something hard hit the floor at my feet with a crack.

The creature collapsed to stillness. I bent down and picked up the object that lay in a pool of blood before me. It was a black sphere, or at least that is how it seemed until I lifted it to the light. I wiped the sticky film of blood from it and turned it in my fingers. A dim amethyst glow kindled in its centre, and from far away I heard voices singing, high and clear and sharp.

‘You have it,’ hissed the daemon. ‘Now honour your debt, sorcerer.’

With an effort I tucked the black sphere into a pouch at my waist. The song faded but still lingered on the edge of my hearing. I looked at the creature.

‘Be gone,’ I said, and brought my open hand down on the altar. A crack of thunder rolled through the chamber. The reek of burning hair and ozone flooded my mouth. The host creature flashed to cold cinders.

I shivered, suddenly more weary than I had been only moments before. I turned away from the altar and walked towards the chamber’s only door, picking my staff from the air as I went.

+Wake the Navigator, Astraeos,+ I sent, aiming the thought for where his mind lurked in the Sycorax’s high citadel.

+You have a course for the Abyss?+ came Astraeos’s reply, edged with blunt dislike.

+In a manner of speaking. I have a song for him to hear.+

‘You should not come in here,’ said Silvanus as I entered his chamber. The Navigator sat on the floor, a black velvet robe clutched around him. A mass of needle-tipped tubes hung from the ceiling above a couch moulded to the impression of a human body. Beads of viscous liquid hung from some of the dangling needles. I could smell the sweet traces of sedatives and nerve signal inhibitors evaporating into the air.

+Oh, should I not?+ I sent. The Navigator flinched at my sending. I almost laughed. His skin was white-grey and drawn over fine bones. A strip of black silk wound around his head. The fabric bulged slightly where it crossed his forehead. Beneath the silk and embroidered stars his third eye rolled in its socket so as not to look at me. His mind radiated discomfort in a heavy grey wave. He was feeling sick, partly because of the effects of waking from his drug coma, and partly because that was the way he felt most of the time. His name was Silvanus Yeshar, and he did not like being awake; he did not like being what he was.

‘You…’ he began to glance up at me, then hesitated and looked to where Astraeos stood. ‘Nothing,’ he said, at last and rubbed his palms over his eyes. Thin webs of skin spanned the gaps between some of the fingers.

+You don’t like us being here, do you?+ I sent. He glanced up at me, winced and looked down again, shaking his head. +You think this is your place, and that by coming here we give you bad dreams.+

‘Get out of my head!’

+I hate to say it, Silvanus, but your dreams have nothing to do with us being here.+ I bent down and peeled his fingers from his face so that his left eye peeked out at me. There were flecks of blood around the iris. +It is because you are damned, little man. Totally, and utterly damned. Just like the rest of us.+

+Leave him,+ came Astraeos’s thought, hard and sharp. He flinched away from where he stood by the door.

+Interesting,+ I sent without looking around. +Have you added sentimentality to your catalogue of flaws, Astraeos? Or do you see this one as some sort of pet?+

I felt the brush of anger like a tongue of flames across my senses. Then it vanished. I looked around in time to see Astraeos take his hand from the sword at his waist. His mind shivered to hard stillness.

+Do what you came for,+ he sent, tight control vibrating through him.

+I am glad your restraint is well practiced.+ I made myself grin at him. His anger gave me little pleasure, but sometimes a little is enough.

I looked back to the hunched form of Silvanus.

+I have something for you, Navigator. Something you need to hear.+

His lip trembled but I could feel anger surge in him, growing to blot out the fear.

‘Go and die somewhere,’ he hissed.

I laughed, and let go of his fingers.

+I like you Silvanus. I really do.+ Confusion rolled across his face and thoughts. +But I am afraid I need you to do something. It will not be pleasant. It will be a very long way from pleasant. But I have no choice. And neither do you.+

He shivered and glanced at me, but said nothing. I reached into the pouch at my waist and pulled the dark sphere into the light. High and shrill notes filled my senses as soon as my fingers touched it. I fought to stop myself from shivering as sharp pain and soft warmth slid up my nerves.

Silvanus looked at it, and vomited a mixture of bile and blood onto the floor.

‘No!’ he cried, and retched again. ‘No, never!’ He scrabbled backwards, trailing strings of sticky spit. His eyes stayed fixed on the sphere. I could see fresh pinpricks of blood around his pupils. ‘Get that thing away from me!’

I stepped forward. He shook his head, and the movement became a juddering spasm. Behind me I sensed Astraeos come away from the wall and draw his sword in a single flow of muscle and mind. He was between us in an eye blink, the ice light of his will shining from his sword’s edge.

+The Navigator is under Ahriman’s protection.+ The sending growled with shaped power. I felt the wall of his will slide around my limbs. Warding parchments burnt from armour. I swallowed carefully. I have been many things, but a warrior or battle psyker the equal of Astraeos was never one of them.

+Whose bidding do you think I do here, Astraeos?+ I sent, making sure that my thoughts held a measure of strength in them.

+He commanded you to do this?+

+He commanded me to find a way out of the Eye, and he did not specify any restriction on how I achieved that.+ I glanced at Silvanus, and then back at Astraeos. +When you have known Ahriman a little longer you will find that his ideals extend to ends, not means.+ I grinned again. Part of me could not help it. +When there is a choice between succeeding and failing he rarely quibbles over the price of victory.+

He stared at me, the green lens of his augmetic eye a hard and steady light.

+He will not be harmed?+

+More than he has been already by being a Navigator puppeted by a coven of sorcerers to steer through a realm swarming with the never-born?+ I shrugged both mentally and physically. +No. He will not be harmed. I will keep him safe. Though I cannot say that the experience will not leave its mark on him.+

Astraeos held his stare, and his mental grip on me did not release, though I could almost hear the thoughts turning over in his mind. I sighed, and closed my eyes.

+If you are going to take the irrational path could we at least move past this part?+

The telekinetic blow rippled through my armour and body and tore me from the deck. I felt the sphere shiver, slip from my fingers, and land on the deck with a heavy crack. I landed face down, and felt the broken edges of bones grind in my limbs. I would have some healing to do later. I pulled myself up in time to see Astraeos sheathing his blade. He looked down at me, power radiating off him like the downdraft of vast wings. I confess that I was impressed. Even after all this time, I still am.

+Is that the extent of the point you wanted to make?+

He snarled, turned his back and returned to his position at the side of the chamber.

I looked back to Silvanus. The black sphere lay on the floor between us where it had fallen from my hand. He looked at it, and then back up to me.

‘No…’ he whispered, and there were flecks of blood in the tears rolling down his cheeks.

I picked the sphere up, and winced as the pain of my freshly broken bones flared brightly. The song surrounded me again.

+Yes,+ I sent, and pulled him upright with my free hand. +I need you for this. Ahriman needs you for this. Be thankful for it. It is what is keeping you alive. Now, open your hand.+

‘Please…’

+Open your hand.+ I put iron and pain into the sending, and his hand came up, long fingers opening like the legs of a pale spider. +Hear the song, and lead us to the Gates of Ruin,+ I sent, and dropped the sphere onto his palm.

+You are disappointed.+

I twitched my eyes at Astraeos. We had been silent in word and thought since we had come from the Navigator’s chambers. The Sycorax lay in the warp-tainted void and waited, just as it had done for many weeks. The passages we walked murmured with the sounds of distant machines, but few of the crew came to these high levels, and most that did would be avoiding encountering us. Two sorcerers walking in warplate, armed with sword and staff and the power to break reality, can have that effect.

+Disappointed?+ I mentally shrugged. +No.+

+But you were not anticipating how the matter has turned out?’

+Are you trying to take pleasure in what you see as my failure?+ I shook my head. +I did not fail. I did not know exactly what would happen. That is the nature of what I do. The nature of what we all do, in fact. From your swinging all that mental force around to Ahriman’s peeling truths from the future. None of it is science no matter what any of my brothers choose to believe when they mutter about aetheric energy. All of it is trying to shape and ride the winds of a storm. Better to be glad you get there than worry how.+

+The Navigator–+

+Will lead us to the Gates of Ruin,+ I interrupted, +and through the Antilline Abyss.+

Astraeos glanced at me out of the corner of his good eye, and took his turn to shrug.

+If you are certain.+

I nodded, but did not reply.

In truth I was not certain. We had left Silvanus in his chambers, curled in his sleep cradle, pressing the sphere to the fabric over his third eye. He had been smiling, and his thoughts were slow, calm circles of release and contentment.

We walked on in uncomfortable silence, my staff tapping on my strides, Astraeos always keeping half a pace ahead of me.

+The one who Ahriman summoned approaches,+ sent Astraeos. +The ship mistress says his ship has just translated and is making speed to join the fleet.+ I nodded, but did not reply. Astraeos’s mind pulsed with brief amusement. +Sanakht was also not pleased.+

+On this, Sanakht and I agree.+

+Were the bonds of brotherhood between your kind so weak?+

+My brothers have never liked me, and the sentiment is universally mutual. I am sure you have noticed.+ I stopped walking. Astraeos also stopped, and the scar tissue of his face shifted as he raised an eyebrow. I leant on my staff and let out a breath. +I am an outcast within my Legion as much by choice as by circumstance. But Ignis has always stood apart.+

+Why?+

+He was of the Order of Ruin, and that is as good a start as any, and… well, you will see. +

Astraeos’s head swivelled up suddenly, and I could tell that he was listening to words that only he could hear.

+Ahriman has returned from his dream quest. He summons me.+

I nodded, and as I did, a wave of different voices, sensations and visions ghosted through me. The warp was shifting as though stirred by a sudden breeze.

+Of course,+ I sent. +His timing is as suspicious as ever.+ Astraeos was already moving away and neither replied or looked back. +I will come with you.+ I began to follow him.

+No,+ he snapped. +Ahriman wishes to see me alone.+

+Very well. If that is his will.+ I stopped.

+It is. Go and prepare whatever you need to with the Navigator. We will be making course soon.+

I bristled at the blunt tone of command. At heart I am a mercenary, and that means that I consider everyone’s authority over me fleeting.

+You seem very certain of what is about to happen.+

+Ahriman has what he has been seeking.+ He stopped and turned slowly and looked back at me, an expression that was probably intended as a smile cutting across his face. +When he achieves one step on a path, the next follows swiftly. When you have served Ahriman a little longer you will understand this, I am sure.+

I could not bring myself to smile in reply.

+Silvanus.+

The Navigator did not move or reply.

+Silvanus, you will answer me.+

The sending was sharp, close to a mental blow. Still he did not move. I stepped closer, bending with a hum and whine of armour. The Navigator lay in his sleep cradle, his knees tucked up to his chest, his head tucked down so that he seemed to imitate a foetus. Sweat had plastered his black robes to his skin. He was breathing heavily and slowly. I could see the shape of his ribs rising and falling. He still had the black orb pressed to his forehead, but his eyes were shut. I touched the outer skin of his mind, but met neither resistance nor thoughts, just a warm flow of softness and calm.

‘Silvanus,’ I said with my true voice. Still there was no response. I gathered my thoughts and focus, and prepared to push deeper into his mind.

The doors to the chamber opened behind me. Pistons and servos whined as the deck shook with heavy steps. The presence of minds breathed across my senses as a wave of flame. My skin prickled and the wards etched into my armour and tattooed across my skin began to bloom with heat.

+He will not answer you.+

I sighed, and straightened.

+Does your mastery now extend beyond numbers and sums?+

I heard a clatter of gears and binaric.

‘No, that course of action is unnecessary,’ said a dry and clipped voiced that was the mirror of the voice that had just spoken in my mind. It was also not talking to me. There was another short clatter that almost sounded disappointed. ‘Yes. I am certain.’

I turned slowly.

Two figures stood between me and the rest of the chamber. One was huge, the other monstrous. Ignis, Master of Ruin, wore Terminator armour in colours which were the echo of the orange and black flame of the automaton’s shell. His face was bare, the features as smooth and impassive as I remembered them. Tattooed circles and lines shifted between designs on his exposed skin. His mind flickered with cold emotionless patterns that I did not recognise and had no desire to understand.

I slid my gaze from Ignis to the sculpture in pistons and machine joints that stood beside him. A lacquered carapace of orange rode over its chest and shoulders. Geometric designs covered the armour plates, cutting the polished orange with fine lines of coal-black. It was a battle automaton, a fact that the weapons in its fists and on its back left were established without doubt. This was what he had been talking to with his mundane voice.

+A pet? Or do you keep it for conversation?+

He waited for a long moment, his eyes moving over me systematically from feet to crown. Then he shook his head slowly and precisely.

+Credence guards my life,+ he sent.

I waited but he said nothing else. My teeth clamped together. I had forgotten how it was to talk to members of the Order of Ruin. The centuries that separated that moment from the last time I had seen Ignis had been a blessing in that respect.

+Thank you for clarifying that.+

Ignis nodded once.

+You have changed since I last saw you, Ctesias.+

+How kind of you to notice.+

+My observation was not intended to give you comfort.+ His sending was leaden with lack of emotion. Perhaps it is the daemons. Perhaps they have stolen some of my patience, or gifted me with a need for emotional subtlety not common in my kind. Whatever the cause, I felt my face twitch and my hand clench on my staff.

I closed my eyes and let out a breath, letting the enforced calm roll through me. When I opened them I looked past Ignis. Ahriman stood beside Astraeos just inside the door. Both were armoured but without helms. Ahriman was gaunt, the pits of his face deep beside the sharp lines of his bones. He looked weary, ill even, but his eyes glittered with triumph.

+What is your will, Ahriman?+ I glanced between Astraeos, Ignis and his automaton.

+You have found a way to the Antilline Abyss,+ he said, and stepped forward. I noticed that he was limping ever so slightly. A vein pulsed at his temple and his face was not just tired but drawn. +For that you have my thanks, Ctesias.+

He stopped above the still shape of Silvanus and looked at him for a long heartbeat. I could feel his thoughts turning and the currents of the warp shifting with them.

+Ignis is correct. He will not answer you if you call him with thought and voice.+

+Why?+ I asked, suddenly too tired for the dance of intellect and words.

Ahriman glanced at Ignis, and nodded.

+The pattern of the Navigator’s thoughts,+ sent Ignis, +is a spiral going ever out and curling ever inwards. It eats everything else that is in his mind, and it will continue without end.+ The Master of Ruin paused, and I glanced at him. The tattoos on his face had become still, the lines seeming to splinter his features into shards. I had the sudden impression of distaste and contempt, though I could not say why. +The ratios and progression of the spiral is… a thing I would not have let come into being.+

I shivered inside my armour. I did not know what Ignis had meant exactly, but I could understand what he was trying to say. It was what I had been worried about ever since I had given the Navigator the sphere.

+His mind beats to a song,+ I sent almost before I meant to.

Ahriman nodded, and looked at me.

+Will that song lead us out of the Eye, Ctesias?+

I broke his gaze, and looked at Silvanus, curled around a daemon pearl like a sleeping child. I thought about all the things that I had done for Ahriman, and all the uses he had put me to since I had come to his service. I wondered if there was more to this situation than I saw or guessed. I wondered what else Ahriman might be trying to achieve besides breaking the Eye’s shackles. I remembered the offer he had made me when I lay bound in Amon’s cells.

I blinked, shook myself and looked between the waiting faces of Ignis, Astraeos, and Ahriman.

+Yes,+ I sent. +I was not seeing if he would answer. I was seeing if he was ready. He is. He hears the song and only the song. He will take us to the pass and out of the Eye. He will take us to the Gates of Ruin.+

The warp closed over us. Fire ran down the spine of the Sycorax in a great burning mane as it pushed through swirls of congealed colour. Its sister ships rode beside and around it, linked to it by cords of silver blue light. Curling storms rose and fell around them, breaking over their Geller fields in shards of screaming shadow. The psychic connections between the ships billowed and snapped like ropes in a gale. Within the navigation sanctuary of the Sycorax, Silvanus sat and stared out at the madness beyond. Feeds and wires linked him to the helm throne, and beneath our feet a tower of machinery half a kilometre high linked his will to the ship. But the true connection between him and the fleet he guided were the minds of Ahriman and his chosen Circle.

The Circle and Ahriman played Silvanus like a puppet, using his abilities and senses like an extension of their own minds. From them, webs of telepathy stretched across the storms and current of the warp to minds who guided the other ships. It was a feat of delicate and terrifying skill. I had aided Ahriman in its creation several times since I had joined him, but on the road to the Gates of Ruin was the first time that I ever saw him follow and not lead.

Silvanus sat on the edge of his chair, the orb held in both his hands. His mundane eyes were shut, but he had shed the strip of fabric from his head and his third eye stared, unblinking, into the light of the warp. Ahriman, Astraeos and myself stood with our backs to the open shutters, our eyes closed, the displays of our helms blanked to black. What I saw came from my second sight. I am a sorcerer, and I have cast my mind into the realm beyond, I have moved through it in dreams and visions, but even then the experience is as much construction of my mind as it is of the immaterium. To see the warp directly, to bathe in the radiance of its power and madness, is to invite worse than death. Only Navigators may look upon it directly and live. And even then they pay a price.

Silvanus’s face was a slack mask hanging beneath his forehead. Pink spittle ran from his open mouth. Deep within his throat a sound gurgled and hummed as he breathed. The Sycorax began to dance, skidding down the faces of emotional squalls, pivoting over vortices of hate and lies. Joined together, Ahriman, Ignis and I touched his mind lightly. The link was just enough for us to keep the fleet tied to his course, but even then we could only hear the song.

It was beautiful. I mean it was really and truly the most beautiful thing I have ever experienced. It was not sound, though when I think of it the dull memories of voices and high shrill notes are all I can recall. It was sorrow and joy, and pain, sharpness and bitterness, joy and glee, and the endless, endless promise of more and more. More until you drowned. It was the finest experience I recall, and nearly the worst. I shut every door within my mind and hardened my will until it was a wall of stone. Hours flicked past in instants, or stretched to aeons. And all the while Silvanus watched the Great Ocean of Souls and gurgled in mockery of the song that pulled him on. And we went with him.

I do not know how far or how long we travelled, and if I did such measurements would be meaningless. We passed through reefs of despair, and climbed the cliffs of bronze while the heat of wars as yet unborn scorched us. We were seeds of metal and stone carried on the wind of paradox. Seeds the size of cities, and with weapons powerful enough to burn those cities to ashes, but for that time our ships were nothing: specks in the eyes of gods that are alive, and yet have never lived.

The song drew us on and on, growing louder and stronger until, without warning, it stopped.

Silvanus shrieked. Anguish and pain flashed across the mental bond with him, and for the blink of an eye I felt the terror and despair of his life crash back into him. Then Ahriman broke the bond, and the Sycorax dropped from the warp like a stone falling from air to water.

My eyes snapped open, and voices began to split my thoughts.

+Where are we?+

+What is happening?+

+The rest of the fleet?+

+Where are–+

+Silence.+ Ahriman’s sending ended the babble. I felt my hearts hammering in my chest, the blood drumming against the inside of my ears and eyes. Stillness and quiet pressed around me. The shutters had sealed over the viewing portals. The only light in the room was from the red and green glow of our helms’ eyes. +The rest of the fleet is not with us. I cannot feel any of them. Wherever we are, we are here alone.+

The automaton, Credence, flicked out a scanning laser and clattered a squall of binary.

Ignis shook his head.

‘Be at peace,’ said Ignis, ‘but be ready.’ Credence replied by arming its weapons.

My grip on my staff tightened.

I glanced at Ahriman. He was looking at Silvanus. The Navigator was shaking. His third eye had closed, but crusted red trails painted his face from forehead to chin.

‘No no, no,’ he was babbling, true eyes wide as he gazed at the black orb. He lifted it, pressed it against his eyes, his skin, his lips, every movement faster and more frantic than the last. ‘Nooo… nooo… nooo… Come back, please, come back…’ He lifted the orb and opened his mouth to swallow it.

Ahriman’s hand closed around the Navigator’s wrist. Silvanus tried to wrench it free, but Ahriman pulled it from his fingers. The Navigator collapsed, weeping, his surface thoughts a shattered pattern of despair. Ahriman looked at the orb, then glanced at me and tossed it to me. I caught it, expecting… I do not know what I was expecting, but the cold dead weight of the thing surprised me. The sensations I had felt when I had touched it before had gone, and no song filled my head.

‘If it has ended,’ I thought aloud. ‘That must mean…’

+That it has led us to where it was supposed to,+ stated Ignis. +That is the most likely of all of the current possibilities.+

+But where are we?+ asked Astraeos.

+The Gates of Ruin,+ I sent, and all their eyes turned to me. +That is where the orb was to lead us.+

+Then why has the song ended?+ asked Astraeos, his fingers tense on the pommel of his sword. I shook my head.

+I do not know.+

+You found this way,+ spat Astraeos, disbelief and anger flowing with his thoughts. +Your craft brought us here. We were following you as much as him. And you do not know!+

+This is the warp, you simpleton!+

Astraeos began to draw his sword. Credence’s weapons twitched. Ahriman’s will slammed out, and I felt the moisture in my throat boil away as force and heat wrapped around my neck. Astraeos froze, a corona of cold light. He turned his gaze from one of us to another, and then I felt the fire in my throat cool, and the light holding Astraeos vanished.

+The ship’s mistress tells me that the sensors cannot see anything outside the hull. Nothing. It is blank as far as they are concerned. And the warp drives refuse to wake.+

+Becalmed,+ sent Ignis, with a curt nod.

+No,+ sent Ahriman, +not quite. Something is happening on the lower decks. Carmenta cannot get any response from the machine wrights, but when she does get a vox signal she can hear–+

+Singing,+ I sent. Ahriman looked at me, and nodded.

+Yes.+

‘Hmmm… emmm… hmmm… emmm… hmmm.’

I twisted at the sudden sound. Silvanus was sitting up at the foot of the navigation throne, rocking, a smile on his face, and humming.

‘Can’t you hear it?’ he asked, swaying slowly. +Hmmm… emmm… Now it will never leave me. Now I will never leave it.+

I stared at him for a second, my skin creeping with cold.

Then I heard it. Broken shards of song tinkled and giggled from behind me. I turned and everyone turned at the same moment. All looked in different directions. The sound moved, skittering just out of sight. Every weapon in the chamber came to life. Ozone filled my nose. My own mind shifted, changing focus as I summoned the secret words of fire. Ahriman’s mind contracted, until it was a hard point of total focus on the edge of my senses.

‘Hmmm… emmm… hmmm…’ Silvanus hummed, the smile on his face still drooling stained saliva.

+Open the shutters,+ I sent. I felt Astraeos’s question and objection form, and bit them off before they became words. +We need to see what we face. Open them.+

He hesitated and then nodded. A finger of telekinetic force shimmered through the air, and the controls on Silvanus’s throne clicked as switches flicked over. There was a clank, then another and another. One by one the shutters covering the viewports folded back, and what waited beyond looked in.

I admit, I should have known. I should have anticipated that it would play out as it did. Daemons can lie even when they tell the truth. I had asked for a way to find the Antilline Abyss, and so leave the Eye of Terror. The daemon I had bound had told me that the Gates of Ruin lay at its beginning, and then had given me the means to find them. And I had taken what it had given me and followed the thread to its end. It could not lie to me. The bindings on it forbade that, but the truth it had given me was more lethal than any lie. Even after all the millennia that have since passed, I still wonder why I made that mistake. Perhaps it was fatigue, or arrogance. Or perhaps it was because some deep and unseen part of me did not want to leave the Eye which had become my home and sanctuary. Perhaps that impish part of me wanted us to fail. The daemon had done exactly what I had demanded; it had led us to the Gates of Ruin on the edge of the Antilline Abyss, and it had given us to our doom.

Dead ships floated across a black abyss. Clouds of turning green light edged the dark, spinning and merging like the clouds at the defining edge of a hurricane’s eye. The corpses of warships spun laxly, the bones of their structures glinting through the ragged skin of their hulls. Mountain-sized chunks of debris hung like irregular moons. There were hundreds of them, thousands of designs and origins I had never seen.

And around them the daemons circled like schools of fish around already stripped bones, turning as one, their skin glimmering as it caught the light of the storms around them. If there were thousands of dead ships, there were more daemons than I could count.

My thoughts were speeding past, as time slid to treacle slowness. We were dead, and I had killed us. I had led us to a feeding pool and plunged us in. Ignorance was no excuse.

+The Gates of Ruin…+ sent Ignis, and his flat sending was like the falling of an axe.

The sending reached my mind just as a shape swam into view on the other side of the view port. It was a body of sculpted muscle and pale skin. Two circular eyes of black glinted above a slim face. The graceful line of its arms reached down to wet-edged pincer claws. It skimmed through the warp-saturated void with the slow movement of a shark cutting through water. Its mane of hair trailed behind, each strand flowing between colours. It was beautiful and revolting, and utterly terrible. I knew what it was. I had bound its kind many times before.

As I looked at it more slid into sight. More and more. I heard Silvanus rise and take a step towards the crystal viewport.

‘I heard,’ he moaned. ‘I am here.’

I began to turn, but even as I did one of the daemons twisted and its eyes met mine. It grinned, perfect lips splitting over glass needle teeth.

The song was so loud now that it invaded my sight as well as my hearing, with the taste of bitter nectar on my tongue.

+We need to go! Now!+ shouted Astraeos.

And the world shattered into stillness.

Ahriman had not moved.

Silvanus’s foot hung above the deck, his step forwards falling.

Ignis’s mouth was opened, air drawing into his lungs to shout a word.

Fire wreathed Astraeos’s sword.

And daemons turned towards us.

All of them.

+Fire the guns, mistress,+ came Ahriman’s thought.

The daemons shot towards the Sycorax. Shrieks stabbed into my mind, and the world became a blur of sliced instants.

The view beyond the viewport vanished behind clouds of snarling faces and claws.

My mind formed the words of a ward.

The song was a deafening shriek in my skull.

I felt the ship shake as its guns fired.

The view beyond the crystal vanished.

Fire broke across my eyes, and my lenses dimmed as the Sycorax cloaked itself in detonations. The air blistered. Colour poured from nothingness, and the shrieks were rising and rising in my skull, blotting out every other thought.

A slender arm reached out of nothing and peeled open the air. Ahriman exploded forward, his hand reaching for Silvanus as a whip crack of force pulled the Navigator from his feet. A wet, red claw snapped shut where Silvanus had been. A lithe figure stepped through, claws clacking on the deck.

‘Kill protocol!’ shouted Ignis. Credence came forward with a thunder rolling of gears. Sheets of flame spat from its fists. Pale flesh boiled to black smoke. Casings fountained from the cannon on its shoulders. Ignis was wading towards it, blades of silver and lightning growing from his fingers as he slashed at spinning shapes.

More and more wounds were opening in the midair. The scent of hot blood and sugar filled my mouth. My eyes were filling with spinning shapes of colour. I sensed rather than saw the daemon. It lunged at me from beyond reality, its talon and body forming as it struck. I caught the blow on the head of my staff. Silver-laced iron shattered warp-born bone. The daemon spun back, screaming in pleasure and pain. I spoke a word in my mind and fire poured after it. It pirouetted aside and I saw my flame char its perfect skin.

‘You will be mine,’ it called to me in a voice of glass and razors. I looked for Ahriman, but the air was a curtain of fire and bleeding reality.

Astraeos was striding forwards wreathed in cold light. A daemon spun to meet him, its arms wide. His sword was a burning sheet as he cut. The daemon ducked under his blow, sprang off the deck, and landed on his shoulders. Its arms folded around him as though in an embrace, its head dipping down beside his helm, claws reaching for his neck. I felt the pulse of raw power as invisible force ripped the daemon into the air, and tore it in two. Blood and ectoplasm misted the air. Its last sound was a laugh.

The light and fury parted, and for a second I saw Ahriman. He was pulling Silvanus to his feet, a sphere of white-hot debris orbiting him. Daemons circled him, tumbling faster than my eyes could trace. I tried to reach out with my mind but, the warp was a wall of screams and sharpness. Then Ahriman turned his head, and his eyes met mine. The daemons were crowding around him, their claws clashing against the bright sphere around him.

+Ctesias,+ he began, but I never heard the thought completed, because in that instant a claw snapped shut on my arm.

Ceramite split like skin. Blood gushed out, and I was screaming, and screaming, and the pain was the burn of acid and the taste of honey. I froze, my body juddering in place. The daemon leant closer, tongue licking needle teeth. Blurred murder filled the Navigator’s sanctuary. The warp was pouring in through the ship’s hull. Pale figures spun amongst spears of flame and lightning. Blood and colour sweated from empty air. I could see Ahriman, his hands on Silvanus’s skull, unmoving even as a towering figure of pale skin and razor edges unfolded in the space behind him.

+Ahri–+ I shouted with all my will. But the daemon’s claw bit deeper into my left arm, and fresh agony stole the warning

‘Hush,’ the daemon whispered to me. I felt the tip of its tongue touch my cheek. Its eyes were black pools in its perfect face. ‘Hush now, my sweet one.’ The shriek poured from my throat, ripping skin and blood from my lips and mouth. Hundreds of sensations flowed through me: hunger, rage, happiness, the brush of petals and the stab of needles, on and on, more and more, brighter and faster than the grey world in which I was about to die.

The daemon shook its head and hooked the tip of its second claw onto the collar of my armour.

‘Do not be afraid, beautiful soul,’ it purred. It pulled the claw down and the armour over my chest parted like silk. ‘This will not be over quickly, or without pain.’

I screamed and its smile glittered with points and edges.

A fist of fire-blackened metal snapped shut on the daemon’s skull. Red jelly burst across my face. Credence yanked the body backwards and triggered the flamers in its wrists, then tossed the shrivelled remains aside. It turned, planting its legs to either side of me, and its cannon roared its challenge and defiance at the tide.

+Ctesias.+ The voice reached me, but my head was spinning. +Get up. Move.+

I began to rise, but my muscles were shuddering with the daemon’s touch.

A hand reached down and yanked me up. I looked up into the lenses of Ignis’s helm.

+Where is Ahriman?+ I asked, feeling the sending tremble as it formed.

+I am here, brother.+ Ahriman walked towards me, dragging Silvanus, green fire whirling from his hand.

Behind him a towering daemon followed. Jewels hung from its flesh, and clouds of musk smudged the air around it. A bovine head swayed atop its torso. It lifted one of its four limbs and pointed; the gesture was beautiful and lazy. A red tongue of fire lashed out, the air around it glittering with blood and frost.

Ahriman raised a hand. The lash coiled around his arm, pulsing, cutting and sucking through his armour. Power flared from him, exploding outwards into the warp. The psychic shock wave lifted daemons from reality and blew them to tatters of black slime. He yanked the red lash from the air and spun. The bull-headed daemon bellowed. Ahriman whipped the stolen lash of fire across its flesh. Mother-of-pearl skin parted. Black fluid gushed from the wound. Ahriman struck again, but this time the daemon slid aside as though it had not been there, and a claw lashed out. A sphere of light snapped into being around Ahriman and Silvanus. Blue flame exploded as the claw struck, and the shield burst with a flash. The daemon staggered, its claw cracked and burning. I waited for Ahriman to strike again, but no blow came. I glanced at Ahriman. He was still standing, but I could feel the fatigue shuddering off him.

The daemon hung back, circling, cloven hooves chiming on the deck, nostrils pulsing as it breathed incense into the air. The lesser daemons parted before it, hissing and mewling in delight.

The song was rising higher and higher, and I could almost see the Sycorax drowning as the legions of daemons swarmed through its hull. There would be blood flowing down the decks. Wards would be melting from walls, bullets flying from defence guns, and all the while the daemons would be dancing in the ruin. I could hear it, the screams and gunfire were rippling through the warp, blending with the daemon’s song, calling more of them to feed like blood spilled in shark-infested water.

+There are more coming,+ I called to Ahriman. Blood was still pulsing from my arm. The daemons had paused in their assault but it was just the calm that comes before a wave crashes down. +This is not just a gate, it is a feeding ground.+

+We will not leave,+ sent Ahriman, and I could feel the control and effort in the sending. His eyes were still locked on the circling greater daemon. +The Antilline Abyss lies beyond here, and we will pass through.+

+We will die here!+

+No,+ he sent calmly. +We will not.+

+How?+ I sent, bitterness and false laughter heavy in the word. +You have a secret, or a weapon to free us?+

+I do,+ he sent, and just as he did the greater daemon charged. +I have you.+

The greater daemon was a blur of shimmering light. Its lesser kin followed with a howl.

And I understood what Ahriman wanted me to do.

I wish I could have said that I hesitated. If I had paused perhaps we really would have ended there, torn to shreds in a well of screaming souls on the edge of the Eye. I did not pause. I did what Ahriman wanted me to do. Just as he knew I would.

I reached into the segmented compartments of my mind, and threw doors of all the cells of memory open. Tens of thousands of fragmented daemon names poured into my consciousness. Ciphers snapped through my thoughts. Syllables rang together, became words and phrases, became black presences digging into the flesh of reality. The first name came to my mouth and I spoke it.

The charging daemons and the whirl of combat stuttered. Yellow and black smoke poured from my mouth. Sounds echoed and veils of rust peeled from the root and deck. A ball of blistering fat formed in the air, and grew and grew and grew, slower than spreading rot, faster than a gust of wind. The Maggot Lord, exalted servant of the Father of Decay, split reality and swelled into a full being. I had bound it in the temple of a dead oracle and never thought that I would ever want to bring it into being again. A foolish thought, even for me. I felt it pull against the bindings of the summoning. They held, but I did not give it the chance to try again.

+Destroy them,+ I willed.

The Maggot Lord exploded forwards, rotting muscle splitting its skin. The bull-headed daemon shrieked with rage and pivoted to meet it. Claws buried themselves in rolling blubber. Dead flies and pus gushed out. The Maggot Lord laughed, and its arms gripped the bull-headed daemon and embraced it. I saw its mouth open, splintered roots of black teeth on a cave of tumours. Its laugh boomed again, just before it bit down on the bull-headed daemon’s skull.

The next name was already free of my lips and a haze in the air.

Chel’thek, the Dragon of the Hundredth Gate, uncoiled from a whirl of fire, mouths spitting chains of lightning. Claws split its flanks, and wobbling spheres of arms and legs popped from the wounds. Daemons slid through the walls and floors as they surged to meet the Maggot Lord and the Dragon. Colours flashed between shades; distance and nearness collapsed then snapped back. The song of the daemons was now a discordant cacophony.

I had fallen to my knees, my unwounded hand gripping my staff, as name after name came up from within me.

Daemons of brass and anger, of hunger and mindless despair, came to my call and spilled out through the ship and void. On and on they came, the store of mortal lifetimes of collecting, binding and bargaining. I could not stop it even if I had wanted to, and in truth, I did not want to. My eyes blurred with acid tears, and my tongue had blistered, but I did not care. A wild joy had taken me. Some carry beautifully crafted swords all their lives, and never realise, until they are daubed in blood, that the pleasure comes not from owning a sword, no matter how perfect, but from letting it cut.

The daemons poured out with the words and I heard the clash as two immortal armies met, and I was glad.

In the void around the Sycorax, beasts of metal and glowing flesh ripped at things that ran through the vacuum on back-slung legs. On the gun decks and passages the slave crew and serfs fled for safety. Winged figures clad in brass and smoke flew beside huge rotting flies. Swarms of clawed figures crawled over rolling shapes of jellied puss and tentacles. Sheets of spell light and rainbow fire painted the vacuum.

On and on I spoke the names, my sight boiling away and my throat tearing with each new syllable until I was aware of nothing, but the sounds running from me like blood. I was dying, my life charring at the edges but I did not care.

I do not know how long I spoke, or how many daemons I named and summoned. The only thing that reached me in that age was a roar of pure focus and power which shivered through the warp. I recognised it. It was Ahriman, shouting into the beyond, the voices of Ignis and Astraeos joining him as he called the scattered ships of our fleet to come to his light. I heard that summons, but it did not shake me, and so I rolled on and my store of life and names began to dwindle, until I was just a voice speaking to itself.

+Stop, Ctesias,+ came a voice. +It is done. +

I heard and the voice checked the flow of names.

+It is over. Dismiss them.+

I felt my mouth moving. I did not want to obey. I wanted to let all the poisonous knowledge within me flood out and leave me empty.

+Please, Ctesias.+

I obeyed, and felt the acid of my tears blister my cheeks.

The touch of a hand brought me back to awareness. I was still where I had been. Folds of charred ectoplasm and conjured flesh lay on the floor all around me. The air reeked of rotting meat and burning hair.

The first thing I saw was Silvanus, sitting on his chair, head lolled back, eyes closed. He looked dead, but for the slow rising and falling of his chest. Astraeos stood beside him. Slime and burned blood lacquered his blue armour. The ship was still – still and quiet, no song, no screams of killing, or battle.

‘We are within the Antilline Abyss,’ said Ahriman from where he crouched at my side. His head was bare, and though he looked tired I recognised satisfaction in his expression. ‘The rest of the fleet reached us. Two ships were lost to the passage, but the rest are beside us while we rest and repair. There is still a long way and many more jumps until we are beyond the Eye, but the first step is complete. We are past the Gates of Ruin.’ He nodded carefully. ‘Thanks to you.’

I looked down from his gaze. My hands and arms were shaking. My mouth filled with sharp edges and I felt weaker than a mortal child. It had become a familiar consequence of serving Ahriman, but this was the most spent and damaged I had been in a long, long time. I forced my limbs to stillness, and after a moment managed to get my tongue to work.

‘This is what you wanted me for?’ I said, my voice a croak. ‘When you negotiated my service, did you know it would come to this? The binding of the Maggot Lord, the Oracle, Be’lakor – was it just so that I could find and break the Gates of Ruin?’

He rocked back, watching me carefully. The feather touch of his thoughts brushed through my own as he read the surface of my mind. I did not have the energy to resist or muster anger.

‘No,’ he said after a long pause. ‘I did not have exactly this in mind, but it is good to see first what you are capable of. You have served the future of our Legion well, but the purpose I have for you waits in the future’

‘The Legion…’ I snorted, and felt the tremors in my flesh begin again.

‘Yes,’ he said and straightened. ‘The Legion. We all have to have something to serve. Even those who believe they do not.’

I shook my head, but could not muster a stronger objection.

Looking back, with all life times that have piled into ages between that moment and this one, I think I loathe him more now than I ever did then. I write this and I think of all that I know now that I did not then, and all the ways in which fate would play out to make so much of those days seem like cruel jests. I look back and I realise that there is one reason above all the rest that I hate Ahriman.

He was right.

We all need something to serve.

And we cannot choose what.

AHRIMAN: SORCERER

Abandon the limitations of what you think is possible and you are left with a universe that is truly infinite. That realisation is the root of all power. Cage your mind with the possible and you have stolen your own future.

– Rumination of the primarch Magnus the Red,
recorded in the Athenaeum of Kalimakus.

PROLOGUE

The old man was close to death. The attendants watched the quill tremble in his fingers as it scratched across the page. They did not move. There was an order to this moment, an order that stretched back to before any of them could remember, so they waited and watched as the old man shivered and shook in the last moments of his life. They called him the Remembrancer, though none knew why. Ultimately the reason did not matter, only the fact of him, and those who had come before him.

The Remembrancer took a wheezing breath. The quill stopped moving. Ink began to bloom across the parchment. The cloak of cables, which fell from his skull and back, trembled. He raised his head and turned it from side to side, as though looking around the domed chamber, as though the metal visor riveted to his skull was not there, as though he could see. His mouth flapped silently, lips trying to form words without a tongue. The hooded and cloaked attendants waited. The only sound was the rasp of the old man’s breath, and the gulp-hiss of the tubes linked to his body.

The brass and iron lectern holding his shrivelled frame quivered. The blue flames of the candles that ringed the lectern and man spluttered and then stretched high, burning brighter and brighter. The Remembrancer’s back arched. Tubes popped from his flesh and sprayed blood and fouled water into the air. The liquid boiled before it hit the floor. The man screamed in silence. The cables and pipes began to glow with heat where they connected to him. Smoke rose from his body. His hand spasmed, smearing the ink on the parchment. The visor covering his eyes blazed with heat and began to melt.

The attendants moved forwards as one, unfolding from niches which ringed the chamber. There were nine of them, all robed in grey, the face of each hidden behind silver masks that left only one eye uncovered. They closed on the old man in a circle. He was still screaming, but now something was moving in his mouth, something that thrashed as it grew from inside his throat. He began to croak out sounds that might have been words, but which popped and gurgled like breaking cartilage and bubbling pus. The circle of attendants closed in further. When they were two paces away, the Remembrancer went still. The candles went out. The sounds coming from his throat became a simple whimper of agony. He went utterly still, and then slumped forwards, his face wiping across the still-wet ink of his life’s work.

The attendants worked quickly. All but one of them had done this before, and all of them knew that they did not have long. They lifted the smoking body of the Remembrancer from the lectern, pulling the cables and tubes from their plugs as they did so. The iris hatch in the domed roof of the chamber opened. An unconscious figure was lowered through the ceiling on a hoist. The plug ports for the waiting cables and tubes already dotted his body, and a visor of silver covered his eyes. Of his limbs only his left arm remained. The attendants met him as he descended, attaching the cables and web of pipes before he settled into the lectern.

One of the attendants glanced towards the ink-blotted page of the book; it had begun to char at the edges. The others had noticed this too and began to work faster. Finally, they put the quill in the man’s hand, and walked backwards to the chamber’s edge. Smoke was rising from the book.

The man awoke. The new Remembrancer’s mouth moved as though he still had a tongue, and then became still. Slowly he turned his blinded gaze to the page in front of him. The candles lit one after another, their flames burning blue. The Remembrancer’s arm jerked and the quill began to move across the parchment. At the edge of the chamber the attendants watched, and waited.

PART ONE

WAR OF PROPHECY

I
DREAMS

Soon it will be done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Perhaps,’ he said, after a pause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This must end soon, or we will be lost.

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

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

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

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

Too close. Far, far too close.

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

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

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

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

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

But a dream can still kill you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A hand grasped his arm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What then am I?’ said the figure.

It was Ahriman’s turn to laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I am not here to harm you, Ahriman.’

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

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

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

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

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

‘I knew him,’ said Ahriman softly.

‘Then why seek the Athenaeum?’

‘For the future.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

II
BROTHERHOOD

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

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

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

Close, far too close.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A tide of consciousness broke over him.

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

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

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

+Astraeos,+ he sent.

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

+We have it. Join me here.+

+As you will.+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Almost.’

‘There is no other way?’

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

‘Many, but all with greater risk.’

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

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

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

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

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

Ahriman gave a sad smile, his eyes suddenly bright.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is it even possible?’

Ahriman placed the card back on the pile.

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

‘What is?’

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

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

Astraeos shivered, despite the heat of the sun.

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

Ahriman looked away, but said nothing.

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

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

‘Ask,’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Augustonar’s voice growled out again.

‘I am Aug–’

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

Augustonar lunged forwards.

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

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

Ignis watched Augustonar try to rise.

The automaton coughed a stream of machine code.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

+He is here,+ he sent.

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

+Yes, apart from an automaton bodyguard.+

+You are escorting him to the citadel?+

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

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

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

Kadin looked up into the daemon’s shark grin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III
CONCLAVE

The seer was blind, and old, and shuffled at the centre of her web of chains. Two steps into the chamber she stumbled, and hung for several seconds. She spat on the floor.

From her place on the lowest of the encircling tiers Iobel watched the thick yellow phlegm splatter on the flagstones. Candlelight glinted from the thick liquid. The seer gave a moan and tried to stand. Iobel blinked, and felt the muscles of her face tighten. The attendants holding the chains did not move, but just pulled the restraints tight, their slab muscles strained under their tattooed skin. The eye holes of their hoods did not turn towards their charge, in fact they did not move at all. The figures standing on the stone tiers shifted quietly, waiting. Eventually the seer found her balance and began to shuffle towards the centre of the chamber again.

‘This will be unpleasant,’ murmured Cavor, and Iobel could tell he was grinning. Across the chamber eyes flicked at Iobel and Cavor, then away. Without thinking she stabbed a mental rebuke at Cavor, only to feel the deadening effect of the null fields steal the thought. Instead she turned her head and favoured Cavor with a stare. Clad as she was in layered plasteel and leather, she was smaller than him by far. Dark hair folded and set by silver pins topped her pale face. She met the green glow of his bionic eyes with her own clouded, grey gaze. The rayed disk of the Solar cult tattooed on her left cheek twitched as she raised an eyebrow.

‘Sorry, my lady,’ said Cavor, and then tried a grin. The skin of his lips twisted to show the filed bronze of his teeth. The green light in his eyes widened. He took a step back, bandoliers of rounds and pistols clinking softly. Iobel gave a short shake of her head and turned away.

After a second of silence she heard Cavor step back to his appointed place.

I should have brought Linisa, she thought. Or even Horeg. The ex-gang boss might have the decorum of a dying grox, but at least without a tongue he would have been quiet. She pursed her lips as the seer came to a halt at the centre of the chamber.

The chamber was the deepest in a fortress which sat under a blue sky, in the centre of a desert on a world that had been dead for centuries. The fortress was a spike of stone built into a mountain, which jutted from the dry plains like a rotten fang. Iobel had seen it from the lander as she had descended from orbit, and had walked through the dust-cloaked halls and passages on the way to the council chamber. It looked as though it had been made by human hands, but you could never be sure. Timeworn gargoyles had watched her pass, and the stones had last seen the tread of feet long ago.

But of course it was not deserted – the servants of the Inquisition had claimed the dead fortress for this conclave. Thick trunks of cable snaked down the sides of corridors, and vanished down openings in the floor. Glow-globes hovered close to the high ceilings, suspensor fields buzzing in the dry air. Hooded serfs moved in tight groups, and soldiers in gloss-red armour walked the walls under the spitting light of void shields. And everywhere the hot wind blew, and the dust rattled across the floor stones.

In the sky above, over a dozen warships glinted like stars. Some had brought Iobel and her peers, but most simply hung still above the fortress like guards mounted over an open grave. It was not a permanent occupation, but a place selected for its isolation and made temporarily strong.

If she was being honest she would have said that she felt the whole thing rather daunting. She had attended a conclave once before at the side of her mentor, but that had been on Luna, in sight of hallowed Terra. It had been a grand gathering filled with a sense of coming to the centre of things, of ascension. On this dead and dry world, it felt like coming to the margins and looking over the edge into the drop beyond.

In truth Cavor was right, what was to come would be unpleasant; there was no avoiding that fact. But then what else were the duties of an inquisitor but an unpleasant necessity? Iobel glanced at the two other inquisitors who stood beside her with their attendants. Erionas shifted but did not meet her eyes. He was tall, his face smooth, hairless and its features so bland that they looked as though they had been pressed from a mould. He wore a grey bodyglove, and cables extended away from his spine to the trio of hooded followers who stood behind him. The old crone Malkira was still, her chromed exoskeleton whining with a gum-aching purr. Before the seer had entered, the eyes of every one of the figures in the higher tiers had been watching the three of them, judging, assessing, calculating…

That is what you get for calling a grand conclave of your peers, but what choice did we have?

They had journeyed into the Eye of Terror and returned bearing knowledge, and that knowledge was beyond the power of the three of them alone to address. The seer held a portion of it. She was the last of the astropaths they had taken with them to sift the Eye for truth, and what she had seen was burned into her mind. That fragment of knowledge, and what had happened as they had tried to leave the Eye, was why they were here, in a forgotten fortress on a dead world.

The seer stopped at the centre of the chamber. She swayed, and the chains clinked. The chamber doors closed. Quiet filled the gloom, and then a rustle of fabric and whispers rose from the audience. A figure stood on one of the higher tiers. Silence fell again. He was thin, and clad in an unadorned black robe with a pale face, which reminded her of a sharpened axe head. His name was Inquisitor Izdubar, and he was the other reason they were here.

No, not just Inquisitor Izdubar. Lord Inquisitor Izdubar. The silence in the chamber as he looked around him left no doubt as to that status.

‘Still looks young,’ Cavor had muttered when he had first seen Izdubar take his place in the chamber. That was true as well, of course, but if anyone knew how old the lord inquisitor was, Iobel was not one of them. He had always looked the same, even when they had first met. It had been a decade since she had last seen him on Sardunas, and he had not seemed to age a day, except perhaps in the stillness of his eyes. She was grateful that he had come, but the weight of his name meant this was now his conclave, and by standing now he had just gathered it into his hand. Part of her wondered how much he already knew; he always had a habit of knowing more than you thought.

Slowly he moved his eyes to Iobel.

‘So,’ he said, his voice soft, ‘what do you bring to us?’

Just like that. No ritual phrasing, no high booming oratory, just a question.

Erionas spoke from beside Iobel, his monotone voice rising in the still quiet.

‘We return from the Eye, with matters of profound and broad importance.’

‘Enough to draw us all here? I would hope nothing less.’ Izdubar smiled a brittle smile. ‘What did you see?’

I saw hell made real, she thought. Memories opened in her mind, scratching against the emotional dams she had built around them. I saw nightmares walking the spaces between stars. I saw reality torn open, and carrion swarm to its blood. I saw the doom that awaits us all if we fail. That is what I saw, what I still see when I can sleep.

They had gone into the Eye of Terror, where the physical realm and the warp overlapped, and the laws of reality danced to the laughter of madness. They had found what they sought and more, and returned alive… barely. Another great outpouring from the Eye was coming, they all knew it. It waited there just beyond the horizon of the future. The old seer, who stood weeping in silence before them, was the last of their psychic auspices who had survived to tell of what else they had found.

‘The mission was a limited-duration operation,’ said Erionas, his voice clipped and clear. ‘Psycho-synthesised impressions were taken from a volume that extended at least into the tertiary zone of reality breakdown. The quantity of data was considerable despite losses among the auspices. We–’

‘Of course such a mission gathered much of extraordinary value.’ Izdubar broke through the monologue with another smile. ‘But even such learning would not cause you to call us all here.’ He glanced around the chamber, leaving the statement hanging between an accusation and a question.

‘We found the remains of a war,’ said Iobel.

‘Yes?’ asked Izdubar, turning his gaze back to her.

‘A war that had scarred the warp itself.’

‘Such things are–’

‘Something was, or will be born out of it. A storm that will come for us.’ She laid emphasis on the word storm, and saw a flicker in Izdubar’s eyes.

‘The Despoiler…’ began a voice from a lower tier.

‘No,’ said Iobel. ‘The name carried on the aether was that of another.’ She looked at Izdubar. He met her gaze, his face impassive and unreadable. He must know already. He would not be here otherwise. And besides us three, he is the only one who will know what the name of the storm means. She gestured towards the seer at the centre of the web of chains. ‘Hear for yourself.’

Izdubar held her gaze for a second longer and then nodded.

‘Light,’ she said. The word was soft, but it carried up the stone tiers with complete clarity. A second later a low grinding filled Iobel’s ears and she felt the stone beneath her feet tremble. Iobel braced herself. She, like the half-dead seer held in the web of chains, was a psyker. Ever since she had entered the fortress, null fields had shut the warp out from her mind, blunting her ability. It was uncomfortable, but so would be the sudden return of her psychic senses.

A crescent of light appeared at the apex of the chamber’s domed roof. Every eye in the chamber turned upwards. The crescent became a widening smile of sky. The Eye of Terror looked down through the open hole, visible even in the noon light.

The seer twisted in her chains, hiding her blind eyes in her hands. She began to moan.

The null fields vanished.

The warp flowed back into Iobel’s senses, fragments of thoughts and sensations carried on it like driftwood on a floodtide. She gritted her teeth as the psychic reality of the chamber settled in her awareness. She was not powerful, not in the sense of some that she had met, but even so she heard surface thoughts and emotions bleeding from the minds around her. There was curiosity, excitement, fear even, all focused on what would happen next, on why they were here. Only Izdubar’s mind stood clear and calm.

The old seer began to unbend, spine popping as she straightened. Her hands fell away from her face. The soiled emerald of her robes hung sheer against her skeletal body. Her head turned upwards, lank hair falling away from her face. Empty eyes met the rays of the sun. Her mouth opened a crack. Air rattled from her lips. And then, as though it was nothing, as though she was a fallen flower lifted by a breeze, she floated into the air. The web of chains clinked, and the masked attendants tensed.

Iobel waited, half watching with her eyes, half feeling the invisible tide of the warp spiral through the chamber. It pulled at her thoughts. Sweat began to bead Iobel’s forehead, and ran into her eyes. Heat was spreading through her flesh. A taste of lightning and metal ran across her tongue.

Izdubar was silent and utterly still, his eyes focused on the seer. The silence extended beat by beat.

The seer spoke.

+Ah-zek-mag-nus-oh-there-wyrd-make-kall-is-ta-er-is…+

It was a whisper at first, a low murmur of sound that rose out of the waiting quiet, overlapping and echoing. Iobel strained to hear, and then realised that she was hearing the same sounds twice, once with her mind and once with her ears.

+…cam-illes-hi-vani-ah-muz-emekh-he-ru-me-aph-ael-au-ri-es-fu-er-za-ra-mse-h-ett…+

The sound rose, rolling along with a rising rhythm. Beside her, Erionas had closed his eyes, light glowing through his eyelids.

‘Names,’ mouthed Erionas to himself, his head nodding in time with the wash of syllables.

+…hor-kos-haa-kon-oulf-ca-r-me-n-ta-gz-rel…+

Iobel knew the names. They were names she had found in dried scraps of lore, in what remained of a forgotten and secret history.

+…ph-o-sis-t-k-ar-ha-th-or-maa-t-u-th-iz-aar-kha-lo-ph-is-a-sh-ur-kai-dj-ed-hor-jai-k-el-ka-ra-ja-hn-ru-tat…+

The seer spoke the names in a continual flow without break or pause.

+…ra-ho-tep-ph-ae-l-to-ron-au-ra-ma-g-ma-an-khu-an-en…+

She frowned. She had heard this mind impression before, but each time the names were different, some added, some gone.

+…Xiatsis Cottadaron Maroth Karoz Kadin Thidias Cadar Ohrmuzd Lemuel Gaumon Amon Magnus Tolbek Hagos Egion Helio Isidorus Mabius Ro Pentheus Nycteus Memunim Menkaura…+

The seer was shouting now, spit flying up to meet the sunlight. The warp was singing, a chorus of whispers scratching against her will.

+…Amon Zebul Ketuel Silvanus Yeshar Jehoel Midrash Arvenus Kiu Zabaia Siamak Artaxerxes Calitiedies Iskandar Khayon Ignis Sycld Grimur Sanakht–+

The seer went silent. Her withered face twisted, creases forming and shifting around the empty sockets of her eyes. Her lips trembled as though she was trying to cry. She looked utterly terrified.

‘Nine suns,’ whimpered the seer, turning her head as though looking around her. ‘Nine suns above towers of silver and sapphire. It is here, it is all of us. It is burning. I am burning. It has fallen – the sun has fallen and the entire world is light.’ She paused and shook her head. ‘What have we done? Failure has no answer. There is dust, dust rising on the wind so that I cannot see. The eyes of the dead are all around me… Is this the redemption you sought?’

The seer hung her head, her shoulders shaking.

‘The swirl of stars. A figure burned onto the horizon. I am fate come round at last. I see lines of choice vanish into darkness, and I cannot see their ends. The broken king remade. Vortices of destruction that scream the names of those who created them. The netherborn scavenging the remains of worlds split open like soft fruit.’ The seer stopped suddenly, her breath coming heavy, fuming with cold in the shaft of sunlight. Frost was spreading across her face from her mouth. ‘They rise,’ she breathed. ‘The dreams of enslaved worlds scream. The storm calls them. It stands on the horizon. It is the void defined by fire.’ The seer breathed out the last word, swayed, and her head lolled to her chest. Ice had crusted her robe now, and crawled across her skin.

‘And what is the storm’s name?’ said Izdubar. His voice was low, but its sound made Iobel flinch.

The seer did not answer.

‘Speak its name,’ said Izdubar, and the command cracked like a whip.

‘Ahriman,’ gasped the seer. ‘Ahriman.’ She was shaking, the web of chains holding her creaking and glowing with heat. The ice was thickening across her body.

Izdubar stared at the seer for a long moment, and then nodded slowly.

‘May the Emperor reward your service.’

His hand moved so fast that Iobel only saw the pistol in the instant before the shot rang out.

The seer fell. The chains rang as they caught her weight. She hung at the centre of the web, limbs slack and hair falling over her face. Ice began to fall off her body. The chains creaked as they cooled to a dull red. A dribble of blood began to splatter the floor under her feet. Izdubar’s hand dropped to his side, and the pistol vanished back beneath his robe. For a second there was no sound beside the slow patter of blood on stone.

The Sycorax pushed free from the hole she had punched between the real and unreal, and settled into the vacuum. She was truly vast. At her forgotten birth she had been one of the greatest ships of her age, and her time in the Eye had only added to her bulk. Seen from above she resembled a spear blade, its edge waved and curled like a rippling flame. A city of spires and domes glittered on her back, and her belly hung with inverted towers. The muzzles of her guns were as wide as hab-blocks. The citadel of her bridge was a mountain of glinting metal and pinpricks of light. Arcs of lightning crawled across the tops of her towers as the power which had guided her dissipated.

More ships appeared, tearing the sheet of stars into tatters as they left the warp. Some had once been ships of the Thousand Sons, but most had been made for different masters. Some had been captured, and made to serve Ahriman’s brothers. Others served the herd of warriors and sorcerers that had been drawn to follow the Exile. There were the three sister ships of Zelalsen the Wanderer, their hulls crawling with growths of bronze and bone, trailing luminous smears of light as they slid through the dark. The Pyromonarch, Gilgamos’s split-hulled barque, coasted to station beside squadrons of gunboats clad with sapphire-stained brass.

Even the smallest of ships held the population of a small city, and the largest swarmed with life. Thousands laboured on each vessel. Many of those souls had never known another life, had been born into the dark, and had only ever known the metal growl of the beast they lived within. Strange creatures stalked the dark of many ships, things that might have once been flesh, or might have walked from nightmare. In the deep holds of each ship masked prophets, redeemers, oracles, machine abominations, and petty kings rose and fell, and went unnoticed by the Space Marines who called themselves lords of realms they never saw and had no care for.

The fire-darkened Word of Hermes was the last to emerge from the warp, the spear tip of its prow trailing lightning from its re-entry to reality. Together, the assembled fleet settled into position around the Sycorax, and waited.

At the summit of a spiral-sided tower above the Sycorax’s bridge, Silvanus Yeshar vomited. His head was pounding, and his flesh felt as though he had been boiled in oil. Vision echoes of the warp lingered inside his skull, like neon bruises. The fading sound of screams still rang in his ears. He took a deep breath, almost vomited again and then managed to steady the sense of being spun around while not moving. He was fairly sure he was lying on the floor. He could feel and smell his vomit pooling around the side of his face. Slowly he pushed himself up to his knees, and wiped his hand across his face. He began to open his mundane eyes.

+Silvanus,+ growled Astraeos’s thought voice inside his skull.

Multi-coloured stars exploded inside his head. He screamed, as the pain rushed out to every corner of his awareness. After a moment the screaming just ran out, and the pain began to fade back to a dull ache.

‘Yes,’ he croaked.

+You are alive,+ sent Astraeos.

‘Yes, thank you for your concern.’

‘Concern?’

Silvanus shook his head. The bare lines of the pyramidal chamber were forming slowly around him. He scrambled to tie the strip of blue silk back over his third eye, then looked up. A giant in sapphire-blue war-plate looked down at him, its eyes an impassive green in a blunt helm. A swirl of gold marked the helm’s faceplate beneath the left eye, like the memory of a molten tear. A golden serpent coiled on the shoulder guard, its jaws eating its own tail. Silvanus shivered despite the fever heat in his flesh.

‘You are correct,’ he nodded. ‘I am alive.’

+It was successful.+

Successful, thought Silvanus as he blinked away the fading smudges at the edge of his sight. Successful in that they had found the Antilline Abyss. Successful in that the Circle had managed to burn through the storm spill at the Eye’s edge. Successful in that Ahriman had managed to guide Silvanus, and through him the fleet, to this place. Wherever this place was; Silvanus was not even sure how they had got here. It had felt more like a dream than a navigation, following a path that was not his own. Of course, that was true; it had been Ahriman’s. He had just been an eye, an additional sense organ grafted into Ahriman’s awareness.

+Ahriman wishes you to be there when it comes to planetfall.+

Silvanus shook his head, holding his hands against his eyes. When he took them away, he noticed again that the fingers looked longer, the skin more translucent and clammy. It was getting worse and worse. He looked at his hands for a long moment.

+Silvanus.+

‘Yes, I heard.’ He got to his feet, swayed and then took a step, but had to stop to steady himself. Astraeos just watched. Silvanus felt a stab of annoyance as he trembled under the cold green gaze. ‘Tell me, Astraeos, why are you here?’

+I watch over you, Navigator.+

Silvanus snorted, and wiped a trailing string of sick and spit from his chin. He was angry, the navigation had been… a nightmare, and he felt as though part of the warp’s fury had soaked into him as they had passed through it.

‘The Circle of Ahriman’s closest lieutenants is formed, and you are sent to watch me?’ He shook his head. ‘An honour rather than an insult, I am sure. Tell me, why does Ahriman keep others close, and send you away? He gathered eighty-one slave acolytes for each stage of the passage here. Eighty-one, to aid him and the Circle, but you are sent to watch over me while human witches lend their strength to him. You are called his lieutenant, but is any other lieutenant so favoured with scorn?’

Astraeos was perfectly still. The skin-itching hum of the blue power armour was the only sound.

+You should rest, Navigator.+ The telepathic words were brittle-sharp, and sent a stinging blizzard across Silvanus’s scalp. He bit off a bark of pain.

‘Just speak with your voice, for Terra’s sake!’

The armoured hand was around Silvanus’s throat before he could breathe in. Astraeos lifted him from the floor. He gasped, his own fingers scrabbling at the hand locked around his neck. His lungs were empty. Beneath him his legs and feet thrashed the air. Panic flooded him, overwhelming every thought and instinct. He had to break free, had to breathe. His eyes blurred, washing out of focus. He felt his nails and skin rip as they pulled at the ceramite digits. He could not breathe, he could not get free. His vision fogged to black at the edges. At the end of the narrowing tunnel of sight the green eyes of Astraeos’s helm watched him with still indifference.

The fingers suddenly opened, and he fell to the floor. He lay sucking in air, feeling the relief at still being alive flood over him. Astraeos looked down at him, and then turned and walked from the chamber.

‘So,’ said Izdubar. ‘The first son of the Crimson King lives.’ He paused as though measuring the weight of his words.

Iobel was not looking at Izdubar; she was watching the muscled attendants drag the dead seer from the chamber. A wet, red trail smeared the grey stone floor behind them.

‘Unpleasant indeed,’ muttered Cavor from behind her. Above them the aperture in the domed ceiling ground shut. A scowl flickered across Iobel’s face as she looked back to Izdubar. His expression was grave, but she thought she saw something else flickering in his eyes. Excitement? Anticipation? Triumph?

‘Yes, Ahzek Ahriman lives, and this psychic impression tells us much more,’ said Erionas, and smiled with his eyes closed. ‘Its meaning–’

‘Does it really mean anything?’ The voice was acidic and came from a sour-faced girl in a red bodyglove and black velvet cloak on one of the higher tiers. Izdubar looked at her. Everyone looked at her. The girl looked around, and gave an open-handed shrug. ‘Come now, the warp is littered with patterns of thought, dead dreams, and storms of lost meaning. This prophecy could mean nothing.’

‘It means something,’ said Malkira. The old crone’s voice cut the air like broken glass. ‘Of that there is no doubt.’

‘Then you had better tell us what and how.’ The sour-faced girl met Malkira’s cold gaze with her own.

‘Ahriman?’ said a dry voice on the other side of the chamber. Iobel turned to look at the speaker. His eyes were sunken dots in a fat and age-folded face. Worn robes of purple and silver silk hid his bulk, and rings glittered from a heavy hand as he gestured stiffly to Izdubar. ‘Ahriman is not a name or formulaic that I have encountered before. What does it signify?’

‘Not what, but who,’ snapped Erionas. ‘Ahriman was a son of the Fifteenth Legion, a traitor from the great time of betrayal, a son of one of the fallen fathers of the Imperium.’

‘The Fifteenth are gone,’ said the old man, his voice a slow creak of sipped breaths. ‘Swallowed by the Eye. If any survive, then…’

‘They are not all gone,’ said Iobel, and felt the eyes of the assembly swivel to her. She felt her mind sting as it sensed the thoughts of the assembled inquisitors point at her, assess her, judge her. ‘Not all of the Fifteenth are gone, perhaps not even most. The signs are there, in the warp and those that touch it – a girl born on Marius Nine with one eye blue and one white, a girl who screams of the Crimson King before she dies in the Black Ships, the accounts of the attacks on Cadia nine centuries ago, the tales told by the Wolves of Fenris when they believe they are not heard. The signs are there, but each age forgets more, and becomes a little more blind. Perhaps one day we will not remember or recognise the truth at all.’

‘Poetic,’ croaked Malkira. ‘But true.’

Izdubar cut through the silence before it could form.

‘There is more than that even, but Iobel speaks the truth.’ Izdubar flicked a glance at Iobel, and she could read the message in that glance without needing to see his thoughts. Do not mention the Athenaeum, said that look. Do not speak of what we have both seen. He turned his eyes back to the others and carried on smoothly. ‘The Fifteenth lives, and now we know that Ahriman, who was once its greatest son, lives too.’

‘Very well,’ said the sour-faced girl, ‘but without more we are floundering in prophecy and symbolism.’

Iobel noticed the twitch of a smile at the edge of Izdubar’s cold eyes.

‘You are right, we do not know what these words may mean, or how they may play out, or even if there is a way of preventing what they do tell us. But discovering such things is what we do, is it not? What we exist for?’

He knows what comes next, thought Iobel, and felt a shiver scuttle across her skin, the early guess now a certainty. He had just set the stage for the final piece of evidence, the last fact that they had brought to the conclave. You knew what we would say, and what evidence we brought. You always were the showman, Izdubar. It’s all been an introduction, a setting of the stage. This is not our moment – it is yours.

‘But we have one more thing,’ said Iobel, feeling as she said it as though she had spoken a line on cue. The grinding of stone and machinery filled the chamber again. ‘We have the means to find answers.’

The floor of the chamber started to break apart. The flagstones cracked along hidden lines and hinged downwards. A circular shaft yawned wide. Red-orange light glowed in the unseen depths. Iobel blinked as the null fields snapped back into force again. The chamber became dark to her mind, the warp and the whispers of minds held back beyond a barrier of silence. A whine of engines and a clatter of gears echoed from the gloom beneath.

A circular platform as wide as a battle tank ascended from the shaft. A vertical black casket rose from the centre of the platform, fuming steam and wisps of energy. A warrior stood beside the casket. The light rippled across the silver of his armour. Blue light burned in the eyepieces of his plough-fronted helm. Bronze amulets in the shape of swords, lions and eagles hung from chains beside parchments crowded with script. The warrior held a sword as tall as a man, its tip resting point down.

Iobel found she could not look away from the silver-clad warrior. He was utterly still, as only something carved from stone or cast in metal should be. Her eyes stayed fixed on him, her pulse racing despite her fighting it down. She had seen the warrior before, but those previous encounters did not stop her reaction. The silver-clad figure was not human; it was a weapon from ages past, created to face the enemies that no others could. The very existence of such a creature was a secret that would have killed all those in the chamber had they not been on the left hand of the Emperor. It was a son of Titan, a Grey Knight.

The platform stopped when it was level with the floor. The Grey Knight remained silent and unmoving. Izdubar inclined his head.

The Grey Knight reached up and unsealed his helm. A tight-fitting leather caul framed the broad features beneath. Dark eyes glittered above a mouth set in a line. Flesh-bonded silver wire spiralled across iron-black skin, gleaming like the lost tracks of tears. Iobel’s first thought was that it was the face of a troubled king remade as a demigod. The Grey Knight knelt on one knee, but did not bow his head.

‘Sires,’ he said.

‘Cendrion,’ said Iobel with a nod.

The Grey Knight called Cendrion stood, and turned to the black casket at the centre of the platform. It stood taller than him, and was a little wider. The oily shell of a shield surrounded it, distorting its dimensions. Cables linked to sockets in the casket’s black surface snaked down into the platform. Transparent tubes sucked and bubbled with viscous liquid: arterial red, neon blue, polluted yellow. Two hunched tech-priests lurked behind and to the sides of the platform, the green light of their machine eyes glowing in the caves of their cowls. Machines ringed the casket’s base, thrumming with a low bass note. Iobel’s teeth ached as she looked at them: null-generators, shrouding the casket in a second layer of psychic deadness.

Cendrion gestured. Steam vented as a wide crack formed in the black metal. The front of the casket broke into a hundred pieces which folded back into its sides. A figure lay within.

He was not human, but like the Grey Knight, he had begun as human. He was a Space Marine. Thick bands of silvered adamantine looped around his wrists, waist, ankles and neck. Stitch scars ran across his bare skin – faded with age, but still visible – telling the story of the process which had changed him from a child into a weapon. The marks of war were there too, twisting the flesh in knots and ridges. The skin of his hands was glossy, as though it had once been stripped away and regrown. A halo of black iron and silver cables circled his head. Iobel could see the dried blood from where it had been riveted to his skull. Old marks showed that this had been done many times before. Wires hung from the empty socket of a bionic eye. His face was lean, proud and strong even in sleep. He had been like this when they found him, caged in ice and locked in the wreckage of a ship drifting close to Cadia.

Murmurs ran around the chamber, growing in volume.

‘What is he?’ asked the sour-faced girl. Izdubar remained silent, and just looked at the bound Space Marine.

‘Wake him,’ said Iobel. The murmuring faded to a hush.

Cendrion nodded to the tech-priests. They bent to the machine with a sigh of clockwork. A few moments later the colour of the liquid in the tubes began to change. The bound figure stirred. His lips twitched, gums peeling back as muscles contracted. One of the tech-priests reached out with a hand of tarnished bronze, and tapped a control on the pillar’s side. The halo of cables jerked, sparks running over the black iron clamp as it dug into the prisoner’s skull. Muscles spasmed as blue sparks spread across bare flesh. A smell of ozone and cooking meat rose to Iobel’s nose.

The figure’s one eye opened. His muscles became still as though at a command. Arcs of electricity continued to play over him. He did not make a sound. His head moved slowly, his one-eyed gaze holding on Cendrion for a long while before it moved to Izdubar, and then to Iobel.

‘You will answer me,’ said Izdubar in a level voice. The bound Space Marine just stared back. ‘Who do you serve?’

‘No one,’ said the Space Marine, and Iobel heard the hate rolling in the words.

‘But who did you serve? You have already told my comrades this, have you not? So, as you did before, tell us who you served.’

The edge of the Space Marine’s mouth twitched. On another face, belonging to a different species, it might have been a smile. To Iobel it looked like a predator baring its teeth.

‘Ahriman,’ said the prisoner. A murmur of sound ran around the room. Iobel realised that she had been holding her breath. Izdubar looked up at the tiers of faces nodding in agreement, before turning back to the prisoner.

‘Tell us, what is your name?’

‘My name…’ said the prisoner, his jaw chewing the words slowly. Then he shook his head. The silver cables linked to his skull rattled. ‘My name is Astraeos.’

IV
WORLD MURDER

Ahriman watched the fleet gather around the Sycorax. Engine fires and the dispersing energy of warp wake flickered across the depths of the crystal sphere which hung in the high dome of the Sycorax’s bridge. He shifted the direction of his thought, and the view widened, pulling back until the Sycorax was just one island of light amongst many. Beyond them a single star burned bright against the distant void. It was not a large star, but seen from the edge of the system it was clear and bright.

Like a candle, thought Ahriman. A lone flame to guide the lost through a storm-lashed night. His mind flickered and the crystal’s bound vision glided closer, until the star’s planets were dots of visible light, and it had become a disc of raw white. Or like a ghost light, dancing out of sight, leading the traveller to their grave.

The bridge at the summit of the High Citadel was a pile of armour and architecture which rose like a mountain at the stern of the Sycorax. The bridge itself was half a kilometre long, its armoured shell clad in bronze and supported by spars and pillars of black metal. Blue-green light shimmered up the walls and across the floor, as though the chamber were far beneath the ocean. A swarm of crew filled the bridge, webbed into machine cages by fleshmetal cables, or muttering over consoles. These were the Cyrabor, a sect of machine-wrights bred in some warp-soaked corner of the Eye of Terror, who had taken the Sycorax as both their goddess and nest. The air smelt of cinnamon and machine oil, as it did everywhere that the machine-wrights went.

He liked it here; of all the places that existed in the Sycorax, it was one of the few where he felt at peace without having to impose that state on his mind. The hum of the machines washed through him, and above it the clicking and hooting of the Cyrabor calling to each other, the mingled sounds rising and falling like the break and retreat of waves on a seashore. Above him the sphere of crystal hung like a great pearl of night.

He closed his eyes, and dipped his awareness into the web of telepathic voices stretched across his fleet. All had arrived, all were ready. They were a fusion of disparate renegades, traitors and outcasts, bound to his will by oaths, by hope, by the desire for power. Some were his brothers by blood, Thousand Sons like himself. Others were simple warrior bands whose only loyalty was to the promise of power. Of these he trusted few, liked even fewer, and found most vile, but they were a distasteful necessity; for what was to come he would need every weapon no matter the hand that wielded it.

‘Overkill,’ the voiced rasped behind him, its human tones riddled with static.

He did not answer, but watched the Cyrabor machine-wrights scurry through the bridge, yellow robes rippling around their bloated or spindle-thin frames. The image in the crystal sphere dissolved into blackness. Behind him his ears picked up the whisper of fabric as the figure on the great brass command throne turned her head. Metal-sheathed cables clinked as they shifted against each other. He heard the click-hiss as air sucked into metal lungs.

‘Are you ready, mistress?’ he asked.

‘Have you told them what you intend?’ asked Carmenta, electronic clicks wheezing between each word.

‘No,’ said Ahriman. ‘Not all of it, not yet.’ He turned to look at her. The green light of her eyes gleamed from the cracked red lacquer of her face. Crimson velvet swathed her, and cables swarmed over her like strangling vines. The brass and brushed plasteel of the throne rose around her like the setting for a queen of a forgotten age.

‘Do you tell any of us the whole truth, Ahriman?’

He watched her but did not reply.

She looks smaller. Every time I see her she always seems smaller.

‘You should trust them,’ said Carmenta. ‘At the least you should trust Astraeos.’

Ahriman shook his head.

‘That would be unwise,’ he said.

‘Trust, Ahriman. It is the only thing you do not have, and cannot buy or take by force.’

‘I trusted you,’ he said, and let the words hang in the heavy air.

‘You did,’ said Carmenta, and her machine gaze was steady under Ahriman’s blue eyes. ‘And we know where that led us. So why is it that you tell me things you keep from those bound to you by oaths and blood?’

‘It is necessary.’

‘Necessary that you keep secrets from them, or necessary that you tell some of those secrets to a dying traitor?’

‘You are not dying,’ he said.

A cough of distortion and clicking code came from Carmenta’s hood.

‘A good lie. The Sycorax is older than I am – older, stronger, and an unkind child. As much as I have made it mine, it has taken from me, and it takes more with each passing cycle. One day I will be gone.’ She seemed to nod, and breathed a stream of machine code to herself. ‘But of course you know this – you are Ahriman.’

He did not answer. She was right; he did know. He could feel the shape of her mind changing, breaking apart into islands of awareness and madness. Damaged long ago by the attempt to become one with a machine the size of a warship, the bond with the Sycorax was now pulling the old cracks wide. The ship was not only vast, but had grown ancient swimming the tides of the Eye of Terror. The warp was in its bones, chuckling in the fires of its reactors and whispering in its data links. Its spirit was corrosive and pernicious. Carmenta could not leave the embrace of the Sycorax, not now, but every day she lost a little more of herself. Sometimes – times like this moment – she would seem as she had once been, but more often she would not respond at all, or if she did it was only to look at him in confusion while she burbled in mangled machine code.

Her head began to loll towards her chest.

‘Are you ready?’ he asked again.

Carmenta’s head came up again. The light of her eyes fluttered, brightened, and became hard and steady.

‘To destroy a world?’ Somewhere far beneath the bridge, the Sycorax began to tremble as breeches swallowed shells, landing bay doors opened to the void, and the engines began to push the ship towards the lone star burning brighter than the rest of the heavens. ‘Yes, we are ready.’

‘Sire.’ The voice was close and insistent. Hemellion, 251st Bearer of the Regency of Vohal, heard the voice, shook his head, muttered, and rolled over in his bed. He had been up well after sunset, trying to persuade that old cur Setar that it was best not to march south as soon as high summer came. The discussion had not been successful, and there had been a good deal of soured wine before Hemellion had finally given up and withdrawn. ‘Sire,’ said the voice again, louder now. ‘Sire, please wake.’

Hemellion opened his eyes. His chatelaine Helana was leaning over him, her scaled and lacquered armour looking as though it had been donned in haste. He blinked, trying to clear the fog of sleep and wine from his eyes. Helana waking him rather than one of his bondsmen: that was odd. He sat up. The fire had burned low in the hearth, but the wicks of the oil lamps were alight. It was still night then. That was not good, not good at all.

‘Have the Western Clans begun to march?’

Helana shook her head.

‘No, sire.’

She looks shaken, thought Hemellion. No, not shaken, frightened. That was bad; that was very bad. He pulled himself out of the bed, and felt the cold air wrap around him as he reached for a fur-edged robe.

‘Well, what–’

‘There are lights in the sky,’ she said. He stopped still, hands tying the robe around his neck. His flesh prickled, and cold sweat formed in the creases of his skin.

‘You are sure?’

Helana did not answer, but walked to one of the high windows and pulled the heavy shutters open. The night sky was a star-brightened strip across the horizon. In the east the curdled light of the Eye of Woe waxed against the darkness.

Hemellion stepped forwards, forgetting the coldness of the flagstones beneath his feet. He stopped before the window and stared. New stars burned in the night, pulsing with ragged light, moving even as he watched them.

They have returned. After all this time, the Imperium has returned to us again. The thought fell through him, spreading cold fear and elation. The Imperium had not come to Vohal since the time of the 203rd Regent, and now they came again during his stewardship.

Vohal was a world of the Emperor, a seat held in trust as part of His realm amongst the stars. Long ago mankind had found it, and those few desperate settlers had given their new home a name from their species’ ancient past: Vohal, they called it. Wrapped in wind, cloud and clear blue skies it was much like the world the settlers had left, but though they came in a ship from across the stars, they found their new home was not a kind master. When the Great Crusade had discovered Vohal, its population was small, its cities few, and despots ruled its scattered cultures from fortresses of stone that stood on the horizon like broken teeth. The Imperium claimed Vohal, recorded its name, and left an official to ensure that it remained compliant. That official, remembered only in the pages of books, had been Hemellion’s ancestor, and his line had borne the stewardship of Vohal ever since.

Hemellion let his eyes dip to the fortress beneath the window. It had been built into the side of a mountain, and the result of hundreds of generations of stonecraft descended from his tower to meet the plains at the mountain’s foot. The outer walls were thick enough that three carts could drive abreast along their tops. Within those walls chambers extended back and down into the mountain itself, held safe behind iron-bound doors. The fortress’s purpose was to dominate a world in the name of the Emperor. Hemellion looked back to where that Emperor’s servants now filled the night with strange stars.

‘Light the signal fires,’ he said, his breath misting in the cold air. ‘Send riders to the near holds.’

‘Yes, sire,’ said Helana, and he heard the question left unspoken at the end of her words.

‘Yes?’

‘Why do they come now?’

‘Who knows?’ he said with a shrug. ‘They come when they will.’

‘What do they want?’

‘The same as any ruler wants from his lands and vassals – they come for tribute. The records speak of them taking armies to serve in wars across the stars, or coming to cull those with the witch-sight.’

‘And we…?’

He rubbed a hand across his face, feeling the stubble that had accumulated on the wrinkles of his face. He suddenly felt very tired. Forty years of life, twenty since his mother had died and left him the regency, and in all that time, in all the decisions and crises, nothing had made him feel as burdened as those small points of light shining in the sky.

‘We give them everything they ask for,’ he said. He was about to say something else when Helana gave a cry. He looked up. The stars were falling. As he watched they birthed smaller stars, until a net of fire fell through the night. Cries rose from the fortress, and more stars fell.

Ignis began to count time after the first salvo. The numbers streamed through his mind, forming shapes and patterns in his consciousness. Triangles became pyramids, spheres became circles, and spirals danced in his awareness as time sliced into ever thinner slivers. Beneath his feet the Word of Hermes shook as its guns added to the second salvo. Fresh streaks of fire began to reach for the world laid out in front of his eyes. This salvo had begun seven hundred and twenty seconds after the first. Two hundred and forty tonnes of active agent filled the warheads in each salvo. There would be three salvos.

The first shells would already be breaking apart in the lower atmosphere. The defoliant-agent would reach surface saturation within nine hours. Even if some of the other ships did not attain his level of precision it was still certain that every blade of grass, tree and leaf would be dust within twenty-seven hours. Once he would have considered that symbolism beautiful, or profound, or perfect. Now, watching the warheads begin to glow as they cut through the doomed planet’s atmosphere, he simply considered it a relief.

Clusters of falling shells formed a pattern in his mind’s eye. His subconscious caught the pattern, and multiplied it into spreading designs of fire, each part of the whole identical to every other part. He felt the pattern slip into the warp, and continue to grow. He let it multiply to the point that he could no longer control it, and then blanked it from his mind. He took a deep, slow breath.

Ahriman had commanded Ignis to engineer the planet’s end, but Ignis knew that the calculations of obliteration mattered little to his one-time brother. Only the result mattered to Ahriman, and Ignis could give him that. It was a simple task, and it let him touch the pattern even if only for a brief time. It was not much, but for now it was enough.

He blinked, eyelids closing for five seconds while he followed the progress of his design one more time in his mind.

He turned from the viewport, and found the blank mask of Credence staring at him.

‘All is well,’ Ignis said, and gave a small nod. The towering automaton clicked, and the gears in its shoulders cycled. Credence clacked another binaric query with its metal insect voice. Ignis thought that there might have been a tone of concern in the machine’s inquiry, but he knew that inferring genuine emotion to a capsule of silica in an armoured shell was madness. But then he did not understand expressions of emotion in humans either. He shook his head and replied anyway.

‘Yes, all is well in a personal sense too.’

He closed his eyes again, and let the voice of his mind slip free.

+Ahriman,+ he sent, feeling the thought reach across the void to the Sycorax.

+Ignis.+ The sending was delicate, but to Ignis it sounded like the low rumble of a rock slide. He flinched, and felt the counting and calculations slip from his focus. He bit off an angry mental retort, as he tried to pull the threads of number and pattern back together. +Ignis,+ came Ahriman’s thought voice. +What do you have to tell me?+

Ignis had no choice but to let go of the calculations.

+It is done. The world will be dust in twenty-seven hours.+

+The third salvo–+

+Is to be sure, though the outcome is now a certainty. Twenty-seven hours, not one minute more. Beyond that, one thousand and eight hours should see the majority of the population depleted, and the rest incapable of impeding us.+

+My thanks, brother. You will join me on the surface once it is done.+

‘Astraeos.’ Izdubar echoed the bound Space Marine’s name into the silence, as though he was weighing it on his tongue.

Astraeos remained silent, his lone eye steady on Iobel.

‘He was recovered from a ship found drifting close to the Cadian Gate,’ said Iobel. ‘The ship was wrecked and warp damaged. Only he was found alive, his life processes in suspension.’ A ripple of glances ran around the chamber.

‘Really?’ It was the girl in the red bodyglove, again. She leant back, shrugging, her face composed into a superior sneer as she looked at Iobel, Malkira and Erionas. ‘Please tell me you have something other than this? A lone traitor, spat out of the Eye, with a name and a claim to serve another traitor who has not been heard of since the dark times? What else do you know of him?’ She turned her sneer to Astraeos. ‘Of what world were you born? What Chapter did you betray?’ She cocked her head to the side. The gesture reminded Iobel of a bird of prey. ‘What was the cause of your treachery?’ The girl smiled as no answer came. ‘Your evidence seems reluctant to answer.’

Iobel looked at Izdubar. The lord inquisitor was still smiling.

‘Why now?’ croaked another inquisitor from the folds of his robes. ‘Why summon a conclave now?’ continued the dry voice. ‘You venture into the Eye, you find an echo that speaks of Ahriman, and then a traitor to a traitor falls into your hands with the same name on his lips. A coincidence?’ He left the word hanging like a curse. ‘Or is something hearing your desire and answering? And if so,’ his fat, pale lips parted to show emerald teeth, ‘why now?’

‘Why does it matter?’ Iobel said.

‘Diplomatically done,’ muttered Cavor from behind her.

‘You missed a question,’ said Izdubar. ‘All of you should also ask “why us?”’ He nodded again. ‘The answer to why now is meaningless. It is a confluence of time and events. Coincidence, yes, but each of us knows that there is no such thing, not in the world we see. We are all here because we know of the Fifteenth Legion, the warriors of the fall called the Thousand Sons. We have seen the footsteps they left in the ashes of worlds, heard their sins whispered from dry pages. Even if you did not know all of it, you have all seen the scars they have left. We are their enemies.’ He turned his head to the girl in the bodyglove. ‘And while you are correct to challenge this evidence, mamzel, there is of course another way to get answers to questions.’

Cendrion glanced up at Izdubar, then to Iobel. She met his eyes, held his gaze, and then slowly nodded. The Grey Knight moved forwards, his hand rising. The gauntlet on his right hand released, and unfolded from his fingers with a stutter of metallic clicks. He raised his bare hand; the fingers were long, and seemed delicate despite their size. Cendrion closed his eyes.

Iobel braced herself a second before the null field generators shut down again. The warp rushed in like a razor-laden wind. She almost fell as it scored into her mind. The two figures on the platform burned in her senses: Cendrion with bright white brilliance, Astraeos with coiling red flame. Neon swirled across her eyes. Heat prickled her skin, and the smell of cold iron filled her nose.

A storm of oil-black shadow and blue lightning was gathering around Cendrion’s hand. His armour glowed as the script etched into its plates lit. Astraeos was tensing against his bindings, veins writhing under scars. Blood beaded and clotted at the corners of his eye sockets. Iobel could feel the Traitor Space Marine’s mind trying to gather the winds of the warp, trying to shape it. Ectoplasm misted the air, glistening and glowing with sickly light. Cendrion reached out, his hand seeming to push against a great weight. Astraeos bared his teeth. His skin was deathly pale, the veins black worms writhing under his skin. Cendrion pushed his hand forward. The tips of the Grey Knight’s fingers pressed against Astraeos’s skull.

V
INTERSECTION

Silvanus coughed. The dust was everywhere, sucking into his mouth with every breath. He pulled the black silk of his robe closer around him. The wind glided through the fabric, its cold fingers touching his flesh. A shiver took him and his whole body trembled. He really had no idea why he was here. In fact he had no idea why any of them were here, but it was his own presence that troubled him most. He spat and tasted the gritty chemical taste of the dead world mixed with the scent of smoke. It had been called Vohal, and the figure sitting on the cracked stones of the tower top was called Hemellion, and was apparently its ruler.

Had been its ruler, corrected a voice in the back of Silvanus’s thoughts. The world the man had ruled was gone, and its people were dead or would be soon enough. Hemellion looked exhausted, and old, and broken. Dust coated his balding head, matted his beard, and had turned the colour of his rich clothes to dull brown. Ahriman stood above the broken king. His armour was blue, but the diffused light blurred it to aquamarine. Horns curled from the brows and cheeks of his helm, and thin pennants of cloth and parchment snapped in the wind. To his left, Kadin stood, the pistons of his limbs creaking as they clogged with dust. The warrior was bareheaded, the glossy scar tissue of his face set into a frown. The rest of the Circle stood around Ahriman. Sanakht was just behind his master, gleaming in polished blue plate; he seemed stooped even though he stood tall, his jackal-crested helm tucked under his arm, his face a carving of focused calm. Ignis stood further away, flanked by a hulking automaton which clicked to itself.

Silvanus did not like being so close to all of them at once. Their presences crackled against each other like storm clouds; his teeth were itching and he could taste ozone. That was never a good sign.

Hemellion looked up at the Space Marines. Silvanus saw green eyes glitter in hollowed sockets. There was still strength there, more strength than Silvanus would have believed anyone in such a position could possess at such a moment.

‘Why?’ said Hemellion through cracked lips.

Ahriman reached up and removed his helm with a hiss of releasing pressure. His blue eyes settled on the human. Silvanus’s teeth trembled. Hemellion’s stare did not waver. There was hate there, Silvanus saw, a hate that could overcome even the fear of standing at the feet of a demigod who had just destroyed your world and everything that you cared for.

Out beyond the walls of the stone fortress, the dry plains extended away to meet a horizon lost somewhere behind the clouds of dust. Now and then the cries of a starving animal drifted up to Silvanus’s ears from the distance. At least Silvanus hoped it was an animal. The defoliant-agent had done its work quickly, killing all the plant life and reducing it to dust. When the winds allowed the dust to settle the entire planet would be dry and stripped of life, a desert with the broken remains of its civilisation sticking up from the desolation like dry bones.

‘This is how fate is shaped,’ said Ahriman. His voice was low, calm, the voice of rationality, the voice of reason. Hemellion spat. Silvanus watched the dust-clogged saliva drool thickly down Ahriman’s armour. Part of him, a part he did not often listen to now, felt envy of the man’s defiance. Kadin made a noise that might have been a chuckle. Ahriman nodded carefully.

Silvanus looked away. Out beyond the tower’s parapet the rest of the fortress fell away. Fires burned in its broken stones, fires which flickered with green and blue-edged tongues. They had needed to take the fortress by force. It had not taken long, not for the forces that now waited beyond the walls, hidden by the murk. The billowing dust parted as he gazed beyond the parapet. Rank upon rank of motionless Rubricae stood on the plains around the fortress, the dust turning the green glow of their eyes to haloes. Static discharge crackled across their blue and gold battleplate. The clouds shifted and the Rubricae became smudges in the ochre gloom.

Silvanus still wondered why it had been necessary, why they were even here on the surface, why he was there standing amongst Ahriman’s inner circle. The rest of the planet was to be allowed to die slowly, but the might of Ahriman’s fleet had descended on this primitive fortress like an executioner’s axe.

Ahriman moved away from Hemellion, his armour purring as he turned to Sanakht.

‘He comes with us,’ said Ahriman, and nodded at Hemellion. ‘He may hate us, but his mind is strong, and he will serve.’

‘Master?’ said Sanakht, his dry paper voice an echo of the wind.

‘He lives. He has earned that much.’

Sanakht must have nodded, or spoken in thoughts, because Silvanus heard no reply.

We kill a world for a king who will now be a slave, thought Silvanus. Is that what we did this for? He paused, suddenly aware that he had thought of the sorcerers and the fleet, and their chattels, not as they, not as traitors who were different from him, but as we, as something of which he was a part.

Ahriman turned to face Silvanus. The Navigator felt his hairless skin prickle. He did not look up at his master.

‘Ask your question, Silvanus,’ said Ahriman, his voice low and resonant. ‘They all wish to know as well, so ask.’

Silvanus swallowed in his dry throat.

‘Why am I here?’

‘So that you can be here, so that you can touch this place, breathe the air of its death. So you can find your way back.’

Silvanus shivered again.

‘My way back?’ he said and looked up at Ahriman. Clear blue eyes looked back at him without blinking.

‘Yes,’ said Ahriman. ‘We will leave here soon, but we will return. It may be many years, but we will return. You are our eye into the warp, so you must see clearly where I guide you.’ He looked away from Silvanus, his gaze passing over Ignis, Sanakht, and the other sorcerers. ‘Let this place touch your mind, hold its memory clear inside you so that you can stand here again by closing your eyes. We must all be ready to return.’

‘Return?’ Silvanus realised he had spoken a second too late. The gaze of every eye on the tower top turned to him. Even the bitter gaze of Hemellion was locked on him. ‘Return for what? Why are we here? Why have we stripped this world of life to then return?’

A hint of a smile formed and faded on Ahriman’s face. It was the most terrifying thing Silvanus had ever seen. The clouds of dust were shifting, the winds pulling the drab curtain back again. The Rubricae still stood there, but now all of them were staring up at the fortress.

‘In time this place will change. Others will find it, and their hands will remake the fortress we stand on. Then, in that future, one person will come here. Her name will be Iobel, and she will have something I need. This is what I have been seeking – a point of intersection in the threads of time, a point where I can be certain where she will be. We are not here for what this place is now – we are here for what it will be.’

Silvanus followed Ahriman’s gaze down to the plains at the foot of the fortress. Drifting dust was burying the Rubricae. Already their feet and shins were beneath the surface, as though swallowed by a rising tide. The light in their eyes was dimming.

‘Sleep, my brothers,’ said Ahriman softly. ‘Sleep in dust, and wait.’

Astraeos felt the Grey Knight’s fingers touch his skin, and a sun exploded in his soul. The tiered chamber vanished. He was blind to everything except the light that was burning inside him. Somewhere far away he screamed. He tried to close his mind off, to contain the star forming in his thoughts. For a second his will held, hardening over his mind. Then the light grew, and his will broke apart. The light was blue with soul fire; he felt his surface thoughts peeling away like charred skin. Memories surfaced, fragments of time spooling backwards through his mind’s eye.

‘…we are here for what it will be,’ said Ahriman on a dustblown tower.

The wind rattled against his armour.

‘This is how fate is made.’

Dust swirled around the waiting dead.

‘Why?’ asked a man through cracked lips.

He tightened his grip, and the Navigator’s face began to bulge and gasp for air.

‘Why does Ahriman keep Sanakht so close, and send you away?’

‘I watch over you,’ he had said.

‘Tell me, Astraeos, why are you here?’

Stillness filled him, sudden and complete. He sat with Ahriman on the floor of a high tower. He looked around. The floor was lapis, the roof bronze. Silver sigils spiralled across the floor. It was very quiet.

‘I am sorry, my friend,’ said Ahriman. He wore a pale blue robe and his head was bare. ‘There must be something to draw the inquisitors together, a cause to create the future. They will be seeking me, and only answers will make them gather to learn the truth. That gathering must happen. You understand why it must be you?’

‘I am not one of you.’

Ahriman’s face remained as still as stone.

‘They will try to take secrets from you, first by crude methods, but then they will try to take them from your mind.’ Ahriman paused, and drew a slow breath. ‘They might even have the strength to do it.’

Astraeos did not move. Part of him knew that he could not, that this was not real – it was a memory of something that had already happened, sealed off and buried within his mind.

‘You must keep a part of yourself separate from the rest, a part that they cannot reach unless your entire mind falls, a fortress hidden from the rest of your thoughts. I will be there, this memory will be there. Remember then what must happen. You will not have long, perhaps a fraction of a second.’

‘How can you be sure that Iobel will be there when this happens? How can you be sure that any of it will intersect as you predict?’

Ahriman gave a tired smile.

‘I can’t.’

The memory began to fade, the lines of the chamber blurring.

‘Remember you will have an instant,’ said Ahriman’s voice, its tones seeming to reach from a long way away. ‘Remember, Astraeos.’

Astraeos’s eye opened. Cendrion stood before him. Ice sheathed the Grey Knight’s arm from fingers to shoulder. Silver-blue fire crackled and flickered over the stretched fingers. The world was slow, separate, like the crash of water beyond glass. Cendrion’s hand began to close. Astraeos felt the power boring into him change.

You will have an instant…

His thought form leapt into the air. It had the shape of a tattered eagle with feathers of smoke and red flame. The warp broke into storm winds that shrieked past him. The eagle soared through the chamber, searching the souls of the figures gathered there. Some were moving, reaching for weapons. He could feel the shock flicker down the pathways in their minds. Slow, so slow. He saw Iobel’s mind haloed in an aura of confused red. He dived towards her, claws extending.

Iobel’s mind flared to white as it tried to form a defence. It was a strong mind, but it was not strong enough. His claws met aetheric flesh, and his mind ripped into hers.

Iobel. He tasted the name; it tasted like forged steel and fire. It was her, without doubt. The one they needed.

The crowd on the stone tiers rose, weapon breeches swallowing rounds, blades scraping free, shouts forming in a hundred throats. Cendrion’s sword was rising. Astraeos could feel the distant beats of his hearts.

Time, there was not enough time. Astraeos ripped free from Iobel’s mind. The Grey Knight’s thoughts blazed even as his body moved, so slow but faster than an eyeblink.

Cendrion’s mind form roared into the aether as he charged forwards. Lion-bodied and reptile-winged, it was the echo of myths from mankind’s past. Silver fire fell away from its scaled wings as its jaws opened wide. The two thought forms collided. Ice flashed into existence across the platform. Astraeos’s claws raked Cendrion’s flanks, scattering smoking blood into the warp. Aetheric teeth ripped into his mind. He could hear voices, a choir of voices singing deep within the Grey Knight’s soul. It was beautiful, and terrible, like rage turned to bitter grief. They tumbled together, falling through nothingness, jaws and claws raking at each other. Cendrion fastened his jaws around Astraeos’s mind and bit down.

The chamber and platform were a distant tableau moving with stopped-clock slowness. Only Cendrion’s sword was clear, a bright line in Astraeos’s sight as it cut towards a body he was only distantly aware of.

I am going to fail. I am not strong enough, not for this, not against a creature like this. They had not predicted that such a warrior would be here.

Astraeos felt his thought form tear under Cendrion’s aetheric jaws. He bit back, but his strength was failing. Cendrion’s thought form was all around him, jaws closing, claws hooked deep.

I cannot… he gasped to himself. I cannot fail. If I fail I end here, it all ends here. He thought of Thidias, dead in the cold void, of Cadar grinning with the hunger of a daemon, of the skies burning above his home world so long ago. The silver warriors had come from that sky, the inferno staining their armour black and crimson. All my dead brothers, he thought. All my murdered pasts end here. In the real world he felt the heat of Cendrion’s blade. It was a finger span from his neck, slicing in fast. This is it – the last stretched moment of a life of broken oaths and failed revenge.

+No.+ The word roared from his mind as he ripped his thought form free. Chunks of emotion and tattered thoughts tumbled in his wake. He could feel wounds open on his body as his mind bled into the warp. But he was free.

+Ahriman,+ his soul screamed.

He slammed back into his body. His kine shield snapped into existence just before the sword struck. Light sheeted through the chamber. Shouts cut the air. Astraeos split his will into pieces and called the warp. It answered.

The metal of the bindings around his body exploded in a shower of liquid metal. A wave of telekinetic power ripped out from him. Cendrion staggered, recovered and cut again. His silver armour glowed, sucking the invisible force into its core and dissipating it into the warp. His sword spun up and cut down. Astraeos ducked. The blade sliced into the empty casket in a shower of sparks. Someone was shouting for the null shields to be activated. Gunfire began to hiss through the air. Screams and babbling roared at the edges of Astraeos’s mind. He ran for the edge of the platform, blood sheeting down his skin from the stigmatic wounds in his flesh.

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

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

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

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

VI
CIRCLE

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

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

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

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

She smiled. She would enjoy this.

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

Suddenly her thoughts stopped dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The blast door shut and sealed with a metallic ring.

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

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

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

A tall man stood amongst the rubble, his mind shining in Sanakht’s awareness like a fire on a dark night. A spherical kine shield surrounded the man, glowing where debris had slammed into its surface. A coat of grey leather hung from his thin frame. An axe’s haft projected behind his head from where it was sheathed between his shoulder blades. Augmetic eyes shone from beneath the smooth skin of his scalp. A battle psyker.

Sanakht charged. A ball of lightning rose like a halo around the psyker’s skull. Sanakht threw the jackal sword. It blurred through the air, psy-fire clinging to its edges. The ball lightning catapulted from the psyker’s mind. Sanakht’s sword met the sphere, and a sheet of white light bleached the chamber. The human psyker reeled, and fell to his knees. The jackal sword was falling, its edge smoking. Sanakht caught it as he leapt into the air. The sword blazed at his touch. The human psyker was beneath him, still trying to rise. Sanakht descended, twin swords trailing fire and lightning above his head.

The psyker moved at the last instant, his mind hardening even as he spun to the side. The hooked axe was suddenly in the man’s hands, its edge oiled with warp light, its crystal cores shrieking with fury. Axe and swords met.

The force of the psyker’s mind slammed through Sanakht as the weapons kissed. Once Sanakht would have simply pushed his mind across that link and crushed the human psyker’s mind inside his skull. That, though, had been long ago, before the Rubric, before everything had changed. Now victory had to take a different, more mundane form.

Sanakht scissored his two swords through the psyker’s axe. Its core exploded. Metal and crystal fragments rang against Sanakht’s armour. The psyker screamed, his arms truncated stumps, his face a shredded lump of meat. He was strong, though. He tried to rise, tried to find balance in his mind even as it boiled with agony. Sanakht spun the hawk sword through the man’s neck. Behind him he felt the minds of Ahriman and his brothers rush past him into the rest of the citadel.

They were close, very close. All they had to do was reach Astraeos and–

A psychic cry rose up from beneath his feet, sharp with pain, bright with anguish.

Astraeos gasped and stumbled. The shockwave spilled across his mind, shrieking in dead voices as the storm broke and the Rubricae woke. Across the chamber men and woman reeled, and some fell. He suddenly smelled blood, vomit and faeces. He leapt up the stone tiers. Plasma screamed over his head. Iobel stood still, burst blood vessels blooming red across her eyeballs, her arm steady as she aimed at him.

+Ahriman,+ he shouted to the warp. Only the thunder roar of the storm answered him.

Behind him Cendrion leapt from the platform to the chamber floor with a crack of stone. Astraeos was a pace from Iobel. She began to step back, the pistol still raised, gas fuming from its vents.

+Cavor,+ Iobel’s mind roared, her thought faster than her muscles. Astraeos struck her just below the elbow, and Iobel’s arm shattered as she pulled the trigger. Plasma sprayed into the air. Astraeos looped his arm under hers.

The ground shook as Cendrion landed on the lower tiers and charged. Astraeos felt the warp take shape from the Grey Knight’s thoughts. Fire kindled and stabbed towards him. He focused his mind to meet the inferno.

The explosive round hit him from behind, and ripped away a bloody chunk from his thigh. Astraeos turned as he began to fall. Blood was pulsing down his legs. A las-bolt clipped his shoulder.

A figure stood three tiers above him. Astraeos had the impression of a sour face, and a whip-thin body beneath a ragged coat; that, and the silver of the guns in the man’s hands. Iobel twisted in his grasp, still conscious. He heard the gun cylinders turn, and the hammers cock. His mind flicked out to crush the rounds in the chambers.

The guns fired. Astraeos saw the tongues of flame lick from the muzzles. Slow, so slow. He tried to turn aside, to refocus his mind into a shield. Something hit him in the chest. It felt soft and warm. Blood misted in front of his eyes. He felt his control of the warp falter, and the processes of his mind slipped free. He began to fall again. He still could feel nothing. The second round hit an instant later, and blew the front of his skull away.

I am truly blind now, he thought as he hit the stone tier. Still there was no pain. Just a sense that somewhere locked behind walls of pain suppression there was a world of blades and razor edges waiting for him.

+Ahriman.+ The sending was weak, almost a croak. His awareness was fading, his body and mind closing down to the barest essentials. Everything had become a slow surge of sound and movement behind a window of numbed pain. His will scattered into fragments. The warp crashed in. Memories and half-formed thoughts whirled in the tide.

It was never going to work.

Trust me, my friend.

He was on the ground, slumped on the blood-slick stone. He tried to rise, tried to focus his will. There was a centre of calm within his mind, a pool of utter control that would save him if he could reach it. He would be able to heal himself, to see, to fight. It was there, just there, he could feel it in his grasp…

His will slipped, and he felt the tangle of occult formulae bleeding out of his thoughts.

Now, thought part of him. Ahriman will come for me now. I do not end like this. As I came for him, he will come for me. He gave me his oath. He is my master, my brother. He will–

Darkness came down across his mind like a closing gate.

Someone far away was screaming. As the dark took him he realised that he recognised the screaming voice. It was his.

+What was that?+ Ahriman heard Sanakht’s voice rise out of the sea of thoughts. +Ahriman?+

Ahriman did not answer. He had felt it too. A shift in the warp, like a wind suddenly changing direction. He could see the whole design in his mind like a cage of spun glass, each filament a connection between the real and the warp. Each one and a thousand more had created this moment, had brought them here, and had raised the Rubricae from the ground. And it was slipping out of control. The vital beacon of Astraeos’s mind had blinked out like a snuffed candle. And they were running out of time. He could feel uncertain futures branching ahead of him with every step.

This must not fail. I must not fail.

They were one level above where they needed to be. They would break through to the conclave chamber in one hundred and thirty-five seconds, but that would be too late.

He felt time unravel around his mind like fraying rope. The glowing storm pattern fractured. Ahriman poured more of his will into it. The minds of his brothers shuddered as he drew on them.

He felt all sense fall away. Everything became distant, just another pattern spinning through the quiet stillness. He could see the possibilities of the next nanosecond, multiply and collapse. He saw the Rubricae climbing over the walls, the molten stone squashing beneath their feet. He saw Astraeos fall. He saw a figure of fire waiting at the end of a billion branching futures. He was the storm, the still point around which the warp turned.

He straightened, felt his muscles relax as he lowered his weapons to his side. Sanakht and the rest of the Circle moved closer, though he had given them no command. Their wills were his will, all their power his. The chamber vanished.

High above them a thunderhead of force broke from the summit of the fortress, staining the cloud of the storm red.

The stone floor beneath Ahriman’s feet became a void into nothing. He fell, he and his eight brothers with him, like angels from a burning heaven.

‘Mistress.’

Iobel tried to focus on the voice, but there was blood in her eyes, and her thoughts felt soft and unfocused. She felt hands begin to lift a weight pinning her legs. She blinked, and looked up. Cavor knelt above her. His mouth twitched to show his broken-toothed smile. Behind him the silver mountain of Cendrion was turning, his head tilted upwards to the domed ceiling. At his feet lay the body of Astraeos. Blood was pumping from what had been the Space Marine’s face. She could hear shouting, running feet, the sounds of panic.

‘Stay still, mistress,’ said Cavor. She frowned. Her head hurt a lot. She rolled onto her front, pushed herself to her knees. Purple and black spots bloomed in her vision. The ground felt like it was spinni–

…A web of light and colour spinning into a storm, growing, filling her sight. Ashes and ice and… The vision snapped from her awareness.

She bit off a yell of pain, blinked away the afterglow of the image.

She felt hands trying to steady her. She flicked them away and stood, her teeth gritted. Smoke was bubbling through the chamber. All around her people were moving. Thunder and gunfire rolled overhead. Cavor was at her side, chromed guns drawn, his head twitching. She could see shapes moving through the smoke, clusters of people with weapons drawn.

‘Did you see that?’ she said, feeling her mouth struggle to form each word.

‘Mistress?’

…A web drawing tighter, each strand a line of fire in the night…

She was breathing hard, sweat prickling her cold skin.

No one was moving. Her eyes flickered over them. Can’t they feel it? Can’t they–

…The web drew around her, drawing tighter, and she was alone with just the sound of her own rising pulse…

She blinked and found Cendrion’s silver-grey eyes on hers.

+Inquisitor?+ he sent, but his voice was distant as though he was moving away from her, as though she was falling. She could feel herself shaking now.

+Can’t… you… see… it?+ she sent. Cendrion’s brow flickered. Then he looked up, and then back at her. He nodded once as though in apology. His mind punched into hers. It was like being stabbed by a crystal knife.

…black stillness, and beyond the stars spinning in a blur…

+Run,+ he sent, as his mind withdrew. He raised his sword: its edge was suddenly burning. He looked upwards as thunder echoed through the castle’s stones. +Run. Now!+

Iobel took a step, her hand moving to draw the hand cannon from her second holster.

The ceiling vanished. Her vision flashed white, each person and object becoming a black shadow. It was still, silent, like the image of an explosion burned onto the retina before the eye could close.

Figures of shadow stood around her, looming taller and taller, their edges blurred, their shapes without depth. Iobel realised that she could not feel her own heartbeat.

+Iobel.+ The voice was all around her, holding her in place.

A shriek rang through the chamber. A tongue of white flame cut through the growing dark. One of the shadows was falling, its shape twisting and shrinking like a burning scrap of paper. Colour and shape blinked back into place. She was at the centre of a circle of giants armoured in sapphire blue. She had an impression of blood flicking across white silk robes, of a figure falling with a whine of armour. Cendrion was there, moving faster than she could track. She saw his sword rise and come down.

One of the blue warriors moved to meet him, slashing out with a blade-tipped staff. Cendrion sidestepped the blow, and cut down. Another sapphire warrior fell. She felt the force holding her weaken. Other shapes moved in the glowing cloud of dust. She dipped her gun in her good hand.

She saw him then, one figure amongst the ring of warriors. His armour was silver-edged blue, and his eyepieces glowed red beneath his horn-topped helm. He nodded once as though in greeting.

+Now,+ called a voice in her head. +It must be now or the alignment will pass.+

Cendrion was a pace away, his sword a sheet of blinding light.

+What of Astraeos?+ said another voice.

Iobel raised her gun, until the muzzle was pointing at the red eyes. Her finger tightened on the trigger.

+Now.+

The world vanished, and there was just the rushing of a storm wind and the spinning of stars.

PART TWO

ALL THE SONS
OF ASHES

VII
LOYALTY

The jungle of his dreams closed over Ahriman. The leaves stirred around him as he slid between them. He paused, cocking his head to listen. The creak of insects and the murmur of the wind in the canopy answered him. Heat pressed close to his skin. Sweat beaded across his body and dribbled down his muscles.

The fatigue of the real following me into the unreal, he thought, as he took a heavy breath. The efforts of the battle on Vohal still clung to his mind and body like a fever. Out in reality, he sat in the Sycorax’s High Citadel as it cut through the warp. The ship and the rest of his fleet had broken off their attack and run back into the warp as soon as the Circle and the Rubricae had materialised on the Sycorax again. The diversion the void assault had provided had cost them a handful of vessels. There had been other costs, though. Here, in the landscape of his dreams, he had no doubt that the oppressive heat of the jungle was his mind’s way of expressing his weariness.

The jungle had once covered Sarlina, a world which had been conquered by the Thousand Sons in a different age. The shadows were different, though; something within his psyche had touched them, and made them grow until they seemed to flow around him like black oil.

He began to move forwards again, feeling the mud ooze around his feet. A flat-bodied insect emerged from beneath a leaf, its carapace a luminescent blue, its fringe of waving antennae tapping at the heat-thickened air. Ahriman watched it move across the leaf.

‘Are you here to find me?’

The voice came from just in front of him. Ahriman leapt back, muscles whipcord tense, eyes scanning the darkness in front of him. A pool of shadow split to reveal a one-eyed face beneath a ragged hood. The lone eye glowed red within the cowl.

‘You are looking for me, aren’t you, my son?’ The figure’s voice rattled dry from cracked lips.

Ahriman straightened. The figure shuffled forwards to where the luminescent insect still sat on a leaf.

‘You were the best of my sons,’ said the figure.

‘The memory of Magnus’s last words to me,’ said Ahriman, and turned away.

‘Quite right. I am not here. I am just an idea, a cyst in your memories formed around the idea of your gene father. You are tired. Your mind is allowing things to manifest that it would normally not. This is a form of conversation with yourself. I am not here. I am a dream. Why break with the simplest explanation? Unless…’ Ahriman turned. The twisted figure was smiling at him, and the flat insect had crawled to sit on the palm of the figure’s hand. ‘Unless it is wrong.’

‘Why would you be here?’

The figure looked back at the insect, raised a long finger and brushed one of the waving antennae.

‘Because you are looking for me. You are looking for me in the past, wondering if there were more secrets that I kept from you even before Prospero burned.’

Far off a distant howl shivered through the dark. Ahriman’s head came up. The leaves were rustling, rubbing their edges together like wet teeth.

‘Then why not answer me now?’ said Ahriman as he looked around again.

The figure had gone.

Another howl rose through the night, closer this time. Ahriman stood, eyes moving across the shadows, and then he began to slide through the dream again, running towards wakefulness.

Grimur watched the stars. His axe rested in his hand, and the hunched muscle of his back twitched in complaint at his stillness. Beneath his feet the chunk of the broken star ship turned over again. Sealed in his armour, his boots mag-locked to the metal, it seemed as though he was still and the universe turned around him. He stood on the largest piece of wreckage they had found: a half-kilometre-long chunk of plasteel, blackened and torn by explosions. Smaller pieces of debris spun in the distance, all slowly drifting away from the point where the ship they had been part of had died. To Grimur they looked like burned splinters of bone.

The vox clicked, and Sycld’s breathing wheezed from the static before cutting out. The Rune Priest had climbed down into the crushed and broken passages that ran through the wreckage. He would be crawling over the girders, baring the flesh of his hands for a few seconds to press them against the scorched plating. He needed to touch the bones of the dead ship to connect with the spirits, and hear the echoes of the past.

Grimur shivered, and touched the red iron shard hanging around his neck. He had never liked the ways of the wyrd. He had liked Sycld once, but that young warrior had disappeared a long time ago. They were pack brothers and always would be, but that did not alter the fact that they stood apart. Sycld walked the paths of the dead, and nothing could alter that. Long ago, during Grimur’s few human years on Fenris, he had seen a woman in a cloak of crow feathers freeze the sea around five of his blood-father’s ships. The waves had become white mounds, the black depths bowls of dark ice. The woman had made a sign and the frozen sea had crushed the ships. Grimur’s father had turned the rest of the war fleet back from the attack after that. The woman had laughed, and the sound had carried on the wind that had filled his father’s sails. Even now, many lives of men later, Grimur could still hear the crow-cloaked woman’s laugh, and the screaming of warriors as the ice sea ate them. To him that sound was the voice of the wyrd.

The vox clicked again. Grimur waited for the Rune Priest to speak.

‘The trace is here,’ panted Sycld.

‘Enough?’

‘Yes. It was not his refuge for long, but it carries his soul-spoor even now.’

Grimur nodded, though there was no one to see. He looked up. Slowly spinning islands of debris winked back with reflected light. His helmet display flickered with runes, bracketing the pieces of wreckage with data, framing them with projected arcs of movement. Out beyond the debris field his ships waited, five dark shapes sliding against the void on comet trails. The ships had not started in the service of the Wolves. Grimur had taken them from slain enemies, and given them names that reflected their new purpose. Hel’s Daughter, Storm Wyrm, and Crone Hammer were the largest, three scarred sisters of war. Beside them ran Death’s Laughter and Blood Howl: smaller, faster, their twin spirits like murder daggers. Behind the ships, the Eye of Terror spread across the heavens. Folded wings of glowing gas flickered between colours as he watched, the darkness at their centre a malignant pupil staring back.

For so long the Eye’s tides have been our home, he thought. What will become of us when the hunt is done? All those who have fallen, who have died with an axe in their hand and wounds to their front – Oulf, Haakon, Inge, and the rest – will be forgotten. Our tale is a saga that can never be told.

‘What can we be after it is done?’ he said to himself.

‘Lord?’ came Sycld’s voice. Grimur blinked his helmet display back to a standard view, and looked down again at the twisted metal beneath his feet.

‘What was its name? The ship, what was its name?’

‘Titan Child – a renegade ship fleeing from retribution.’

‘So are all that come to this place.’ The vox crackled, but Sycld said nothing.

Grimur shook his head. He brought the curve of his axe up, and clinked its edge on his helm. His twisted back twinged as the muscles woke. He remembered making the same gesture under a burning sky once before. The axe he had held then was broken, and the remaining shard of its red blade hung over his chest like an iron tooth, but then, as now, the vow in the gesture remained.

If we die unremembered, but with great deeds done, it will be enough. He felt the previous bleak mood shake free from his mind like snow from fur. Time will remember us even if men do not speak our names.

‘We return to the ships,’ Grimur said into the vox. ‘You will guide us.’

‘I can see the way. I can feel the scent pull at my waking, calling me into the paths of dream. I know the course we must steer.’

There had been a cold note in Sycld’s voice, as though he were speaking a warrior’s doom, or talking of an unclean death in battle. Grimur paused, suddenly aware that he did not want to ask the question which was forming on his tongue.

‘Where?’ he asked at last. The vox rasped and clicked.

‘Out of the Eye, into the Allfather’s realm.’

Grimur nodded to himself, his fingers resting on the red iron shard hanging from his neck.

Of course – the prey returns to the lands he betrayed. And we… He smiled inside his helm, baring a yellowed fang at the Eye above him. We follow.

‘Failure,’ said Ignis. The word hung in the High Chamber. Ignis looked around the circle, his eyes lingering on Ahriman. Hard blue eyes met Ignis’s stare. He suppressed a shiver. Ahriman’s face was unmarked by time or battle. Except the eyes; they shone with a controlled insight that made Ignis’s skin crawl inside his armour. What are you beside me? they seemed to say. What can you claim to know that I do not already know? Ignis held Ahriman’s gaze and repeated his judgement.

‘It was failure,’ he said. Behind him the looming bulk of Credence clicked and shifted as though uncomfortable. Ahriman’s eyes twitched to the automaton then back to Ignis. ‘There is no other way of seeing it.’

The Circle remained silent. There were five of them now, each unarmoured and robed in white. Beside Ignis stood Kiu, Gaumata, Ctesias, and, of course, Sanakht. Even here the crippled swordsman wore his twin blades. Ahriman stood at their centre, his bare feet resting on a serpentine sun spread in silver across a floor of obsidian. The whole chamber sat at the apex of the High Citadel of the Sycorax. The light of the stars glimmered from beyond the crystal pyramid which formed the chamber’s roof. Scented resin burned on brass tripods close to the walls. Shadows hung at its edges, hemming in the small circle of figures with emptiness and silence. The warp lapped at the chamber walls, held back by the incantations woven over the gathering. Ignis normally did not like being separated from the Great Ocean, but under Ahriman’s gaze he was suddenly glad that this moment was confined to the real.

‘It worked,’ said Sanakht, from across the circle.

Ignis felt his jaw muscles tighten involuntarily. Sanakht was frowning, his handsome features creased in puzzlement beneath his ash-blond hair.

‘It did.’ Ignis bit the words off with brittle care. ‘But not without cost.’

‘Success always has a cost,’ said Sanakht, shaking his head slowly, as though stating a simple truth to a child.

‘A platitude,’ said Ignis, blinking once.

‘A fact.’

‘Ah,’ said Ignis carefully, making his face smile. ‘You, of course, are best placed to tell us about the cost of failure.’

Sanakht’s frown flickered, and Ignis was suddenly aware that the swordsman’s hands were resting upon his weapons. He had not even seen Sanakht move.

He is still fast, thought Ignis, even if his inner strength is broken. Part of him wondered if Sanakht could reach and kill him before being stopped by the rest of the Circle. Then he wondered if any of them would stop him. He was an outsider here, even if he shared their blood. He decided that it was irrelevant. Credence gave a dull binaric click, which sounded like agreement. Ignis let his false smile fade. Sanakht took his hands from the pommels of his swords.

‘Three of our number gone,’ Ignis gestured at the gaps in the circle. ‘Three. For one human soul. If the salvation of the Legion is our aim, how can this calculation have any other answer?’

‘Four,’ said Ahriman quietly. They all looked towards him. He met each of their gazes, and then looked at the empty space where Astraeos would have stood. ‘We lost four, for one human soul.’

‘One soul who has what?’ asked Ignis. Around the circle the others shifted in discomfort. They all wanted to ask the same question, had wanted to ask it ever since Ahriman had begun this endeavour, of that Ignis was certain; he could feel the hunger in the air.

‘Secrets, brother.’ Ahriman looked up at Ignis. All of the Circle had gone completely silent. All of them had followed and obeyed Ahriman at every step, but Ignis knew they had all asked what Ahriman intended before and received the same reply. Now, at long last, it seemed they would get a different answer. ‘The answer is secrets. Or rather one secret that the Imperium has buried deep.’ They were all still now, all of them watching. ‘The inquisitor we captured knows this secret, and we have bought that knowledge with the lives of our brothers.’ Ahriman paused, nodding slowly as he looked around the circle. ‘Her name is Selandra Iobel. Our paths have crossed before.’

‘How?’ Gaumata’s slow voice rose into the silence. Ahriman looked into the pyromancer’s wide face. Red and black eyes glittered back.

‘She was on the ship I took Silvanus from. The silver in my chest is from her weapon. She almost killed me,’ said Ahriman. Surprise rippled around the circle. ‘And in that moment our minds connected. In that one instant she knew me, and somehow recognised me. She did not think that meeting chance – she thought that I had come for her because of what she knew, because of Apollonia.’

‘What is Apollonia?’ Sanakht spoke. The swordsman’s eyes seemed to have sunken into his ageless face.

So even Sanakht has been kept in the dark. Ignis felt a twinge of pleasure at the thought.

‘A place the reborn Imperium has hidden from itself. It is a planet, or perhaps a system, but in Iobel’s mind Apollonia has another name linked to it. When she thought of Apollonia, she thought of an Athenaeum, a library of knowledge.’ His gaze stopped once again at the circle’s centre. ‘She called it the Athenaeum of Kalimakus.’

Stillness and complete silence formed after the words.

Inside his mind Ignis slotted the fact into calculations which he had not been able to complete since Ahriman had summoned him. Kalimakus had been Magnus the Red’s personal remembrancer, psychically bound to the primarch so that he was not a scribe but a conduit. He had not been seen since Prospero had burned, and his fate had never been known. Until now.

‘The words of the Crimson King.’ Sanakht broke the silence, his voice dry with awe. ‘You are seeking our father’s secrets…’

‘Yes.’ Ahriman nodded, his face grim as his eyes moved between the empty spaces in the circle. ‘That is what four lives bought. The Rubric failed, but its seeds came from our father’s work, from the Book of Magnus.’ Ahriman paused, and when his voice returned it was lower, edged with sadness. ‘But what if there was a flaw in that work, an error which tainted all we built on it? In the source we may find the flaw, and from the flaw we may find a cure. Sanakht is correct – there is always a price, and we have only begun to pay for what we have done, and what we will still do. We do not bow to fate, not now, not ever again. Tell me which of you would not pay for such freedom?’

Silence was his only answer.

Hemellion did not look up as he moved through the Sycorax. It was best not to look at the others that walked the metal city; he had learnt that truth within hours of being brought aboard.

The first time he was set free he had tried to run. The silver chains around his ankles had turned his strides into a limp, but he had run until his lungs were burning. As he scrambled through the bronze and iron caves he had found a tall figure robed in saffron and yellow, its face hidden by a hood. He had called for help, for a way out of this iron city. The saffron-robed figure had ignored him. He had hobbled after it, calling, and had grasped its robe. At that moment he had realised that he had made a mistake. He had pulled his hand back, but it was too late. The figure had turned. Hemellion had looked up into the shadow of the hood before he could stop himself.

He had woken later, his clothes matted in his own vomit and blood, head and ears ringing, face resting against the crystal view of stars glimmering in the distance. That was how his new master had found him.

‘You will not try to run again,’ Sanakht had said, and he had been right. In that view of the stars Hemellion had found another truth; there was no escape from the iron city besides death.

The silver chains jangled as he quickened his step past a group of yellow-swathed Cyrabor. The machine-wrights hissed and clicked in his wake like cogwork birds. No one ever tried to stop him; some even bowed as he passed by, as though the scarlet of his robes were a mark of favour rather than slavery.

Scarlet, he thought, the colour of the slave serfs; of those who were permitted into the close presence of the Thousand Sons to tend their armour, clean their weapons, and do their bidding. The white robes of the acolytes were a higher honour, but when Hemellion thought about the withered men and women, some of them drooling with madness, crawling with the witch-touch, he was pleased it was an honour he could never obtain. For him it had been six months since he had left his dead world and gone up into the city in the sky, six months of learning a new life and unlearning an old one. How long had passed in the realm he had left, though? He could not know. Sanakht, his master, had explained the paradox of time in the warp to Hemellion once, but it had been an explanation that seemed closer to insanity rather than truth. He had not asked to have it explained further.

He stopped before he reached the passage leading to his master’s chamber, sucking breath through his teeth. He ran a hand over his shaven scalp, and it came away slick with sweat. It had taken him two hours to come from the lower passages to this place. On Vohal he could have walked from one side of the largest city to the other in half an hour. His sense of scale was one of the most minor of things that had changed since he had seen his world die.

He felt the hate rise up inside him as he tried to catch his breath. They had taken everything that he knew, had made it nothing without a thought. They had not even put his people to the sword. They had just killed everything that could support life, and let nature wield the scythe. A whole world had died in the dust, children crying in thirst, old women eating the dry earth from hunger. He had been there when the last well had run dry, and the desperate had tried to storm his fortress walls. The Thousand Sons had created a hell, but from the moment he had looked up into Ahriman’s eyes, Hemellion had known that it had not been for malice. No, it had been as part of a process. That truth had kept him alive, had kept the hate beating in his heart as they had shaved his head, robed him in scarlet and told him that he would serve the murderers of his world until he died.

I will see them dead. I will see them die in the ruin of their star city. I will find a way.

He looked about him, suddenly aware of the hate in his thoughts. He pushed the emotion down, waiting until his heartbeat slowed and his thoughts were calm. They were witch-kind, all of them. They could see his thoughts, and if he was not careful they would smell the treachery in him. He turned a corner and limped towards the entrance to Sanakht’s chamber.

A Rubricae stood to either side of the sealed doors. Green corpse light burned in their eyes beneath high-crested helms. Hemellion averted his gaze as he approached the entrance. He did not look into the Rubricae’s eyes; even being close to them made him feel dizzy. He had only to wait a heartbeat before the doors split open, and pulled back into the bronze walls.

The chamber beyond the doors would have been large if it had not been for the figure standing at its far end. Even without armour Sanakht made the room feel small. Flocks of golden birds rose across the sky blue of his robes. His face was thin, and reminded Hemellion of a youth just grown to manhood, his features unmarked by scars, ash-blond hair cut short against the dome of his scalp. He held a curled parchment in his hands, and more parchment lay scattered across the chamber, heaped in corners and hiding the black stone of the floor.

Hemellion bowed slowly.

As kings and warlords once did to me, said a whisper in his mind.

Sanakht tilted the parchment so that the light of the hovering glow-globes fell across it from a different angle. Hemellion waited, still bowed.

‘Fill two cups,’ said Sanakht after a long moment. Hemellion straightened from his bow. A silver jug and a trio of silver cups sat on a stone plinth at the side of the chamber. Most often his master called on him to clean his armour, or to take some artefact to another part of the ship. Sometimes Sanakht called Hemellion, and then dismissed him as soon as he arrived. But the legionary had never asked Hemellion to fill cups before.

Sanakht looked up. The parchment dropped from his fingers and fluttered to the scroll-strewn floor. Hemellion met his master’s gaze, and quickly looked down. Red blotches covered the white of Sanakht’s right eye, and the pupil was a ragged hole, like a broken yolk in a bloody egg. The left eye was clouded white. The corner of Sanakht’s mouth twitched, but if it was in humour it did not show on the rest of his face.

Hemellion shuffled to the silver jug and filled two cups. The liquid that came from the jug was a red so dark that it looked like clotted blood. Hemellion carried both cups back to Sanakht, and held them up.

Sanakht laughed, the sound so sudden and deep that Hemellion almost dropped the cups. The legionary reached down and took one cup.

‘Sit,’ said Sanakht. Hemellion looked at the cup still in his hand, and then back up at the demigod. ‘Sit.’

Hemellion looked around before folding slowly to the floor. A second later Sanakht mirrored the movement.

Like a tiger curling up under a tree, thought Hemellion. Sanakht’s mouth twitched again. He raised the cup to his mouth and took a delicate mouthful.

‘Drink,’ said Sanakht, and tilted his cup.

Hemellion looked down at his own cup. Slowly he raised it to his lips and drank a sip. The liquid was thick on his tongue and tasted of hot sun and spice. He coughed, blinked, and glanced back up. He could feel sweat prickling his skin. Something that would have been a smile on a human cracked Sanakht’s face.

‘Unpleasant, is it not – having your will bound to another?’ said Sanakht, his voice low and measured. ‘Having another creature command you?’

‘It is…’

‘I know this,’ said Sanakht. ‘And I know that you know this, Hemellion, King of Vohal.’

Hemellion watched his own reflection in the still surface of his cup. He was trying to think of something to say. He felt as though he had walked into a dream made from a child’s story; the man talking to the smiling serpent.

‘I…’ He felt his mouth go dry as he tried to speak.

‘Do you know why Ahriman gave you to me?’

Hemellion shook his head without looking up. In fact he was not sure why he was having this conversation.

‘He gave you to me because he thought that of all my brothers I am the one who needs another serf. The others can break apart their armour with a thought, remake the atoms in the air, unmake the light that meets their eyes. I…’ Hemellion looked up. Sanakht was turning the cup in his hand, watching the liquid cling to the silver. ‘I cannot. Not without great effort, not any more.’ He looked back at Hemellion with the cracked pupil of his eye. ‘I am of the Circle, but I am a child by comparison to my brothers. In battle their minds carry me. A brother in name but not in kind. When they use their hands it is because they choose to. I need serfs to carry my scrolls and clean my armour, not because it is my right, but because otherwise I would have to do it with my own hands.’

Hemellion looked down from Sanakht’s face, and took another sip from his cup. A fire spread through his chest. He felt soft tongues of warmth run through his thoughts.

‘What happened to change you so?’ The question slipped from his lips before he could stop it. He realised what he had done a second later. ‘I am sorry, I did not… I…’ The words dried in his throat.

Sanakht was just looking at him, eyes unblinking in a carven face. Hemellion felt his own flesh become very still, the adrenaline hammering in his veins telling him to run now, to run and not look back.

‘A fair question,’ said Sanakht, at last. ‘You were a king once, or as good as, a man used to questioning as he saw fit. I will not take that from you. A mind that sees and questions is worth more than the adoration of a million crawling fools.’ Hemellion felt the race of his pulse slow, but he still did not move or speak. ‘What changed me? Loyalty, Hemellion, loyalty made me like this.’ Sanakht took a longer drink from the cup. ‘All our kind were… on a path that would see us become monsters. Ahriman had a way of stopping it, a way to save all of our brothers. We, many of my brothers and I, were his cabal. We all agreed that we could not allow our Legion to fall any further.’ He paused, his gaze sharpening on a point somewhere in the distance. ‘But not all were with us. One of our brothers tried to stop us. He came for us, for Ahriman. Some died. Ahriman survived.’ Sanakht’s gaze dropped, his eyes seeming to pull back into his skull, the hollows of his face deepening. ‘And that had a cost.’

‘Where is he now?’ asked Hemellion. ‘The one who tried to stop Ahriman, what became of him?’

‘Khayon?’ Sanakht shivered, then shrugged. ‘He was remade in another way.’ Hemellion took a swig from his cup, allowing the liquid to steal a little more of his fear. Sanakht was watching the ripples settle to stillness on the surface of his own drink. ‘For a long time I thought the Eye had taken Ahriman, that he was gone. But Amon believed him alive, and we followed Amon. He was right – Ahriman lived, and now we follow Ahriman again. Now we give him our loyalty, and we trust that he can change us again. We are what we were once again, falling into the same abyss. Whatever he intends will fail, and even in failure it will have a price that he will pay without a thought.’

Hemellion went very still, his eyes watching Sanakht for a movement, for a sign that the treachery he had just spoken was a test. Somewhere, far off at the back of his thoughts, he remembered looking into Ahriman’s eyes, blue and cold as winter stars. ‘Because this is how fate is made,’ the sorcerer had said. Sanakht looked up, and Hemellion thought he saw understanding mirrored back at him.

‘They were right,’ said Sanakht softly. ‘All those who tried to stop us: the Emperor, Khayon, Amon. We follow lies and pay the coins without thinking, believing that we are right, and that only we see clearly. Those who challenge us we condemn as ignorant, and we run on into darkness, trying to reach a false light. We are the heirs of blind kings, ruling a kingdom of ashes.’

Sanakht nodded back at Hemellion’s wide stare. The air in the chamber seemed heavy and still. He was suddenly aware of the taste of the liquor on his tongue, the smell of parchment, and the buzz of the glow-globes.

‘It must end,’ said Sanakht. ‘He must end.’

Hemellion felt the fires of hate kindle in his guts. They spread through him before he could stop them. He felt his heartbeat rise even as he tried to slow it. The corner of Sanakht’s mouth twisted, but the rest of his face remained as still as before.

‘This is not vengeance, Hemellion, not of the kind that you clutch close in the night.’

Cold spread across Hemellion’s skin. He thought of the dreams which filled his sleep, and the anger he hid inside.

‘How do…?’ he managed

‘Your thoughts are of little else. You try to control them, but the warp around you tastes of your hate for us.’

Hemellion felt as though he had been struck, as though all his sensations were not his own, as though he was falling without moving.

He knows. They know. This is a trap. He thought of standing, but it was as though the connections between his mind and limbs had been severed. Witch-touched, said a voice within. They see through thoughts, through stone, through flesh.

+No,+ said Sanakht, and his voice was within Hemellion’s skull, echoing through his thoughts. +This is no trap. I tell you this because I will need you. Because everyone must speak the truth to someone. You will have your vengeance. It will have a cost, but it will be yours in time – you have my word.+

The chamber was fading from Hemellion’s sight. The world was a white swirl of dust, and the cries of his murdered home.

But if one witch can see my thoughts then others can too.

+I am sorry,+ said Sanakht’s voice from beyond the turning cloud. Pain filled Hemellion, blanking out his thoughts, crackling through him like a storm of lightning. He felt parts of himself vanish, crumbling even as he tried to cling onto them. +I trust you,+ spoke Sanakht, +but ignorance is the only thing that will protect us.+ As Hemellion’s mind was reshaped, he remembered one thing, one line that now seemed a lie shrieked at the universe.

He… He said he was weak… a child…

+Weakness,+ came the voice from the storm, +is a matter of degree.+

Hemellion blinked. He felt as though he had just stepped from darkness into bright light. Sanakht stood at the centre of the chamber, a dry leaf of parchment in his hand. Hemellion frowned. He could not remember why his master had summoned him, but it was not the first time he had come to Sanakht’s chamber for a reason he could not remember. A silver cup lay on the floor, dark liquid spreading from it in a thick pool towards the scrolls scattered across the floor. He bent down and picked up the cup. Sanakht looked at him, and Hemellion had to suppress a mixture of hate and fear as the mismatched eyes fastened on him.

‘How may I serve you, lord?’ he asked.

VIII
MINDSCAPE

‘No one enters.’ Ahriman turned and looked at Kadin as the door to the chamber opened. The hiss and clunk of the door mechanisms sounded loud in the empty corridor. Behind him Maroth had crouched against the corridor wall, his hound helm swaying from side to side as though listening to a sound that was not there. The Cyrabor had cleared the deck levels for a kilometre in every direction around this spot.

The chamber beyond the door was not what Kadin had expected. Buried in the Sycorax’s machine decks, it might once have been a magazine or store for volatile chemicals. Small, and accessed by a single blast door, its walls were slab panels of plasteel. Dry rust ran round the chamber’s edges, and the only illumination came from a yellow light held behind a cage of brass in the ceiling. It had the feeling of a place that had fallen between needs again and again until it was forgotten.

A sarcophagus of black stone sat at the room’s centre. Its upper surface was carved in the vague likeness of a human. Kadin could see the impressions of a serene face, and arms folded across its chest. Sigils ran over the surface of the sarcophagus, incised into the stone. Kadin heard voices whisper at the edge of his awareness as he looked at them. He could understand the symbols, but was not sure how; they were demands to the warp to hold the one who lay within the casket quiet.

‘That is her?’ he asked. ‘Iobel?’

‘The princess of the blind,’ hissed Maroth from the corridor behind.

Ahriman nodded, not moving from the door, his eyes flicking over the chamber. He was armoured but bareheaded. In the space before the casket the deck was marked with lines burned into the metal. The lines and spirals made Kadin blink as he looked at them.

‘Why not simply rip it from her mind? If she has what you want, why not just take it?’

Ahriman’s eyes darted over the design on the floor, and then to the sarcophagus. Kadin thought he heard Ahriman muttering even though the sorcerer’s lips did not move.

‘Understanding,’ said Ahriman eventually, still not looking at Kadin. ‘Knowledge without context is useless. The facts are not enough. I must have everything that gives those facts meaning. Besides, who knows what else her mind might contain?’ Kadin saw something that might have been a grim smile flicker across Ahriman’s face, and then vanish. ‘And to take all of that requires… delicacy.’

Ahriman let out a long, measured breath, and his eyes closed briefly. Kadin felt the air become cold. His machine limbs twitched as pistons and servos spasmed. Maroth gave a low whimper from the shadows.

‘No one enters,’ repeated Ahriman, the breath of the words white as it came from his lips. ‘Sanakht and Ignis have primacy over the fleet while I am here.’ Kadin nodded, and unclamped the two-handed chainsword from his back. His machine fingers flexed against the worn grip.

Ahriman stepped through the door.

‘You think someone will try to interfere?’ Kadin asked. Ahriman shrugged, his face darkening with an expression that Kadin knew must be a frown.

‘I am not sure,’ said Ahriman. He walked to the centre of the design burned into the floor. Kadin thought he saw the lines and markings bend away from Ahriman’s footsteps. ‘Perhaps.’

‘He sees everything, yet sees nothing,’ cackled Maroth.

‘You don’t trust them,’ said Kadin. It was a flat statement. ‘Your brothers, you don’t trust them.’

‘I trust you to be what you are.’

‘And what is that?’

Ahriman said nothing, but looked at the deck, shifting his position minutely, his eyes flickering across the lines spiralling away from him.

‘And him?’ Kadin jerked his neck at Maroth. Ahriman glanced up, his eyes fastening on the broken and blind sorcerer. Maroth came with Kadin wherever he went now, attached to him like a second shadow. When Ahriman had summoned Kadin to his side Maroth had come too, hissing and muttering in his ruined armour. Ahriman had not objected, had not even remarked on the broken sorcerer’s presence. It was as though Ahriman did not even see Maroth.

‘He is nothing,’ said Ahriman.

‘Is that what Astraeos died knowing?’ said Kadin, his voice flat.

Ahriman’s eyes snapped up to his. Kadin could feel the fingers of Ahriman’s mind in his thoughts, trying to tease through the mangled web of his soul, searching for anger and treachery. He almost smiled. There had been the barest twinge of regret when he had heard that his brother had fallen, but then the fact had simply become one amongst many, as dead and cold as a fire’s ashes. He had thought about what that lack of a response meant, but had reached no conclusion.

‘I am sorry, Kadin,’ said Ahriman, after a moment.

Kadin did not bother to nod, but simply turned to face the corridor. He rested the tip of his chainsword between his feet, and gripped the hilt with both hands. Behind him the door sealed with a hiss of pistons.

‘Quietness,’ whispered Maroth to himself. Kadin did not reply.

Ahriman looked at the sarcophagus for a long moment. Around him he felt the warp waiting, its tides shaped by the patterns cut into the floor. In his mind’s eye golden planes of light rose from the design. Sigils hung as small suns of meaning and potential, some still, others orbiting one another in clusters. Within the web lay the casket, the slumbering mind within glowing with dreams. He had spent days constructing this ritual. Each part of it was like a vast and delicate machine of thought, symbolism, and aetheric power. It only waited for his mind to set it in motion.

He took a breath, feeling every molecule of air spin slowly into his lungs. He felt the rhythm of his hearts slow until his awareness was suspended between two beats. Everything was still before his unblinking inner eye. He waited, floating in the emptiness. He formed a thought, and sent it rotating through his mind. He formed a string of thoughts, and felt them take life as they fed off memory and imagination. He split his will, breaking apart thought after thought until his mind was filled with whirling and spinning consciousness. The warp tugged at his will, trying to pull the delicate construct apart. Slowly, carefully he let one of his hearts beat. His mind was no longer within his skull; it was floating free, unbound. The ritual designs etched into the chamber met his mind and the two joined. His awareness flowed into the casket, and into Iobel’s mind.

‘Is that what he asked you?’ said Ignis. Sanakht kept his gaze steady. Ignis was watching him, his face impassive.

The crucible chamber sat at the heart of the Word of Hermes, a bowl of raw iron wide enough to swallow a Titan. A ball of molten metal revolved in midair at the crucible’s centre, fuming heat and ruddy light. There were no doors, just the lip of the crucible a dozen metres up the curved iron walls. Deep channels ran across the inside of the bowl, straight lines intersecting with circular depressions scooped into the walls. Sanakht recognised geometry that might have made the sign of Thothmes, or the Idris Progression, or the Sigil of the Carrion, but each seemed to blur and merge together with other designs he did not recognise. The whole structure pressed around Sanakht’s mind like a metal clamp. He did not like it, but the ways of the Order of Ruin had always been strange.

Ignis waited for a long heartbeat then shrugged. ‘When he asked you to betray Magnus, was that how he asked?’

‘No,’ said Sanakht carefully. ‘He never called it treachery.’

Ignis tilted his head but did not look away or blink. The electoos on his face contracted, expanded and multiplied their geometry.

He has not denied me yet, thought Sanakht. Nor has he tried to kill me. He felt hope tug at him, and fought it down. He could read nothing in Ignis’s expressionless face, and he knew that even if he could have looked into Ignis’s thoughts, he would have seen only numbers and symbols, each turning in intricate mental calculations like the cogs of a vast machine. Perhaps he is simply waiting for his calculation to reach a clear conclusion before acting. The Order of Ruin was many things, but haste had never been one of its flaws.

‘You agreed to join Ahriman, to become part of his cabal.’ Ignis paused again, tilting his head the other way. ‘Why?’

Sanakht saw it again then: the dust of the Planet of the Sorcerers, the shambling figures whose flesh and armour could not be told apart. He saw the yellow eyes blinking in blind clusters across the faces of those he had called friends. He looked down at his hand and saw it again as it had been, a thing of living metal and crystal scales. He closed his fingers slowly, one at a time.

‘We were dying, Ignis. Ahriman was not wrong in that.’

‘But wrong to do what he did?’ Ignis paused and blinked once, slowly. ‘Yes?’

‘No,’ said Sanakht, and gave a sad smile. ‘He was wrong to believe that we were worth saving.’

‘So you offer us the obliteration we deserved? Is that not what Amon believed?’

Sanakht shook his head. Like the rest of the Circle he had chosen to answer Amon and serve him. Ignis had not been a part of Amon’s Brotherhood of Dust, just as he had not been a part of the cabal who had cast the Rubric.

‘It ends with Ahriman. I do not seek to remake our Legion, or to bring us all redemption.’ He paused, thinking of Amon; in many ways he had been right, but in others he was the mirror of Ahriman, but a mirror with a different focus. ‘I know my limits,’ said Sanakht at last.

‘And Ahriman?’ Ignis asked, his voice level, but the black electoos twitched above his eyes.

‘He believes there is a way to save us all. A little more understanding, a little more perfection of knowledge, and he can correct his errors. There is a light dancing on the horizon for him, and what he has done already is only the beginning of the price he will pay to get a step closer to that end. He will drag us all with him. Salvation does not wait for us – only the darkness of damnation closing around us until we can no longer see where we began.’

Ignis did not move or speak for a long moment. The patterns on his face were still. Sanakht watched him, waiting. The clank of distant machines and the hiss of gas from a vent high above trickled into the silence.

‘How do you think to do such a thing?’ said Ignis at last, his expression as unreadable as ever. ‘Do you ask me to fire on the Sycorax? Do you hope to break the Rubricae from his will? Do you wish to try and persuade the entire Circle to face him?’ Ignis blinked again, but kept on speaking before Sanakht could answer. ‘All such methods will fail. The others will not join you. The Sycorax could face half the fleet and survive, and he…’ Ignis paused, and Sanakht saw something flicker in the black eyes. ‘He is a power like I have never seen. More even than before.’

Sanakht shook his head.

‘The others will stand against me. Ahriman has them all. They are starting to believe him again, they are starting to hope, just as they did before. I am alone, for now.’

‘So what do you intend?’

He still has not refused, thought Sanakht, but if this does not end as I hope then I will have to kill him. He had no doubt that he could – his powers were weak, but Ignis’s powers were channelled in other ways, and even then a blade would silence him as easily as a thought.

‘I will wait until he has no strength, and I have strength he does not expect.’

‘You know that such a moment will come?’

‘Such a moment always comes.’

Ignis inclined his head as though acknowledging the point.

‘Why come to me? We are not… friends, Sanakht, we never were.’

‘Failure,’ said Sanakht, and let the word hang in the air with his breath. ‘That is what you called Vohal. We lost three of our brothers, and you said it was failure.’

‘A calculation. If we do this to remake ourselves, then to sacrifice ourselves to that end undoes the logic of victory.’

Sanakht nodded, and gave a tired smile.

‘So what is the calculation now, brother? Are you with me?’

Ignis stared at him, eyes still, the patterns of his face growing more complex. Sanakht just waited. At last the patterns settled and Ignis opened his mouth.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Iobel heard the hab-block detonate behind her. She took a pace, a curse forming in her mouth. The blast wave hit her. The ground vanished beneath her feet. She spun through the dust-filled air. Her armour cracked as she hit the ground and pain stabbed through her torso.

Her ears were ringing. Billowing grey clouds surrounded her. She sucked in a breath of air. Rockcrete dust and ash filled her lungs. She coughed, and felt something sharp shift in her chest. She could hear the mutant creatures crying out in pain. Some of them must have been caught by the blast; that at least was a small comfort.

‘Horeg!’ she shouted into the vox. She rolled over and came to her feet. The ground swayed under her. ‘Horeg? Linisa? Cavor? Any of you?’ Whoops of distortion answered her. ‘Answer, you useless bastards,’ she called again, and pulled the meltagun from her back harness. It lit with a whine. Powdered grey dusted the weapon’s silver and black iron casing.

‘If any of you can hear this, I think that I got the last of the Prophets, but their family are still everywhere.’ She turned, and took a step forwards as she spoke. Her foot crunched on broken rockcrete.

The creature came out of the mist in a single bound. She had an impression of pale skin, and reaching claws. She fired. A line of energy flicked into existence in front of the gun’s muzzle. The air shrieked with heat. The creature exploded into black steam. She spat, and wiped cooked blood from her eyes.

It was going to take a while to clear the city, even if she pulled in half the planet’s defence forces and the rest of the Arbitrators. It had been luck that she had found the Prophets, random chance playing her a strong hand, and her enemies a very bad one. She had been tracking a recidivist who had been dabbling in some very dangerous alien artefacts. That particular piece of heretic scum was still out there somewhere, but his trail had led her to Carsona and to dig into its under-culture, and there she had found the Prophets.

The Prophets were rogue psykers. They offered glimpses of the future to Carsona’s burgeoning underclass. In a sense she supposed they offered hope, a chance to make better choices, and the desperate had paid in coins, in favours, or in whatever they had. The Prophets were slaves themselves. Others held the rogue psykers’ chains, and took payment. Those hidden masters were the true criminals, reckless and greedy. A rogue psyker, even one who could just mewl out a few warp-addled prophecies, was a bomb just waiting to explode. And there had been a lot of Prophets in the city, all ticking down to doomsday, and all for wealth.

It was the pettiness that made her most angry.

She had found them though, and even though the city might have to be put to the flame, the other possibilities could have been far, far worse. The only question remaining was the big one – who had begun the whole thing? Somewhere behind the coin-takers and the mutant families, there had been a first mover in this heresy. Now that the Prophets themselves were done with, she would find out where this had begun.

Something hit her on the back and fell to the ground. She looked down. A fragment of rockcrete the size of a finger lay at her feet.

‘Oh, Throne of Terra,’ she muttered.

She felt another impact, harder this time. Then another and another, and suddenly she was covering her head, her cracked armour ringing as debris streamed past her as though drawn into the centre of a cyclone. A hooting bellow echoed through the fog. Her head snapped up as the sound rolled around her. Worms of mauve light were forming in the air. Screams were coming from the dust cloud. In her mind she could taste desperation and panic. The flavour of metal and rotting fruit itched at her teeth. She had misjudged, and misjudged badly – this was all about to become something much worse. Somewhere close by another uncontrolled psyker was awakening.

A chunk of girder whipped her legs from beneath her, and suddenly she was falling. She never hit the ground. Invisible ropes lashed around her, pulling her up and through the air. She could smell burning silk, and hear the rattle of insects in the rising wind. Ghost voices called to her, promising her infinity. She hardened her will, focusing in the way that had kept her alive on the Black Ships. She was stronger than the voices on the wind, stronger than the whispers which were telling her to submit, to leave her own mind open to the storm of possibility that was just a wish away.

A pillar of shattered stone came out of the mist and slammed into her. She heard a crack of breaking bone, and her left leg filled with fire. She did not scream. The invisible ropes vanished. She hit the ground, and tumbled across it. Black spots bloomed at the edge of her sight. She lay still. The pain was her world now, its edges defined by the walls of her will. Dust and debris streamed past her.

She was in the remains of a hab-block. Its broken structural pillars rose around her like snapped fingers. She flexed her left hand and found it still held the meltagun. She spat, and watched the blood-thickened phlegm whirl away on the wind. The psyker was close. She could feel its presence fizzing in her awareness like a fire made of munitions. She looked up, and saw the entrance to the broken hab’s basement. Debris flew through the low door, and she could see light crackling in the darkness beyond.

She tried to move, and felt the pain shiver up her side as she shifted her left leg. She closed her eyes and found the threads of pain pulling through her mind, red and jagged. She began to ravel them together into a place which was separate from her, a place where she could ignore them. It was not a psychic ability, just a consequence of training and willpower.

It took her almost a minute before she could stand. Her bones crunched and ground in the sheath of her muscle as she limped towards the doorway down into the basement.

There were more mutants here, but most were already dead or dying. Splinters of rockcrete and metal riddled most of them. Those that still lived croaked at her as she passed. Quills had sprouted from their skin, and milk-white eyes had opened across their flesh. Tatters of overalls hung from them like the half-shed skins of snakes.

It was quiet in the basement. Above, the aetheric wind roared and the city pulled itself apart, but here everything was still. A man sat in the centre of the space. Detritus had gathered around him, small drifts of scorched paper, and ashes forming a spiral that covered the floor. Blue flames clung to the ceiling, silently rolling across the rockcrete without sound or smoke. The man looked up as Iobel entered. He was not old, but Iobel could tell that toil had stolen the best of his years. The flesh of his face sagged beneath the chequered pattern of his labour-glyph. Bloodshot eyes met Iobel’s, and the pupils contracted to dots. Something rippled under his skin.

‘What…’ he rasped, his jaw chewing the air. ‘What do I do?’ Iobel took a step closer. ‘I don’t know what to do.’ The man trembled. He was crying, she saw. ‘I just want it to stop. Please. Is this a dream? I think it might be a dream. I just want it to stop.’ He was shaking now. His cheeks were bright with tears. Iobel’s finger tightened on the meltagun’s trigger. The gun armed with a low whine.

He looked up sharply, his skin rippling. ‘The Sons of Prospero,’ he said, and his voice was a hollow rasp. ‘I see Prospero’s cities now cast down. Its sons call to me. As they are its sons we are theirs. We are their vengeance.’ The last word echoed through the basement, rolling louder and louder. Dust and rock fragments rose from the floor. His face bulged. Iobel had an impression of fingers pressing against the taut skin.

She pulled the meltagun’s trigger. The ray of heat hit the man in the centre of his chest. The fat and meat of his body vaporised an instant before his distorting skeleton exploded. A chattering scream split the air, rising like a flock of carrion. The blue fire surged across the ceiling, flames reaching like hands. Then it vanished, and Iobel was left in half darkness. A second later the debris began to hit the ground outside. It sounded like hail.

Iobel let out a breath, then collapsed to the floor.

Prospero. The word muttered through her thoughts, while a headache screamed behind her eyes. What had that meant? She had heard the ranting of madmen and demagogues, had taken the truth from thousands of heretics, and in all that time, she had learnt that there was rarely real truth in their words, and if there was it was best forgotten. But the dead psyker’s last words rang in her thoughts, like a sound caught in an echo chamber. The Sons of Prospero…

‘So that is how it began.’ The voice came out of the dark. She twisted and brought the meltagun up. Darkness flashed to daylight as she fired. There was nothing there. Just the rockcrete support pillars, and the briefly distorted shadows. She twisted where she lay on the floor, extending her mind again, smelling the warp, feeling its wounded flesh as though it were her own skin. She stopped.

It was not there. The warp was gone. Beyond the skin of sensations inside her mind there was just a void.

‘This is not real. At least not in the sense most would consider it.’ The voice was rich, measured. ‘I thought it would take you longer to realise.’

A man stepped from behind one of the pillars, and her finger tightened on the trigger, but did not fire. Muscles bunched and flowed across his bared chest and shoulders. Silver and gold rings glinted from his scalp. Huge relaxed hands hung beside the handles of sheathed glaives. Half of his face looked like knotted leather, the scars shaped and folded into a tangle of dragons and serpents. He smiled at her with the other half. The sharpened points of his teeth showed in the twisted corner of his mouth.

It was Horeg, her retainer and bodyguard, or at least it looked just like him. But Horeg had no tongue and could not speak. ‘I thought it would take us longer to reach this point,’ said the man who was not Horeg.

Iobel squeezed the trigger of the meltagun. Nothing. She pulled it again, and still nothing. She felt a shiver whip through her. The man who was not Horeg stepped closer. He had blue eyes, bright blue eyes, the colour of a sea under sunlight. She tried to rise, but the pain in her leg suddenly grew. She could feel bone cutting into flesh. She gasped.

‘As I said, this is not real.’ He squatted down opposite her, muscles bunching in his haunches. ‘But there are ways of making it feel that way.’

‘Daemon,’ she hissed, but even as she said it she was not sure. This felt different, like something that had already happened.

‘No, and besides you, I alone am real.’

She felt suddenly very cold.

‘What is your name?’ she said carefully.

‘A good question – names have power, do they not? You want to see if I will answer, and if I do, and if I tell true, then you have the beginning of a weapon to cut your way out.’ He smiled Horeg’s twisted smile again. ‘That is what you were intending, was it not? Resourceful, never yielding, always looking for a path to victory even when all is uncertain – you are a remarkable person, Selandra Iobel. Your mind is very strong, stronger than I would have thought possible for one still mortal.’

‘Your name?’ she growled, fighting down the pain, shutting out the panic and questions. This was a trick, one of the greater illusions of the daemons that infested the warp. It might not be real, but that did not mean that she had to submit to its lie.

He just smiled again, and shook his head. A line of silver rings rattled in the pierced flesh of Horeg’s eyebrows.

‘My name is Ahzek Ahriman,’ he said. She froze, hair prickling across her arms as though touched by an icy wind. Her tongue was still in her mouth. Her eyes fixed on the bright blue points of his eyes, and suddenly she knew that she was not the Inquisitor Iobel who had purged the Prophets of Carsona, or at least she was not any more. Carsona had been a century and a half ago. She had not known the name Prospero then, had never heard of the Legion it had birthed, and had not known the name Ahzek Ahriman. He was right, this was the start. This moment, in the basement of a broken hab, had been the beginning of her journey from ignorance to enlightenment: the journey that would lead to Apollonia…

She shut the thought down as it formed, thrusting it away from her consciousness and burying it deep within her. That was what he was after, why he had come for her, why he was standing in the ruin of her past wearing the face of a loyal friend.

Ahriman nodded, and stood.

‘This memory is close to the surface of your mind. The last things you would have remembered before this would have been the conclave, and the examination of my lieutenant. Your mind would have been fixated on me, and what I intended, but this memory is the first your mind comes to now. Why?’ Ahriman looked at her. His gaze hit her like a physical blow. ‘Because this is the start of the path that would bring you to me.’

Iobel suddenly felt as though a sliver of cold iron had slipped into her chest. Her mind flicked back through what Ahriman had said, through what seemed to be happening. This was happening in her mind, in her memories. There was a reason she was here, in this exact memory. This was not an interrogation, it was a breach into her memories, a hole bored into the outer layer of her mind. She closed her mouth, pulling her thoughts back, hardening her will.

Apollonia, he has come because of Apollonia…

She forced the thought deeper, burying it down, clamping layers of trained will over it. Numbness spread through portions of her consciousness, sections of her past suddenly becoming cold and dead. Names and facts she had carried for decades vanished from sight, swallowed down within her core.

It will not be enough, she thought, even as the walls grew and the memory blocks formed in her mind. Not against the likes of him. Escape or death are the only ways to keep it from him. I must find a way to escape, or a way to die.

‘You can hide what I seek, inquisitor, but I will reach it.’

She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came. The image of the hab basement was coming apart, bleeding into blackness like wet paint dribbling from a canvas. Only the blue eyes remained fixed, glittering as they pierced into her, glowing like cruel stars.

‘Is that enough? Can he hear us?’

The voice came from above him. There was light too, sunlight perhaps, falling through a grey fog. He was not sure how far away the light was, though. The voice had sounded familiar, but he was not sure where he had heard it before.

‘Probability of normal cognition and sensory awareness is high.’ The second voice was a clatter of machinery. ‘Adeptus Astartes physiology yields uncertainty quotient of–’

‘He can hear us,’ cut in the first voice. He heard the speaker lick his lips. ‘Can’t you?’

He did not reply. No, in fact he did not know how to reply. Could he make words like those he heard? He listened instead. He could hear a low hiss and wheeze, and a buzzing pulse almost below the level of hearing.

Active augmetics, said a voice within his head. He knew it was right but he did not know why. Yes, active augmetics, and… weaponry… no… yes, but something else as well… something low like the purr of power armour. And then the smells came. The thick reek of machine oil, and contraseptic, and wires running hot close to dead flesh. Breath, heavy and wet with the smells of polluted lungs, and spiced food, and burned caffeine, and–

‘Can you get him to see?’ asked another voice, a different voice. Female, further back from the other two. He could hear her withered chest in the bite of her words. He had heard that voice as well, but he could not remember where. Did it matter that he could not remember?

The fog and hazed sun vanished. The world that replaced them was pale blue. He could see a group of figures in a pool of light. Beyond the light everything was shadow, blurring to darkness that extended to an undefined distance. At the centre of the pool of light sat an object. At first he thought it was a machine, but then he saw the flesh under the mass of tubes. It was a body, clamped to a metal table, its skin and meat punctured by needle-tipped tubes, its breath the slow sucking of fluid through glass flasks. Its head was an eyeless mask of metal, haloed by cables, and with a black slot for a mouth. Two figures stood close by; the nearest had no legs, but floated a metre from the floor. Two sets of glittering limbs hung from within the shadow of its robe, and three green eyes rotated slowly beneath its hood. The second figure was a human with a thin hard face and plain black robes. Further away a shrunken old woman in a gleaming exoskeleton stood beside a man with shining crystal eyes. Three hooded attendants stood behind the crystal-eyed man, linked to his spine and skull by thick cables. They were all looking at the figure bound into the machines at the room’s centre.

He recognised them all, but was not sure why. None of them seemed to have reacted to him suddenly appearing on the opposite side of the chamber to them. He looked at each of them again, tried to blink but without success.

The floating four-armed figure turned to look at him. Its tri-lens eye rotated faster, then clicked to stillness.

‘Subject can see us now.’ The voice was the same machine clatter as before. They all turned to look at him then. The man with the thin face frowned, and raised a crooked finger.

‘Closer.’

He floated forwards, passing over the figure buried under the snake swarm of sucking tubes. As he did so he saw a reflection glide across the glass of one of the fluid-filled vials: a polished skull without a lower jaw, a cluster of lenses filling its left eye socket. He kept on moving forwards, his mind suddenly tumbling. A servo-skull: he recognised it, and felt the shock roll through his narrow awareness.

The thin man’s face was now level with his vision.

‘Tell me, can you speak?’

No, of course he could not speak. The word echoed through him in mute frustration. He could not…

A sound gurgled up from the figure on the table.

‘N… No.’

‘Good,’ said the thin-faced man, then gave a narrow smile that was not a smile.

He understood then, and knew why he was seeing through a servo-skull, knew why no one had looked at him when he first saw the chamber. He was the figure on the table. The injured flesh was his. The mouth speaking through the slot in the metal mask was his. And he had no eyes.

‘Who are you?’ he said.

‘I,’ said the thin-faced man carefully, ‘am of no concern. You however, you are very much the focus of things.’ He glanced at the hovering tech-priest. ‘Though I understand your cognition is impeded at present, we will help you recover it.’ He nodded carefully. ‘We will help you remember.’

‘Remember?’

‘Yes, and let me start by giving you something. We will need more of you, much more, but you will need to lead us there, and for that we need somewhere for you to start. Your name.’ The thin-faced man paused. ‘Your name is Astraeos.’

Astraeos. The name rolled through him, like an echo of a shout carrying through fog. Yes… Yes. That was… that is my name.

‘Why am I here?’ asked Astraeos.

The thin-faced man folded his arms, a long finger resting on his jaw.

‘A very good question,’ he said.

IX
STORM CALM

The fleet waited in unquiet calm. Two dozen ships lay in the dark, their engines silent. Distant starlight lapped against their hulls, sketching their shapes in silver. Time ticked on and the millions who lived in the ships waited. On the bridges of the warships, in close cramped sub-decks, and in lightless bilges they waited. Most did not know why, but they felt it all the same, a tautness that stretched between heartbeats like a drum skin waiting for the first strike to fall.

In the steam-filled gorges between the Sycorax’s shield stacks, the mech-scavengers folded their brass wings over their bodies and hooted into the quiet. The Cyrabor gathered in their forge-fanes, clicking at each other in their half-machine tongue. In the domed library of the cruiser Metatron Gilgamos watched the stars beyond the viewports. At his side three Rubricae stood, statue still, the light in their eyes dim.

In his quarters Hemellion sat, his legs curled under him, staring at the wick of a candle burning lower. He thought of the faces of those he had known, of the sun falling through mist on a cold morning. He thought of the son he had sent away from the capital so that he would learn of the world he would one day rule. For an instant he wondered where his son would be now, then he remembered that he knew. Tears rolled down his cheeks in silence, and he stared at the candle flame and waited.

Silvanus could not sleep. The drugs had stopped working, and would not work again, no matter how many he took. He sat on the hard floor of his oculary, looking at the circle of mirrored glass in his hands. He did not want to look into the reflection; he did not want the answer it would give. But even the hands that held the mirror gave an answer – they were changing. The bones were longer, the skin thinner, the nails finer and sharper. He raised the mirror, and looked at his face. The flesh was sagging under his eyes, and the pupil in his left eye had swollen to swallow the iris. The features of his face were disappearing, melting back into smooth flat skin. Slowly he lowered the glass.

How long? he wondered. How long do I have before I cannot recognise myself?

Carmenta drifted between wakefulness and the slumbering dreams of the Sycorax. Every now and then she could hear the Cyrabor talking as they stood around her throne. They were talking about her, their half-machine voices clicking and purring like oiled cogs. They thought she could not understand them. They were saying that she would not last much longer, that the ship would take her soon, that the portents all said that her end was coming.

But I am the mistress. The slow, cold embrace of her ship folded over her. I am Titan Child. I am Sycorax. I am a goddess of the void. How can I die?

No answer came, just the whispers of the Cyrabor fading into the restless quiet.

And on and on through the fleet time drew taut, and the whispers passed between lips both high and low: What now? When would the waiting end? Where would the answer lead them?

The chainblade roared to life in Kadin’s hands. Sparks rose from where the teeth caught the decking at his feet. After a second he stopped the blade’s motor, and listened to the teeth slow to stillness. The corridor was quiet again.

Kadin watched the stillness of the corridor. The cracked glow-globes cast ragged pools of light over the metal gratings of the floor. At his back the door of the chamber through which Ahriman had passed days before remained shut. Kadin had heard sounds, sand blowing across metal, calls like the cries of birds, laughter even. Frost had leaked from the door seals and spiralled down the walls of the corridor. The door had glowed deep red then cooled with a tinkle of contracting metal. But even those moments had not broken the feeling that the whole ship and fleet had settled into a dreamless night.

Kadin turned his head and looked into the blackness at the other end of the corridor. He kept watching until it melted away from his eyes, and he could see the dot of the distant bulkhead in grey monochrome. He looked back down. He would have closed his eyes, but his eyelids would not stay shut any more, and his eyes saw regardless of how deep the darkness. He had grown in the dark, learned to fight in the dark, killed his first man in the dark. So many memories were gone, but he could still remember the warmth of the blood as it washed over his knife arm. The dark had been mother and father; the dark had been fear and the racing heart of the hunt.

What remains?

He triggered the resting chainblade. It rattled to life and noise filled the corridor, tumbling down the long space. He gunned it louder, felt it shake the metal of his grasp. He cut the motor, listening to the sound drain back to nothing.

A few memories of a child in the dark, afraid and hungry – that is what remains.

He gunned the chainblade again, and listened to the silence vanish as the metal teeth sang.

Maroth knelt. Above him, the daemon stirred, and its silver chains clinked. He raised the blind eyes of his helm. The daemon looked back, its own eyes like pools of mirror-black water. The host body had changed again. Maroth could see the red muscles beneath the stretched skin. Horns grew from beneath the temples of its head, reaching up like bare, twisted branches. Its lips had pulled back from its teeth, and it grinned with a cage of translucent needles. He could hear it breathing, the air sucking wetly, even though its chest was still.

Nothing here is as it seems, thought Maroth. The silence is not silence, and the quiet is a storm waiting to break. I am not the broken husk of a sorcerer, and Ahriman is not my master.

‘Sire,’ said Maroth, his voice strong and clear in the blue light of the burning lamps.

‘Now,’ said the daemon, its voice crackling like fire spreading through a forest. ‘It begins now.’

‘Yes, sire,’ said Maroth.

Ignis watched the warlords arrive. He had chosen one of the main hangar decks for the meeting, partly because it was as far as he was willing to let the warlords onto his ship, and partly because he had every intention of just opening the blast doors to the void if all went as wrong as it might. Night filled the vast chamber, broken only by the pilot lights guiding the gunships to their stands on the deck. Credence stood just behind him. The automaton buzzed at him every few seconds.

‘No,’ Ignis muttered in reply. ‘That course of action is unnecessary at this point.’

Credence gave a short clatter of binaric.

‘In this case your threat assessment is in error,’ said Ignis.

Another pause, another blurt.

Ignis glanced up at the automaton’s sensor sockets. ‘Yes, I am sure.’

He turned back to watching the warlords and their entourages cross the deck. They walked with the blunt arrogance of those trying not to show that they were unsure of why they were there. It almost made Ignis smile. All of them commanded ships and warbands in Ahriman’s fleet. Most of them had been part of one Legion or another during the Great Crusade and subsequent rebellion against the Emperor. All of them had fought in the wars in and around the Eye of Terror, some for hundreds of years, some for much longer. And all of them held to no higher ideal than their own thirst for power. They came one by one, each flanked by a clutch of warriors that fumed violence like smoke from a fresh fire.

First came Hzakatris, so called Master of the Hellforged, clad in armour which looked like cancerous bone. He brought three of his blooded warriors with him, each one of them clad in Terminator plate looted from battlefields across the Eye. They clanked with poor repair as they moved. Behind him was Mavahedron, alone apart from his thrall-hounds, the beasts snarling at the ends of taut bronze chains. Sulipicis was last, face shrouded, his black and gold armour half hidden by tattered grey robes. A crescent of blank-helmed and black-armoured warriors flanked him. Each bore a two-handed sword before them. Ignis thought they looked like a mourning guard marching beside a corpse.

Ignis felt the muscles in his jaw tense as the three warlords halted in a ragged arc before him. His eyes lingered on each of them, his second sight picking up their shifting auras: anticipation, caution, distrust, spite, and hunger. He had a sudden urge to tell Credence to open fire. This was the third of these parlays he had arranged, and by now he was feeling a sense of inevitability about the outcome of each.

It was Hzakatris who spoke first.

‘What have you brought us here for?’ His voice hissed and buzzed from the vox-grilles of his Terminator armour. He raised a clawed fist, and delicately ran a bladed finger across the horns which curled from the temples and jaw of his helm. ‘Does Lord Ahriman still not deign to give us commands himself?’

‘Ahriman,’ said Ignis, and noticed Hzakatris’s aura flicker at the absence of title, ‘is locked in a room picking through the dirt of a witch’s mind. He does not know you are here, and if he did he would not care. If he knows who you are it is only as a convenient resource for him to expend before those he values more.’ Ignis allowed his lip to curl. ‘You are less than dogs to him.’

Silence filled the gloom. Ignis waited, counting micro-seconds in his head. Chainblades spun alive, bolters clattered active and began to rise. Mavahedron let a length of chain rattle through his grasp, and the thrall-hounds bounded forwards with a wet howl.

+Hold!+ The thought flashed from Ignis. Frost formed in the air around him, blanching Credence’s carapace from a pace away. Everything in the chamber stopped moving. Arms halted as they aimed or drew weapons. Fingers froze on triggers. Ignis had to fight down the sudden wash of fatigue at the sending. He had never been more than an aspirant in the disciplines of telepathy, and even after the Rubric had remoulded his powers, such an exertion of will cost him. That, and the temptation to allow it to become more than just will was always there, waiting for him to succumb.

‘I speak only truth to you,’ he lied, forcing any trace of fatigue from his voice. ‘And I speak it to you three alone.’ They were all watching him now, weapons not lowered but rising no further. ‘Ahriman thinks nothing of you, if he thinks of you at all. You are useful to him only because you compensate for his weakness with your strength. Without you, he would be nothing. When we attacked Vohal it was you three who were at the bloody edge of the void fighting, you who spent the strength of your warriors. And before that, on Guncua and the Exodus from Samatis, it was you in the vanguard, was it not?’ He watched their auras flicker, some with rage at the insult of his words, some with pride, all with resentment. They wanted to believe what he was saying because it was what they already believed.

Mavahedron nodded once, slowly.

‘You speak truth,’ he said, voice creaking like an old tree in the wind. ‘But why do you speak it?’

‘Because I wish your aid,’ said Ignis. ‘Because I wish you to help me destroy Ahriman.’

The laughter began as a dry rustle, and then rose to a pulsing croak. Everyone in the room looked towards Sulipicis. The hooded figure continued to laugh, then drew a breath and spoke.

‘The jester believes himself the king,’ said Sulipicis, his voice still edged with laughter. ‘Your breed cannot help it, can you? You are like fish that can only swim in a sea of treachery.’

Ignis turned his head to stare at Sulipicis. Behind him Credence mirrored the gesture with a whir of gears. Sulipicis gave another snort of laughter.

‘I did not say that I refused to listen to what you say. And as for the rest – I meant it only as a compliment.’

‘Why should we help you?’ said Hzakatris. Ignis turned to look at him. Rage still flickered around Hzakatris. Ignis saw it form eddies in the warp as it bled from the Terminator’s mind.

‘Because I will divide the surviving fleet between you three when it is done.’

None of them moved or spoke.

‘And,’ said Ignis. ‘I will gift a sorcerer of my Legion to each, blood bound to serve you alone.’

‘You would betray your brothers so?’

Ignis made himself smile. He was not sure if the gesture was right, but he had practised it, and it had worked each of the other times; that it was needed a third time pleased him.

‘My Legion is dead,’ he said. ‘I have no brothers.’

He had them then, he was sure. Now all that remained was to explain what he needed of them. How they would make no move until they had an advantage. How they had to follow his orders alone. And then he would have to reassure them that he would deal with the Sycorax…

The pattern of thoughts snagged in his mind.

Hzakatris was shaking his head, the horns of his helm scraping the collar of his armour.

‘No,’ Hzakatris’s voice grated through the gloom. ‘Ahriman is a deceiver, and an arrogant bastard, but I would sooner trust him than you. I will not join you in this folly.’

It took two seconds for everyone else in the room to realise that Hzakatris had just ensured that either he or all of them had to die. And two seconds was too slow. Hzakatris’s bolters came up. Mavahedron and Sulipicis seemed frozen by surprise. Hzakatris squeezed the trigger.

‘Kill protocol!’ shouted Ignis.

Fire spat from Hzakatris’s bolters. Credence slammed forwards. Rounds exploded off the automaton’s carapace. Hzakatris’s Terminators were moving now, guns clacking as they armed. Credence fired, the cannon on its back shrouding the Terminators in explosions. Hzakatris burst from the fire, fist raised and writhing with lightning. Credence smashed its hand into the warlord’s helm. Its fingers closed with a cough of pistons, and it yanked the warlord up as the cannon on its back rotated down. It fired.

Hzakatris’s head and helm vanished in a spray of explosive rounds. Credence threw the armoured corpse aside in time to meet the first of Hzakatris’s bodyguards with a kick. The Terminator reeled back, and Credence kicked again, very hard on the exposed flesh of its face. The other two came on, chainfists and powerblades hissing and buzzing. Credence spread its arms wide. Power fields snapped into existence around its fists. The Terminators’ charge faltered as, too late, they realised what the automaton intended.

Credence brought its fists together. The Terminator caught in the double blow lived for long enough to feel his armour fracture, and hear the roar as Credence triggered the flamer units bound to its wrists. Fire poured inside the cracked armour, and the Space Marine within became a soup of cooked flesh and bone. The automaton pivoted, holding the dead Terminator like a club, and used him to smash his comrade to the ground. Credence came forwards before the Terminator could rise, and punched down again, and again with perfect machine rhythm.

Ignis let the automaton mash the Terminator for nine seconds.

‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Kill protocol revoked.’ Credence straightened, and walked slowly back to stand behind Ignis. Once stationary it gave a lower series of clicks. Ignis looked up at it, eyebrow raised. The automaton’s armour was chewed by bolt fire and steaming with blood.

Ignis looked back to the heap of broken armour and pulped meat that had been Hzakatris. It was a shame. He had been sure Hzakatris would turn against Ahriman. A frown formed on his forehead as he considered the imperfection in the pattern of events. It was an unfortunate, but luckily minor flaw.

Ignis shook his head, and looked at the other two warlords. Neither had moved. ‘So, do we have an agreement?’

Grimur watched the fire and tried to remember the cold of Fenris. The hall at the heart of Hel’s Daughter rumbled around him with the voices muttering around a dozen different fires. Once there had been many more fires, and the circles around each had been five deep, and the hall had rolled with voices. But that had been long ago, on a ship now lost to the storms. The hunt for Ahriman and his kin had claimed both ship and comrades. Those who clustered around the fires now spoke in the silences between words. They all wore their armour since the hunt had begun, only shedding it for repair. They were fewer, and older in years and scars. Firelight touched grey hairs, and glinted on teeth grown long through time.

The chamber itself was black from the smoke of the fires. Pillars of raw iron reached up from the floor, their surfaces reshaped into dragons which bit and clawed the distant ceiling. Runes marked the walls, cut into the bare metal by axe blows. The names of those who had fallen on the hunt spoke to Grimur from those marks.

They rarely gathered like this now, and when they did they all knew that they were facing a turning in the hunt. The people of Fenris called such a moment ‘the laughter of the wind’, when the wind carrying the scent of the prey changed direction, and all might be lost by a single wrong decision. That was why they had gathered beside the fires, both here and on the other ships. The wind was laughing and leading them into a storm, so they looked into the fires and spoke, and remembered sagas no longer told.

Sycld stirred at Grimur’s side, tilting his thin face towards his lord.

‘You must tell them soon, jarl,’ said the Rune Priest in a wet hiss.

‘Be silent,’ growled Grimur, without looking around. Sycld pulled away, but Grimur could feel the priest’s eyes still on him.

We are the wights of the Underverse, thought Grimur. He gulped the bitter liquid from his drinking bowl. The fire danced in his eyes. We are the night walkers. There is no saga waiting for us, just death at the end of the chase, and the silence of snow falling to cover our skulls.

Carefully he put the bowl down on the floor. The murmur of voices faded to silence. Grimur began to rise. Faces turned to look at him, amber irises reflecting gold in the dim light. His hand tapped his throat, and the vox pickup activated in the collar of his armour. Across each of his ships, the Wolves of his pack would hear him, and would see him stand in their halls as a hologhost. His axe came up with him. Its edge was a crescent of reflected firelight.

He looked around, meeting the fire-touched eyes, feeling the twisted muscles of his back creak as he moved. He paused, tasting the tang of the smoke, and the scent of the blood mixed with the liquor in the drinking bowls. Fat hissed as it fell into the fires from charring meat. He opened his mouth, and felt his teeth unmesh.

‘We remain,’ he said into the silence. ‘No others stand with us. Others fall, their blood soaks into the snow, their cries fade behind us, but we remain. The years turn, the winters pass, and come again, and still we run on. Others forget the crimes of the past, others forget what was, but we remember.’ Grimur brought his axe up in front of him, and let his eyes touch the knotted serpents behind its cutting edge. ‘We remember. We run and we do not tire, not if a thousand winters pass.’ He looked up again, feeling the stillness amongst his warriors, the breaths paused to hear again the words they had heard so many times before. ‘We are vengeance,’ he said.

The growls come then, rising through sharp teeth to shake the air. For a second Grimur felt as though he was back at his father’s side standing in the halls of the Fang, hearing the mountain ring to the sound of his brothers’ voices. He had been young then and was old now, and the growls that shook the air were fewer and heavy with time. This was not the cry of the young wishing for blood; it was the cry of old wolves reminding each other of what they had been and what they still were. He let his axe fall to his side and the cries faded.

He looked up and nodded. Somewhere in the shadows one of the last Iron Priests saw the gesture and called on the spirits of the ship. A sphere of green light appeared in the dark, hanging above the fires. All eyes turned to it. Grimur’s ships had been hanging in the dead space between stars for weeks, waiting to hear where the hunt would carry them next. Grimur had kept his plans to himself. It was better that the rest of the pack were told when there was little time to brood on it.

‘The Cadian Gate,’ he said. ‘Our seers have walked the paths of dreams and seen that the prey has passed out of the Eye. He and his slave-kin are within the Imperium, and where they have gone we must follow.’ He paused. There was no shock, no ripple of surprise or unease, but he could feel the change in the hall, the shift in the pack’s mood. The skin of his back prickled, and the ice at his core hardened. ‘They have taken a serpent’s way through the storms. Such ways are closed to us, so we must pass through the Gate.’

‘If it is guarded, we will not pass.’ It was Halvar. The pack leader brought his armoured hand up to his face, and ran his thumb slowly over the scar tissue where his nose had once been. His eyes stayed fixed on the projection. After a long moment he turned to look at Grimur. Lifetimes of war on the borderlands of the Underverse lived in that look.

‘We will pass. A scattered fleet flees from the deep Eye, running on the clear tides towards Cadia. They are desperate, wild and panicked and will make Cadia in two weeks. That is when we will also reach the Gate, and slip through while the beasts occupy the blades of any who guard it.’

‘And if we do not pass unseen?’ said Halvar, and Grimur knew that he was just speaking what all would be thinking. ‘What if the guardians of the Gate see us, and bar our path?’

Grimur shivered, and heard his axe clink against the thigh plate of his armour. It was the question that he had come here to answer. The question he knew he would have to answer as soon as Sycld had told him that Ahriman had left the Eye. What if we must face those who serve the Emperor, and what if they see us as enemies not friends?

‘Then we cut them down,’ he said.

X
RECALL

The sky was the grey of beaten iron. Iobel looked up and watched lightning writhe at the base of the anvil-headed clouds. The air was clammy against the exposed skin of her face. It tasted of storm charge and rust. She let out the breath she had held, and looked down. The dead world sank away from her in grey drifts of ash. The jagged teeth of mountains rose in the distance, while sharp daggers of grime-coated crystal covered the distance between like shards from the broken blade of a god.

‘Rain’s coming,’ said Linisa, her lilting voice crackling across the vox. Iobel glanced at her acolyte. Linisa’s armour was red and massive, like corded muscle cast in ceramite and exotic metal. The idea of the wisp-thin girl within the hulking suit was almost comical. Almost. The gun tubes ringing Linisa’s wrists only added to the effect. ‘You will want to get your helmet on,’ said Linisa. ‘The scans say these storms are acidic, bad enough to burn to the bone.’

As though on cue the rain started. A single fat drop exploded on the ash and left a crater of grey mud. Iobel clamped her helmet over her head. The rain started to pour from the sky. The ground around her was a dancing sheet of liquid. She looked down at her gauntleted hands. The white lacquer was already blistered, and the grey ceramite beneath was fuming as the rain poured between her fingers. A bolt of lightning fell amongst the forest of crystal shards, and the grey world became white.

‘You say we have to cross that?’ said Linisa.

‘Yes,’ said Iobel.

‘Could the gun-cutter not have dropped us closer?’

Iobel shook her head.

‘Atmospherics are too unstable.’

‘But walking is safer?’ Linisa raised her hands before Iobel could reply. ‘Just saying.’

Iobel turned her gaze back to the broken land. In truth she was far from sure this was wise, but it had taken four years to find that this place still existed, and three times that time to reach it.

Prospero, the world that had sired an order of traitors and sorcerers. She had been searching for it ever since Carsona, and here it was, beneath her feet. It had been a long journey, and she had learned things that she would have killed others for knowing. The Thousand Sons, the breaking of the Edict of Nikaea, Magnus the Red – all now loomed in her dreams, and with them the rasped words of a dying psyker linking them like a chain binding the present to the past.

She felt the psychic thread tug at her mind, pulling her out there into the desolation which had once been a great city. It had latched onto her mind as soon as she had set foot on the planet. It was not a voice, more like a path left by the passing of others, a path that had been left for her, or those like her, to find.

‘You are sure there is something here?’ asked Linisa.

Iobel said nothing, and Linisa had been with her for more than long enough to know what that meant. ‘All right,’ she sighed. ‘Best get moving.’

It took them an hour to cross two miles. The rain had turned the ash into a grey mire. Even with the augmented strength of their armour each step was a fight against the sucking tug of the mud. A white fog had risen soon after the rain had stopped. The readings on Iobel’s helmet display said it was both toxic and corrosive. She did not need the readings to tell her the last part, one glance at Linisa was enough. Her acolyte’s armour was grey, the red lacquer stripped clean from curved plates.

Linisa swore every step of the way, moving through colourful and creative phrases in High and Low Gothic and the spire tongue of her birth hive. Iobel said nothing to stop the stream of invective; it gave her something else to focus on besides the voices of the dead.

The ghost voices had begun as soon as they entered the fields of broken crystal. They rose in Iobel’s mind, roaring with rage, crying out in pain, babbling, pleading. She closed them out, but they always found a way back in, and each time they were stronger. Several times they almost drowned out her awareness of the psychic trail. She was starting to wonder if she had made a serious mistake. The whole landscape, from grey sky to grey ground, seemed to press on her mind. She was not even sure what she was expecting to find; nothing remained here now, just the shards of crystal cities, and the ashes of its past.

‘What was that?’ Linisa’s voice cracked across the vox, sharp and sudden. Iobel reached for the boltgun clamped to her back. She twisted, trying to see what Linisa had seen. The acolyte had moved close to her, arms raised, weapon tubes focused on the fog. Iobel instinctively extended her senses beyond her mind, and then recoiled.

‘Turn back now. You must turn back.’

The voice was so clear that it sounded like her own. She shook her head to clear it. The fog was thick around them. Linisa was braced, legs sunk to the knee in the ash mud. Iobel could hear her own breathing fill her helm. She shifted her grip on the boltgun in her hands.

The figure reared from the grey sludge. Its body was a ragged sculpture of torn armour and heaped bones. It had no head, and only the vaguest similarity to a human shape. Black liquid poured from it. White ice crackled across its growing limbs. A roar of countless anguished voices filled Iobel’s mind. She reeled, blood spattering the inside of her helm. The sludge around the creature froze hard. It lunged forwards with a limb made of cracked armour plates and broken blades. Linisa fired from behind Iobel. A deluge of bolts hammered into the creature, ripping it into chunks with explosions. Its arm tore away. Rounds exploded within its torso, and for a second it seemed to shiver. Linisa shook as her armour absorbed the recoil. The creature staggered, its roar now a shriek.

Linisa moved forwards, firing without pause, frozen ground splintering before her. The creature lunged again with its remaining arm. The acolyte ducked, but not fast enough. The creature’s fist lifted her from the ground and tossed her into the fog.

The creature turned to Iobel, its chewed body glowing with pale light. She caught herself as she stumbled backwards, and aimed her boltgun. The creature raised an arm of debris. Iobel squeezed the trigger. The boltgun roared until the firing pin clicked on an empty chamber.

It took several deep breaths before she remembered to release the trigger. The creature lay in the mud, a heap of bones and armour. Steam rose from it as the witch ice melted. Iobel moved closer. Her mental senses were silent. The creature was dead, as much as something which had not truly lived could die. Looking down at the remains she recognised the shape of broken power armour within them. Specks of red lacquer clung to the deep recesses of some, ice grey to others.

‘So walking was still a good idea,’ said Linisa. Her battle rig was dented, but still seemed to be in one piece. If anything the damage just enhanced the armour’s air of blunt brutality. She stopped beside Iobel, and looked down at the remains of the creature. ‘Please tell me this is not what we came here for.’

‘No,’ said Iobel.

‘Hmmm. What is it, anyway?’

‘An echo of the past,’ said Iobel. ‘A cluster of shredded souls trapped at the moment of death, like flotsam caught in an eddy. So much was done here – it is no longer just a planet, it is a scar in the warp.’ She straightened up and looked back into the fog, reached for and found the tug on her psychic senses. ‘We keep going.’

It took them another hour to find it. When they did Linisa just stared, and muttered a sequence of swear words in a dozen dialects. It had been buried in a small adamantine box at the base of a toppled obelisk. A faint psychic aura pulsed from within the box. Iobel had hesitated before opening it, but when she did, she almost laughed. She lifted out what she found, and held it up to the faint light. It was an ‘I’ crossed by three horizontal bars moulded in polished adamantine; the symbol of the Inquisition. A brilliant blue carbuncle sat at the symbol’s centre, winking in the weak light like a single, watching eye.

‘What–’ began Linisa.

‘It is an answer, of sorts,’ said Iobel, watching fire kindle at the heart of the blue gem. ‘It says that others have followed the same path I have, and that there are more answers for those who have come this far. If they can find them.’

‘That’s it?’

‘It’s enough,’ said Iobel.

The fog froze. Everything stopped moving. The low sounds of distant rain and thunder cut out.

Iobel lowered the Inquisitorial symbol. She reached for her boltgun.

‘Enough,’ said a low, deep voice which came from Linisa, but did not belong to her.

Linisa paced forwards slowly, her movements feline smooth despite the bulk of her armour. Cold light burned in the eyes of her helm. Iobel had her bolter in her hand, but she already knew that nothing would happen if she pulled the trigger.

Linisa crouched down, and scooped up a handful of grey ash from the ground. Iobel blinked. Something was screaming inside her, the voice which told her to turn back – a voice which sounded like her own.

Linisa let the dust fall from her fingers.

‘The bones of a Legion buried beneath the ashes of all they had built.’

‘Ahriman,’ breathed Iobel.

‘It was enough, wasn’t it, to come here, to touch the first grave of my Legion? In this moment you knew that everything you had discovered of us was true.’ Ahriman pointed at the Inquisitorial symbol still clutched in Iobel’s hand. ‘And that bauble was enough to lead you further, and to continue your hunt for the truth.’ Ahriman stood, the form of Linisa blurring as it moved, spiralling into a rising cyclone of dust. ‘And here and now, it is enough for me to do the same.’

Iobel was shaking where she stood. The fog and ground were gone. She stood in emptiness. The shape of Linisa had vanished. Two cold points of lights shone in the spinning cloud of dust before her. She felt her will try to hold her where she was.

‘No!’ she managed to shout, before the storm of dust enveloped her.

‘Why am I here?’

Astraeos watched as the man with the thin face stepped closer.

‘You are here because you are a traitor,’ said the man in a flat voice. ‘You are here because your master deserted you. You are here to give us everything you know.’

‘A traitor… I am no traitor.’

The man shook his head. Behind him the crone and the glass-eyed man exchanged glances.

‘I am sorry, perhaps you believe that now. Perhaps you believed it before, but what you believe does not alter the truth. You have broken oaths, you have embraced powers that wish only mankind’s slavery, and you have drawn arms against those who fight to preserve humanity. You are a servant of ruin, Astraeos.’

‘I…’ The word caught in Astraeos’s throat. ‘…cannot remember.’

‘No, your mind was damaged. Though if you can remember, you will.’

Astraeos did not reply. His head was rolling with fog. Who was he? He recognised the name that the man had given him, but was that really his name? Other images and half recollections drifted close to his awareness, then dissolved back into vapour. Memories were there. He could sense them waiting just beyond his perception, like the buildings of a broken city looming out of the fog. He wanted to know who he was, and why he was here, bound to a metal slab. He had been here for some time, but he was not sure how long. He remembered that there had been questions before, that there had been pain, but he could not remember the details or how long that cycle of pain and questions had lasted. There was just a dull aching feeling that he had been asked these questions before, and asked the same questions in return.

The thin-faced man had not moved; Astraeos had the impression that he was waiting.

‘What is your name?’ said Astraeos.

‘My name is not the question at hand,’ said the man, and glanced behind him towards the crone and the crystal-eyed man. ‘I am an inquisitor. Think of me as that if you must.’

‘Inquisitor,’ said Astraeos carefully. Somewhere in the fog of his memory something moved and creaked. The word meant something to him, something more than its obvious meaning. ‘You call me a traitor, and think that I will tell you whatever you ask?’

‘Do you believe that you are a traitor?’

‘No,’ said Astraeos without a pause.

‘Then you have your answer.’

‘I cannot remember who I am, or why I might be here.’ Astraeos gave a tired laugh. ‘What do you wish to know?’

‘Everything,’ said the inquisitor. He ran his hand over his forehead, and let out a carefully controlled breath. ‘Let’s begin with what you can remember – your name is Astraeos.’

‘No,’ said Astraeos. In his mind he felt a pocket of recollection open before him. It felt good to speak, as though by talking his memory became clear. ‘It is my name, but it was not my first name.’ He stopped, licked his dry lips. Images and sensations filled him. He could see faces, and smell a swirl of scent that had not been real to him for a long time, but was real for him now, more real than the face of the inquisitor, or the ache in his head. He began to speak, and his voice seemed to be coming from someone and somewhere else.

‘When I was born they called me Mellik. There was a lot of smoke when I was small, and the sky was always the colour of copper. I remember towers going up to the clouds. They were covered with lights, and bled fire. I think I had sisters. I don’t remember what home was called, or what anyone else was called. I just remember that I was called Mellik. I can still hear someone calling that name. I used to hide, find a corner on the roofs, or crawl into passages, and just wait for it to be quiet. I didn’t like people, and they didn’t like me either. I was different, everyone knew it, even though I never told them. I could hear them, though. I could feel their fear and hate touch my skin when they looked at me.’

He paused. Around him the fragments of memory turned, showing him glimpses of faces, of voices. He watched them, knowing they had all meant something to him, but unable to grasp what.

‘Most of your kind cannot remember such things,’ said the inquisitor. The images of the past dimmed.

‘My kind?’ asked Astraeos. The inquisitor nodded.

‘A psyker of the Adeptus Astartes.’

‘Is that what I am?’

The inquisitor raised an eyebrow.

‘You remember how to speak, you remember that this is a servo-skull, but you do not remember what you are.’ He smiled, showing silver teeth. ‘What else do you remember, Astraeos?’

Astraeos compulsively tried to close his eyes. Shutters closed over the servo-skull’s eye-lenses in response. Static-laced blackness replaced the sight of the chamber.

‘I remember the day the ships came. They came through the grey sky, bigger than the towers, bigger than anything. They took the light away. I knew they were coming for me, even before the hailers started calling, I knew. I hid, but they found me. People I knew helped them, told them where the strange child liked to hide. When I woke I was in a different place. There was screaming and pain, and darkness and more light than I had ever seen. It stayed that way for a long time. Then I remember being taken to another place where there was more pain. There were questions. There were tests…’

His voice ran out. In his mind he saw men and women in tight buckled masks pulling him on a chain. There had been machines, and screams that went through the walls and into his dreams. It went on and on, but never the same twice. Only the memory of fear and pain was the same.

‘Can you remember more?’

‘Yes,’ he said, slowly. The memories were coming faster now, the mist shredding as he ran through his past. ‘I remember another ship, and this time I was alone. The room was silver. It was cold. Then the next thing I remember was a giant made of black armour. He had a skull for a face and red eyes. There was a second giant, but he wore blue, and his… his eyes. I felt them on the inside of my skull. They said…’

‘His brain output is fluctuating,’ said the tech-priest from close by, voice rising in volume over the sudden chiming of machines.

The memory stopped. The images snagged and juddered. Astraeos wanted to scream and did not know why. He just knew that something in this memory, something which had been with him there all along in the dark, and light, and pain, was trying to live again. He recognised it then. It was terror, it was the memory of a child’s terror trying to manifest in a mind that could no longer understand it, that was no longer human.

In his mind’s eye, the Space Marine in blue was staring at him with eyes like polished ice. The one in the skull helm was reaching down, raising Astraeos’s face to look into the skull’s stare. The fingers of the gauntlet were worn, their touch cold.

‘They said…’ He heard the words come from his lips again. Everything was becoming slow, and soft, and dark.

‘Yes? What did they say, Astraeos?’

‘Excessive brain activity. Secondary bleeding inside skull. Subject losing consciousness.’

The darkness grew around him and the image of the two Space Marines pulled away, becoming an image seen through a pinprick in a sheet of oblivion.

He felt his mouth open, and his tongue form halting words.

‘They said I would become an angel.’

The fortress was grown of ice. Its walls rose in a ring of turquoise and white blade edges. At its centre a lone landing pad sat like a coin dropped onto a frozen lake. Gun turrets surrounded the pad, their barrels swathed in white fabric and their shapes hidden by pale nets. Looking down at the fortress from the lighter’s windows, Iobel had thought the surface structure looked like a crown of clouded crystal. Now, shivering despite her fur-lined cloak and thermal bodyglove, she thought it looked nothing like a crown, and more like one of the most desolate places she had ever seen.

‘Beautiful,’ muttered Cavor, through chattering teeth. The nihilator’s shoulders were hunched beneath his thick crimson coat, his head sunk so deep into the black fur collar that he looked like a troglodyte. Beside them the lighter’s engines began to rise in pitch as it prepared to lift off again. It would return when they were done; nothing lingered on the polar ice longer than it had to. Iobel found herself thinking fondly of the lighter’s machine-scented warmth.

The planet that they stood on was called AV-213. Tucked away on the frayed edges of the Halo Margins, its equatorial belt was a strip of foetid jungle bound by dry deserts which stretched to the planet’s bloated polar caps. People could have lived there, could have scraped some form of life out of the dirt and clung onto it, but they did not. Only a few members of the Inquisition knew of the planet, and a small circle within the Ordo Malleus kept it that way. AV-213 was one of the quiet and forgotten places used by those who fought the enemies that humanity could not know existed. Iobel knew that much, but what waited for her here she did not know.

Two decades had passed since she had set foot on Prospero, and in that time she had seemed to come no closer to real answers. She had tried, of course. She had bent all of her subtle arts to trying to find out the source of the Inquisitorial emblem left on the dead world. She had found only a suspicious absence of information. That had only convinced her to dig deeper; an absence of information was, after all, sometimes as significant as information itself. But two decades of investigation had yielded nothing, until, when she was almost at the point of turning back, a message had come. A mind-blanked courier had brought her a slip of parchment in a puzzle tube covered in Prosperine runes. Inside was a slip of parchment, and a wafer of explosive designed to detonate if anyone had forced the tube open. On the parchment had been the location of AV-213, a clearance code, and a single line of handwritten script: ‘the door to the truth stands open’.

The lighter’s ramp began to close, and its engines kicked ice dust into the air. The servitor pilot burbled a stream of machine code over the vox, and then it was lifting away. When it was ten metres above the pad, its thrusters fired. Iobel felt the blast of heat wash across her face, and was briefly grateful for the warmth. Then the lighter was gone, a pale speck rising into the cold blue sky. She looked down. They were alone, the expanse of the sky and ice pressing close around them. The wind gusted across the landing pad.

‘I don’t like this,’ said Cavor, turning to look around them. She heard a low click and knew that he had eased a set of pistols from the holsters beneath his coat. She said nothing, but clicked through channels on her vox-bead: a low hiss answered her from each channel. She stopped after a while and waited. If it had not been for the metal of the landing pad, and the covered gun emplacements, she would have thought they were in the wrong place.

‘Selandra Iobel.’ The voice came from so close that she felt her muscles tense. Cavor spun, guns rising. ‘Peace, Cavor,’ said the voice, strong but calm.

She turned more slowly than Cavor, careful not to seem hurried or surprised. A tall, thin man stood a few metres from them. He wore a quilted black bodyglove without mark or symbol. There was a square hole in the ice-covered ground just behind his feet. She nodded slowly, but did not smile. She was pleased to notice that Cavor had not lowered his guns.

‘Yes, and who are you?’ she replied. The thin man smiled.

‘I am glad you came,’ he said smoothly, and turned to Cavor. ‘You are as fast as your reputation, Cavor. What is your kill count now?’

‘Three hundred and thirty-three,’ said Cavor, keeping his guns steady. The thin man kept his expression fixed, the pleasant smile in place.

‘Another eighty-nine and you will be the apex of your clan, will you not?’ The man gave a cough of mirthless laughter. ‘At least you would be if you had not broken their first and second edicts.’

Cavor nodded, but Iobel could see the muscle twitch in his jaw. He never talked about why he had left his gun-clan, and she had thought that she alone knew the reasons. That this man knew as much as she about her own acolytes made her more than tempted to give the command word and see Cavor shoot the patronising bastard’s eyes out.

‘To answer your question, Iobel – I am Inquisitor Castus Izdubar, and it is very good to finally meet you.’

Iobel kept her face still, and her eyes cold, but felt the pulse of her blood rise in her veins. Izdubar, that was a name she knew, a name that was spoken in the circles of the Ordo Malleus with respect; and when it was spoken it was not as Inquisitor Izdubar, but Lord Inquisitor Izdubar, Convenor of the Ephisian Conclave, Watcher of the Cadian Marches.

Izdubar nodded slowly, as though in acknowledgement of her thoughts.

‘I think you have something of mine, do you not?’ he said and reached out with a gloved hand. Iobel nodded stiffly, and fumbled the Inquisitorial symbol she had found on Prospero from around her neck. She felt Cavor’s thoughts tense with readiness as she placed the symbol in Izdubar’s hand. Izdubar looked at the symbol, tilting it slowly so that the blue gem at its centre caught the light.

‘We should get inside,’ he said. ‘Once the sun sets it gets even colder.’ He turned and moved towards the open hatch in the ground.

‘Why am I here?’ she asked before he had taken a step. He turned back, glanced at Cavor’s still levelled pistols, and then back to Iobel.

‘For answers, Iobel. Isn’t that why you went to Prospero, why you have searched out all you can find about the Thousand Sons, and why you have been looking for us for the last two decades? Well, now we are here, and so are the beginnings of answers.’

‘Who are we?’ she said, without moving.

‘A circle of a few who have seen what you have, and who have walked down the same paths in search of the only weapon which can cut our enemies – knowledge.’

‘And what is here?’ she said, flicking her eyes across the ice-bound landing pad.

‘You will have to see.’ Izdubar turned and began to descend the steps into the ground. Iobel glanced at Cavor. The nihilator was watching Izdubar’s retreating back, his face utterly still, his augmetic eyes glowing with cold light. She paused, blinked and shook her head. She had the sudden sense that she had been here before. She opened her mouth to speak.

‘We follow?’ asked Cavor. She nodded slowly, still uncertain. Cavor watched her, still not moving.

‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘We follow.’

She shook herself and stepped through the hatch. Behind her Cavor lowered his pistols, the light in his eyes shifting from green to blue, then he followed the inquisitors beneath the ice.

XI
LAND OF LIES

‘He is lying,’ said a voice. It was a dull voice, washed of emotion, as though the speaker thought greater expression wasteful.

Astraeos tried to open his eyes, and then remembered that he had no true eyes any more. His head still ached, just as it had since he had first woken, but his thoughts felt clear. Memories of before he had fallen unconscious snapped into focus. He knew other things now, though he was not sure why. He knew from the sound of the voices that the chamber extended far beyond the pool of light around him. He knew that besides damage to his skull, his body was trying to heal deep burns to his back and legs. He knew that there were charged and readied power weapons within twenty paces of where he lay. He knew all this and he knew that he was here because the Inquisition said he was a traitor. It could not be true, he knew that, but then why would they have taken him? Why would they have questions?

‘No, no I don’t think he is,’ said another voice. It was the voice of the inquisitor, Astraeos realised. ‘Damage often leaves part of the structure of the mind standing while the rest is buried or swept away. And before you say it, Erionas, I am not going to ask Cendrion to go into his mind. I want what might remain inside, and I want it without further damage.’

‘This costs time.’ Another voice, female this time, the words rattling in an old and damaged throat.

‘I am aware of what it costs,’ said the inquisitor. ‘Cendrion looked into his mind once, and said that it was like a half-collapsed building. We can reach the deepest layer, but we must be careful or it will collapse again. If this fails there are other methods, but with each of them we diminish the chances of success. That is what we want here, isn’t it, to find what Ahriman intends?’

‘He is awake,’ said the machine voice of the tech-priest. Astraeos heard the crinkle of fabric as people turned, then the sound of steps as they came closer.

‘Let him see,’ said the inquisitor.

Light suddenly filled his sight, and he saw the inquisitor standing beside his body.

‘I am no traitor,’ said Astraeos, and then coughed. His body jerked against the restraints, and he tasted wet iron in his throat.

The inquisitor’s face showed no response.

‘What do you remember?’

Astraeos paused. He could see more now, things opening up in front of his mind’s eye like the features of a dark room before a lamp beam. He paused. He did not know how he came to be here, but he knew that he was not a traitor. He was an angel of death; he had been forged to serve the Imperium mind, body and soul. What could he remember that could undo that purpose?

‘Tell us,’ said the inquisitor.

I must answer. Only the heretic refuses to speak the truth. They will see that I am true, they must see.

He told them what he could. He told them of the world that had remade him. Much of it was a fog of confusion at first. Details emerged, and then sank back into the murk of his mind when they were on the tip of his tongue. He talked until he could not remember why he was talking. He told them of the land beneath the mountains, of the echoing dark, and the sound of his heart beating to itself. His brothers came from that underworld, children taken from the people who lived out of the light of the sun. He told them of the towers of the fortress rising towards the sun which burned without end in the cobalt sky.

As he spoke more came to him, images and truths coming to his mind and lips with sudden clarity. It was as though his mind was a ball of unravelling thread. He remembered the Three Towers of Truth, at the summit of which each aspirant swore their great oaths. He remembered the feeling of his bolt pistol in his hand, the names of all its other bearers carved into its grip. He remembered the first time he killed, and the first time he smelled the red offal stink of a battlefield. He remembered the feeling of armour. He remembered that he had become a Space Marine.

Astraeos had fallen quiet. He could taste metal in his mouth, and his skull ached to the core. The servo-skull that had become his eyes twitched to look at the figures that stood behind the thin man. There were three of them, bent under ragged robes covered in symbols stitched in golden thread. They had always been there, but now they were closer, as though they shuffled a step nearer each time he remembered a new detail. Astraeos did not like them. Something about them made him wish he could shoot them.

‘Yes?’ said the thin-faced man.

‘What is your name?’ asked Astraeos. The ache in his head was getting worse. He wanted to blink, but had no eyes. Something was rising into his thoughts; he could feel it spilling into the edge of awareness like the first light of dawn.

The inquisitor stood back.

‘I am judgement, Astraeos.’

‘You say I am a traitor, but I can only remember service and sacrifice. There are battlefields on Carnius Seven, on Keed, on Maltrix that were watered with the blood of my brothers, blood that we shed for our oaths to the Imperium. How can that be if I am a traitor?’

‘What do you remember?’

The light of fresh memory came in a rush, pushing through the darkness, pressing against his mind’s eye.

‘I remember…’

He remembered ships. Ships sliding across the sky like stars set free. Silver. Their hulls had been silver grey, and they had arrived like ghosts. None had seen or sensed their coming, not the astropaths, not the other Librarians, not the system monitors. He had…

He looked up. Around him the fortress-monastery screamed. Sirens echoed through the halls and across the high parapets. The ground shook as blast doors slammed shut from the highest towers to the fortress depths. Void shields crackled into life, daubing the sky with static. The silver ships dropped lower. There were three of them, three jagged shapes glinting in the sun. The defence lasers began to fire. Columns of light burned into the heavens. The air was crackling with lightning. False winds spilled around Astraeos as the unleashed energy cooked the air.

Behind him a door peeled open. Astraeos turned, saw who walked onto the tower summit, and fell to one knee.

‘Rise,’ said Thidias. The Chapter Master’s face was unreadable. The burning light gleamed on his armour, and the ozone-laden winds spilled his red cloak behind him. Kadin stood at the front of Thidias’s honour guard, the banner in his hand stirring as he looked at Astraeos with hard eyes.

‘My lord,’ began Astraeos. ‘What–’

The ships above them fired. Lines of flame spread across the sky. The fortress roared back, pouring stuttering lines at the heavens, even as the fire from the ships reached towards the ground.

‘What is this?’ he shouted above the roar.

Thidias turned to him. His eyes were empty, as though what they had seen had burned away the soul behind them.

‘This is the Imperium we serve coming to destroy us,’ he said.

The memory flashed to nothing. Astraeos was shaking, his muscles bunching. Somewhere nearby something was shouting about neural overload. All Astraeos could see through the servo-skull’s eyes was the inquisitor looking at him, his face as calm and uncaring as an executioner’s blade.

‘Subdue him,’ said the inquisitor.

Cold spread from Astraeos’s chest. He could not feel his limbs. He forced his mouth open, feeling the muscles in his jaw begin to numb. The inquisitor was watching him, his head tilted slightly to one side as though considering a thought.

‘We were loyal!’ Astraeos screamed at the thin face.

And then there was just the numb cold, and the remembered light of fire spreading across a blue sky.

The armour lay at the centre of an adamantium slab. Thick loops of the metal circled its arms, chest, and legs. Layers of energy fields shimmered in the air around it. Iobel could feel the headache purr of active null generators. It was surprisingly warm in the underground fortress, and the crystal floor of the viewing chamber buzzed with heat and static.

Iobel shivered as she looked down through the crystal floor. The armour was black, as though it had been carved from coal. She would have thought that it had been burned if it had not been for the polished bronze that edged its plates and snaked across its shoulders and greaves. A high crest extended above the crown of its helm. The symbol of a baleful eye worked in beaten copper stared out from its chest. It had been the armour of a Space Marine, without a doubt, but this could only be a relic of those who had turned on the Emperor in ages past.

Iobel looked up from the view beneath her feet. She could hardly believe what she was seeing. Izdubar was still looking down, hands clasped behind his back, face almost serene.

‘Is this…?’ she began.

‘You have never seen one of them before, have you?’ said Izdubar softly. ‘Yes, this is one of the Thousand Sons of Magnus the Red. Or at least what remains of one. It is an abomination. Alive, after a fashion – animated by the energies of the warp, at once a body and a prison for the spirit within. Some call them the Rubricae. This one was taken during the incursion onto Vess. A dozen primaris-grade battle psykers died capturing it.’

‘The colours and emblems…’ began Iobel.

‘Marks of fealty to the one they call the Despoiler.’ Izdubar looked up from the crystal floor, and ran a hand over his scalp. Brief pain stabbed through Iobel’s head. Her eyes squeezed shut, and she gasped. The chamber jumped out of focus, then snapped back into clarity. Iobel blinked and breathed hard as she tried to focus on where she was. Izdubar didn’t seem to notice, but just carried on talking. ‘That is not why it is important. It is important because of what it means.’

Iobel’s head cleared as suddenly as it had clouded. She looked at Izdubar. He was looking at her as though he had just asked a question which required a reply. She felt as though she had just come back into a conversation that had continued without her realising. She hesitated, and then knew what she needed to say next.

‘On a world, long ago, a dying psyker spoke to me of Prospero. He said that he was the vengeance of the Sons of Prospero.’

‘Yes,’ said Izdubar. ‘On Carsona, was it not?’

Iobel felt surprise fill her face. Izdubar glanced at her, then back to the bound Rubricae.

‘I have been following your progress towards us since soon after your search began. We must be sure, you see.’ Iobel opened her mouth to speak, but Izdubar continued smoothly on. ‘The psyker who spoke those words to you was right. The will of one of the Thousand Sons had touched him. He and many more like him, in thousands of cults and psyker cells spread through the body of the Imperium, growing in its flesh like cancers. Fed by dreams, and manipulated from beyond by the sorcerers who are all that remain of the Thousand Sons.’

Iobel let out a snort of breath. Behind her Cavor stirred as though waiting for a command.

‘I have found the records, and seen the insides of heretics’ minds. What you have said is nothing that I have not learnt myself.’ She pointed down at the Rubricae beneath their feet. ‘This is just confirmation, not revelation.’

Izdubar laughed, the sound as sudden as it was brief.

‘Revelation.’ He rolled the word over his tongue. ‘I went searching for answers, just like you. For a long time I sifted through rumours, through myths left half forgotten, and lies still whispered in lost places. I learned much, but I always knew there was more. I could feel it, as though it waited around the next corner – a secret so large that its existence drew other secrets into its darkness. I found it at last, and I found that I was not the first. There were others of our kind watching me to see how far I would come on my own, to see if I was ready. I asked just as you asked, and as answer, or perhaps as punishment, they gave me knowledge.’ He reached into a pocket in his bodyglove and pulled out the Inquisitorial symbol with the blue gem at its centre. ‘Do you wish for answers, Iobel? The door to truth stands open. Walk through, or turn back now.’ He held out the symbol to Iobel.

Turn back! The thought cut into her awareness, and the room swam in her eyes. Turn back now! Grey dust swirled across the edge of her sight. The sensation vanished.

The symbol sat on Izdubar’s hand, waiting.

She paused, and then reached out and picked it up. It felt warm in her hand.

Izdubar smiled sadly. The expression surprised her.

‘There is a room on a moon which orbits a far world around a nameless sun,’ he said. ‘It holds a record made by a man who was called Kalimakus. We call it his Athenaeum. It speaks of many things: of the past, of the future, of things that cannot be and the ways to find them. Besides those that keep it, only a few others have seen it.’ He let out a breath, and rubbed a hand over his left eye. ‘Only we of the Ordo Cyclopes have seen it.’

‘What is the Athenaeum?’ she said. At the back of her thoughts she wondered why it felt as though she had said those words before.

‘It is the thoughts of Magnus the Red,’ he said. Iobel stared at him. She could feel the shiver rise as bumps on her skin. ‘It is not just a record, it is a window. Kalimakus died long ago, but still his remembrance is being written, its lore dividing and multiplying without end. With every day that passes more words are added to it. Words that have told us what became of the Thousand Sons within the Eye of Terror, and given us glimpses of what they may yet become.’

‘How can you know it is true?’ Iobel’s voice sounded distant to her, the shock still rolling through her in waves.

Izdubar stepped back, and looked down through the crystal floor at the Rubricae beneath.

‘There is the proof, lying beneath our feet. The Athenaeum told us of how the Rubricae were born from the power and delusion of one called Ahriman.’

Ahriman… The word echoed in Iobel’s mind.

Ahriman…

Ahriman…

‘But for centuries we were not sure, until we took this one and others. Until we could hold the proof of truth in our hands. Once that proof was found, then the rest of what the Athenaeum told us had the possibility of truth. That was when our war to prevent what it foretells truly began.’

‘What does it foretell?’

‘A storm,’ said Izdubar. ‘A storm rising in the future.’ Izdubar closed his eyes. A muscle twitched on his jaw line. In that instant she saw that he was not as young as he seemed; he was old, and very tired. ‘Sometimes when I think of it I can smell the pyre of that future.’ She saw a shiver pass through him. ‘That is what we fight against, Iobel. That is the war demanded by the truth you have sought for half your life.’ He pointed to the symbol she still held in her hand. ‘Will you join us in it?’

You must not go further… the voice whispered from behind her, and Iobel turned, but there was only Cavor looking down through the crystal at the Thousand Sons legionary. His hands were thrust into his coat pockets, his augmetic eyes glowing bright as he stared at the black suit of armour. She frowned; the light of his eyes was blue. She was sure that…

She felt her mouth opening and words rising to the surface of her mind, pushing towards her tongue. She tried to bite them back, to scream. A clinging feeling of nausea slid through her. She swayed. The chamber was rolling and spinning around her.

What is happening? What is–?

The room blinked. Blackness surrounded her. She was so cold. A wind scraped dust over her skin, but there was no wind and her skin was buried beneath layers of fabric.

The crystal-floored chamber snapped back into place around her.

Iobel was standing looking at Izdubar who was looking back at her, his face grave.

Something had just happened, hadn’t it? She blinked, but the feeling was fading. Izdubar was still looking at her.

‘Will you join us, Iobel? Will you see the Athenaeum of Kalimakus?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I will.’

Everything in the room stopped moving. Izdubar stood still, his face frozen between expressions.

Footsteps rang on the crystal as Cavor came to stand in front of her. He crouched, looking down at the Rubricae with his bright, blue augmetic eyes.

‘His name was Kyloris,’ said Ahriman with Cavor’s mouth. ‘He was born on Prospero, on the ninth day of the first transit. Clever, but never gifted. He was a good warrior. Now he is just a memory within a memory.’ He looked at Iobel. ‘You know why we are here, don’t you? I could see part of you struggling to keep me from the end of this memory.’ He smiled. ‘Strong Selandra Iobel, so strong for a human.’ The chamber began to fade. ‘But not strong enough.’

The shadows in the walls began to grow. A wall of pressure clamped around her, bearing down on her thoughts. Heat blazed through her mind. She felt the shell of her defences buckle. The room had almost vanished in a grey blur of swirling dust. This was the end, she knew. One more step through her memories, and Ahriman would have what he wanted: Apollonia, the secrets of the Ordo Cyclopes, the Athenaeum of Kalimakus. Her will had proved to be weak, and now it would not only betray her, but mankind.

Ahriman stepped towards her, growing taller, the details of Cavor’s stolen face falling into darkness. His hand was reaching for her, its fingers growing like spreading shadows.

No, she thought. No. And the thought became iron. There was another way. A way of seeing what was happening that she had not realised before.

This is a memory. And it is mine.

She was not a powerful psyker, but here she did not need to be.

Beneath them the shields and manacles holding the Rubricae boiled away in a flash of light.

‘Tell me,’ she said slowly. ‘If this is a memory, what if I choose to remember it differently?’

The Rubricae exploded through the crystal floor. Ahriman fell, his imagined body flickering between substance and shadow. Iobel was already across the room, running towards the door and whatever was beyond. The Rubricae landed in a crouch on the cracked floor, eyes burning bright. Ahriman rose into the air, shedding Cavor’s shape like a cloak. He reached for Iobel.

The Rubricae came up from its crouch in a single bound. Ahriman twisted in the air as the Rubricae slammed into him. Flames and lightning exploded from them as they hit the wall.

The door was in front of Iobel. She reached out, and she turned her memory over like a key in a lock. The door vanished in a burst of debris. Iobel ran through the cloud of dust. She could feel her pulse hammering through her. Splinters of metal and rock raked her face, drawing blood.

It is not real, she screamed at herself. It is not real.

Her feet skidded out from beneath her and she was tumbling across a floor of white marble. She rolled, and came to her feet. A long corridor stretched in front of her. Closed doors led off it on both sides, and sunlight was streaming through windows open to a blue sky.

Where is this? Where am I?

Locked together, wreathed in flames. Ahriman and the Rubricae came through the remains of the door behind her.

XII
BROKEN

The inquisitor was there when Astraeos woke again.

‘Tell me what you remember,’ said the inquisitor.

Astraeos did not speak. In his mind he saw his brothers firing from parapets, the light of their burning home staining their armour. Silver-grey warriors walked through burning halls, haloed by warp light, cutting down all they found without a word. The towering form of a Dreadnought walked before the grey warriors, shaking the tiled floor with its tread. He saw Chapter Master Thidias take his cloak of office from his back as the pyre leaped higher.

‘What is a king when there is nothing left to rule?’ Thidias had asked.

‘Silence,’ said the inquisitor. ‘Do I take it that the memories of your treachery have returned to you?’

Astraeos felt the muscles of his jaw clench.

‘We broke no oaths,’ he said.

The inquisitor raised an eyebrow.

‘We? So you are a son of greater treachery, rather than a lone creature of heresy? Or perhaps you mean Ahriman, and the rest of his enslaved kind.’ The inquisitor waited. The tubes puncturing Astraeos’s flesh sucked and clicked in the silence. ‘You are not like him, are you? You are not one of the Thousand Sons, even though you serve one. Even amongst my fellow inquisitors there are few who could tell you this, but the Thousand Sons did break their oaths. They broke one after another until there was nothing to hold them back from the abyss. That is the truth.’ He watched Astraeos, the ghost of a frown on his face. ‘Do you remember your master? Do you remember Ahriman?’

Do you remember Ahriman…? The words echoed in his head. Pieces of things he did not understand, or had not realised were there, clustered around the words.

Remember Ahriman…

He saw Ahriman in battered armour the colour of rust and dried blood. He saw the sword glow as it severed his chains. He saw a million candles burning in the darkness of his mind. He saw his brothers: Cadar the instant before the chainblade opened his chest, Thidias standing in the airless dark of a dead void station, Kadin with his face a mass of blood-slicked scar tissue.

Ahriman…

‘He is not coming for you,’ said the inquisitor. ‘Not now, no matter what oath he swore. You are abandoned, Astraeos.’

I am a traitor, thought Astraeos. No matter what the cause, I have made the fallen my brothers.

‘What did he promise you? Power? Revenge?’

‘If there is a way to undo what has been done I will find it,’ Ahriman said in the stillness of his mind. ‘You have my oath.’

‘Hope,’ said Astraeos. He felt cold, as though something of the memory of the lonely human boy he had been bled into the present.

He has abandoned you… He is not coming… no matter what oaths he made.

‘Hope?’ The inquisitor shook his head slowly, and rubbed a hand over his eyes. ‘We make your breed so different, don’t we? Take a boy, cut away his future, his fear. Fill him with secrets that only the Emperor can truly understand, clad him in muscle and armour and surround him by war. What are we left with? Machines? No, machines cannot feel loyalty, cannot reason, cannot strive to reach the impossible. They can break, but they cannot fall. What hope did he offer you, Astraeos?’

Silence hung in the seconds after the question.

The inquisitor let out a slow breath, and shook his head.

‘I do not wish to do what must be done, but I will. You are a traitor, Astraeos, but you could still serve the Imperium if you choose. Tell me what else you remember, tell us of Ahriman and what he intends.’

Astraeos felt anger rise in him. They had killed his Chapter, they had made him an outcast, stripped him of everything which had made him loyal.

‘An oath binds us above all else, but for loyalty there must be an oath from kings to those they serve.’ They had been Thidias’s words. Thidias. Now dead and left in the dark.

‘No,’ said Astraeos.

The inquisitor nodded. There was no sorrow in the gesture, just acknowledgment that there was no other way.

‘Cendrion,’ said the inquisitor. A Space Marine in hulking silver armour stepped forwards. Astraeos wondered that he had not noticed him in the shadows. His false eyes skated over the warrior, taking in the script marching over the pauldrons, the vials and rolled scrolls which hung from golden wire across his chest and shoulders. Silver tattoos spiralled over the warrior’s night-black skin, as though his armour was growing over him. A sword as tall as a man rested in his hand. He looked at Astraeos with steel-grey eyes.

It is one of them, one of the kind that killed our Chapter. One of the kind who made me a traitor. Shock spilled through Astraeos, and then the rage returned, brighter, burning deeper and clearer than before.

‘You do not wish to do this?’ said Astraeos, and felt the ice pour into the words as he spoke. ‘One day, inquisitor, you will be judged, and in that moment you will look up into your own face and know the truth. Your soul will shriek when it passes into the fire.’

The inquisitor’s expression did not flicker.

‘Withdraw the Seraphs,’ he said. ‘Let the warp in.’

‘Are you sure?’ said Cendrion without looking away from Astraeos. The inquisitor’s lips twisted into a weak smile.

‘You are here, are you not, my friend?’ The inquisitor glanced to the other figures standing half in shadow. Beside the crone and the glass-eyed man, the three hunched figures stirred under their black shrouds. ‘Withdraw,’ said the inquisitor, and the bent figures shuffled backwards as though melting into the gloom.

The warp touched Astraeos’s mind, and he was aware of it curling and flowing a shadow’s width away. He was also aware of Cendrion. The warrior’s presence battered into his mind like the heat of a young sun. Astraeos’s own mind was sluggish, and even as he tried to reach for the warp he knew something was wrong. Pain lanced through him. He tasted blood again, and felt his sight blur with nausea. He pulled his mind back. A smell of metal and cooking meat came from the machines clamped over his head.

The inquisitor looked up at Cendrion.

‘Open his mind,’ he said.

Iobel ran. Behind her Ahriman and the Rubricae rammed into a pillar of white marble. Splinters and flames exploded from the impact. The Rubricae’s hands locked tight around Ahriman. Iobel glanced back as her feet pounded down the corridor. Her eyes met Ahriman’s for a split second. Dazed confusion flared in her. She did not know what was happening, or how it had happened. She had made a terrible, terrible misjudgement. Their gazes broke, and the feelings vanished from Iobel’s mind. She stumbled, half falling.

Ahriman broke the Rubricae’s grip. It reeled back a pace, found its balance and launched forwards again. Ahriman rammed his palm towards it. Iobel screamed as the Rubricae’s chestplate shattered. Pain exploded across her torso. Confusion came fast after the pain. The Rubricae took a shaking step towards Ahriman, its hands rising weakly. Cracks spread across its shape, radiating from its chest. It came apart, pieces of its empty shell falling to the floor like wind-blown leaves.

Iobel did not move. Ahriman turned towards her. He looked as he had when she had seen him in the moment he had come for her on Vohal: armoured in blue and silver and robed in turquoise, his head covered by a six-horned helm. He took a step forwards and the helm dissolved into a face with smooth lines and bright eyes. The armour rippled and became a plain robe of white, tied at the waist with a knotted red cord. He moved slowly, as though wary of provoking her.

She was breathing hard, muscles held between stillness and flight. But of course she was doing no such thing, she realised. Wherever her body was, this was just a creation of imagination, a landscape of the mind. From the need to breathe to the fatigue in her limbs, all of it was a fiction.

Ahriman took a step closer, carefully, eyes not moving from her. Then she realised why, and where she must be. This was not her mind; it was his.

She met his eyes and knew at that moment he saw the revelation in her. She felt a cold smile form on her lips. ‘You have made a mistake, Ahriman. There is no sorcery here, only strength of will. Here I am as strong as you.’

He began to move. Iobel closed her thoughts like a fist and slammed them outwards. Ahriman froze. His face was as unreadable as carved stone, but Iobel knew that something that might come close to fear moved beyond the mask.

‘You cannot run,’ he said. His voice was measured and calm. ‘There is no way out of here, inquisitor.’

‘True, but what will it cost you to bring me down? How much damage could I do here, inside your mind?’

‘You are here until I have what I need.’

‘The location and secrets of the Athenaeum.’

‘You will give it to me one way or another. All I have to do is reach into you and take it. You buried it deep, but it is there.’ He raised a slim finger and placed its tip against his temple. ‘I can feel it.’

Iobel kept her thoughts steady, her will poised to break or remake more of this mindscape if he moved. She needed time. Time to find a way out, time to destroy her memories of the Athenaeum.

‘Why seek it?’ she said. ‘You must know what it says already. You were there, weren’t you?’

He shook his head slowly.

‘Mistakes, inquisitor. Mistakes made in the past that I did not understand at the time, and that I will set right in the future. That is what the Atheneaum will help me do.’

She did laugh then, and the sound made the cracked walls shake.

‘You wish for atonement?’

‘Not the atonement your kind can grant, inquisitor.’

His eyes were bright in his unmoving face. The laughter died in her throat.

‘Oh, great Throne on Terra, it is true.’

Ahriman seemed to let out a breath.

‘I have broken everything I sought to save. That is my burden, but one that I will see undone.’

‘Your burden? You are damned, Ahriman. There is no salvation in hell for your kind.’

‘How can I have betrayed something that no longer exists? The Imperium you serve is not the Imperium I helped create.’

‘Then what salvation do you seek?’

His eyes widened, then hardened.

‘The only kind that matters,’ he said softly, and seemed to shiver. When he looked back at her his shape seemed to have blurred and stretched. Behind him, the light dimmed to shadow. ‘You speak of the Imperium and our kind, but what of your kind, inquisitor? I have seen what your kind do through your own eyes. I have seen worlds burned to take one life. I have heard the arguments for what must be done for the good of all. I have touched the ashes that form in your steps. You ask me what salvation can be mine. I ask you, what can be yours?’

She could sense the palace shifting around her, corridors reconfiguring to trap her, walls forming to close off doors into other parts of Ahriman’s mind.

‘There are no innocents,’ said Iobel. ‘If we do not act then who will? Being right does not make me inhuman, it just makes us see that the inhumane is necessary. But what you do, it is beyond that, it is a pyre made of reason for the sake of false ideals.’

Her mind was ghosting through every detail she could sense, searching, probing. But as she opened her mouth to speak again she knew that she had bought what time she could. There was only one option left to her.

‘Fine words. I might say the same of you, Selandra Iobel.’ Ahriman nodded, with a sad smile.

‘You might, but there is a difference.’

Ahriman raised an eyebrow.

‘I am right,’ she said, and swung the full strength of her mind at the imagined world like a wrecking ball.

The walls and ceiling around her blew apart. Splinters of stone, wood and glass spun into the air beyond, falling against gravity. Iobel soared through the destruction, and out into the air and sunlight beyond. Wings snapped free of her shoulders, armour sheathed her skin in silver. She swooped, struck a white tower, and felt it break apart at her touch. Half-formed memory images spilled into the sunlit air, flapping like silk pennants. She spiralled back into the palace, trailing a shock wave of destruction. A cyclone of shattered stone, glass, and wood spiralled around her as her flight corkscrewed through the palace. She burst back into daylight. The light in the sky flickered between neon white and yellow. She did not know where Ahriman’s manifestation was, it did not matter. Every part of this place was Ahriman, every stone a fragment of his mind to break, every tower a pillar of his thoughts. She would not survive this, of that she was sure, but she would break him before he could take her knowledge.

She landed on a tower top. The white stones shook beneath her as she gripped them. The world was juddering around her, the sky swimming. It was trying to shake her free, trying to spit her out. High above her, a black stain was spreading across the face of the sun, spilling across its burning circle. She had to keep moving. She gripped the parapet, pulled herself up, and leapt again before the tower toppled.

The cries of crows cackled through the air, louder than the roar of falling rubble and shattering stone. Far below her she heard thousands of wings beating against the air.

She landed on a higher tower. Cracks spread across the stones. A roar of fracturing marble rose around her. She took another step as half the tower top broke away just behind her. She jumped. Her wings beat. She looked down. The tower fell away beneath her gaze, crumbling downwards in a fountain of dust and stone. Around it more and more towers began to topple, blocks and fragments of glass flowing down as a void opened beneath. She beat her wings and rose towards the sun even as it became a black disc.

‘Iobel!’ The roar shook the sky. She looked down, and saw Ahriman rise from the collapsing palace. He came as a murder of crows, a storm of black wings and jagged shrieks. They poured up to her, moving faster and faster even as the ground dropped away below and the palace fell into the abyss. Iobel could feel her wings becoming heavier. She tried to focus, to hold onto the possibility of the idea of flight, but it was draining away from her even as she tried to grasp it. The crows surrounded her. Black feathers hid the blue sky. Carrion cries rose higher and higher. She realised she was screaming as the crows swallowed her.

‘I have you now,’ said Ahriman in the chorus voice of the crows.

Iobel lashed out with her will, but hundreds of claws and beaks were tearing into her flesh, ripping her consciousness apart as she fell and fell without end.

‘It will not bring you salvation,’ she shouted with all that was left of her strength, as Ahriman tore the last of her memories apart, and then there was nothing but the cry of crows and the caress of claws.

Pain exploded inside Astraeos. It was everywhere, stabbing through him from the depths of his soul to the ends of his fingers. He was burning, and becoming ice, and bleeding and crumbling to dust. He pushed back, tried to form his mind into a weapon, tried to call the warp to him. The pain grew and grew. He felt its fingers pulling at the iron he had trained into his mind. He could remember everything now, every moment from the towers of his birth world to the moment that Ahriman had left him as a corpse on the floor of the tiered chamber. It was all there, laid out as sudden and clear as a spray of blood in sunlight.

‘He left you here, Astraeos,’ said Izdubar, his voice reaching through the pain. ‘Hate us if you wish, but see him for what he is. He is a son of betrayal. He has led you to this fate and left you. And you will end here, loyal to a master who has spent you and cast you aside.’

He could feel the psychic fire burning deeper into his mind, lapping against his will, pressing into every weakness. Sensations and emotions sputtered through him: elation, hate, joy, rage, disbelief.

And over it all was a visage which spoke in a voice that sounded like Thidias. Ahriman did it all for his Legion, but even then he killed Amon. And what are you?

‘You are less than nothing to him,’ said Izdubar. ‘A tool, a weapon left broken on the battlefield.’

The pain was all of him now. His body was thrashing against the restraints, masked head wrenching from side to side. One of his hearts exploded in his chest. His ribs and spine cracked as his muscles spasmed. His lungs began to crumple. There was a smell of cooking fat, and ozone. He thought of the Rubric, of the moment when Ahriman had changed his Legion, and wondered if it had been like this, if there had been pain in that moment of transformation.

I was never part of them, shouted a voice from the edge of the pain. I can never be a part of them.

‘The Athenaeum.’ The word cut through the pain and rang through the darkness. The pain receded, became a fire-edged blade held against his awareness. ‘The Athenaeum,’ Astraeos gasped. Sweat was rolling from his skin, his chest heaving as breath wheezed from his remaining lung. ‘He seeks the Athenaeum of Kalimakus. That is why he came for the one called Iobel. He saw it in her mind. Chance, it was just chance, but he followed her. He wants to know where the Athenaeum is, and how it is defended.’

His sucking breaths filled the moment. Izdubar was watching him, his eyes still. Cendrion stood immobile, hands crossed on the guard of his sword, silver armour fuming aetheric mist and melting frost.

‘And once he has that information, he will go there?’

‘With strength enough to break any defences.’

‘Tell me everything.’

And he did. He told it all as though a dam in his soul had opened, and the last of him was pouring out of a reservoir of doubt and hate. He told them of Cadar, of the creature that now wore his skin. He told them how Thidias had died. He told them of Kadin, and what remained of his last brother. He told them of the Circle Ahriman had drawn around him, of the renegades and the sorcerers, and the ships whose hulls crawled as though alive. He told them everything he could remember.

At the end he lay, tasting the blood on his breath.

I am dying. He tried to think of what he had just done, but there was only a numb emptiness in his mind now. Around him the warp shifted, its currents tugging at his ragged thoughts, chuckling as it passed.

‘Thank you,’ said Izdubar. ‘I cannot forgive what you are, but I thank you. Ahriman will fall. We will be waiting for him.’

‘If it is not too late,’ said the crone from the shadows.

Izdubar remained silent, watching Astraeos, and then turned away. Cendrion did not move, but looked at Izdubar, a question flickering in his grey eyes.

‘No,’ said Izdubar. ‘Not yet.’

Cendrion turned away, his armour purring and clicking. The last thing Astraeos saw before the tech-priests shut down the servo-skull were the three black-swathed Seraphs shambling forwards. The warp’s touch drained away, and in the last moment before it fled, he thought he heard a chattering laugh, like a cloud of crows calling over the dead.

Sparks and shadows filled the cave. Iobel sat watching the fire dance over the pile of logs. She shivered despite the heat, and pulled the frayed blanket closer around her. Ahriman sat on the other side of the yellow tongues. At least she thought it was Ahriman, who else could it be? He wore a tattered red robe, his head covered by a cowl. The hands which stirred the fire with a stick were scarred, the flesh puckered and shiny. He said nothing, but just watched the wood split and crackle as it burned.

‘I can remember,’ she said, and heard the defiance and anger in her own voice. ‘I can remember each step that we have taken to get here. Is that not a mistake? Shouldn’t I be thinking this is real, like I did before? Where is the trick?’

‘Trick?’ said a voice from behind her. She twisted around. Ahriman stood behind her, his face bare, the smooth skin blurred by the sway of shadow and light. He wore the white robe, and his hand held a staff of worn wood. ‘Why would I trick you now, Iobel?’

She glanced back at the figure in the tattered red cowl.

‘He can’t see me,’ said the figure, in a voice as dry as thirst. ‘And he can’t hear me.’ A single point of blue light looked back at her from the blackness beneath the cowl. ‘I am here for you, and you alone.’

‘What is this, then?’ She gestured at the hooded figure. ‘If not another trick.’

‘The cave is many things, but at this moment it might be best thought of as a shelter,’ said Ahriman, as he walked around her and looked down into the fire. ‘You did me a lot of damage, mistress.’

‘He admires you,’ said the cowled figure. ‘Do you know how long it has been since he admired a human?’ She glanced between them. What was this? She had to think. She had to understand what Ahriman was trying to do. She had broken free before; should she just do it again? She tried, but nothing changed.

‘We have been walking in memories and in the lands of the mind,’ said Ahriman. ‘But there is only debris and chaos now: memories and imaginings jumbled together in my head.’ Ahriman sat down beside the fire, his staff across his knees. Slowly he extended his hands towards the warmth. ‘You did that. For the first time in a long time I am a stranger in my own thoughts.’

‘You see?’ said the cowled figure.

Iobel shook her head.

‘What are you?’ she said.

‘What am I?’ said both Ahriman and the cowled figure at once.

Ahriman frowned briefly.

‘I am someone who sees and knows more than others, and does what he must.’

‘He is a liar,’ said the cowled figure, and Iobel thought she heard a chuckle at the edge of the words.

Iobel suddenly felt very tired. She had run and fought, and fought again, and relived her life in glimpses. Even if she did escape there would only be more. She would run to the end of her days and beyond. Better that she die here, that she let this lost dream of herself fade.

‘No,’ she said, and the sound of her voice surprised her. She sounded old, wrung out and too tired to hide it. You sound like Malkira, she thought, and the idea of the old woman, scowling in the exoskeleton, made her want to smile, though she did not know why. ‘No, Ahriman, you are a monster.’

‘I have seen the Inquisition through your eyes. I know what you do. Tell me, if I am a monster, then what are you?’

‘I am a servant. I serve humanity. I fight for the survival of our species. I am survival, Ahriman.’

‘Very good,’ chuckled the cowled figure.

‘I–’ began Ahriman.

‘No, I can guess what you want. I have seen the inside of your soul, Ahriman. I do not need you to tell me what you believe. I understand you.’

‘He always was blind to himself. It is his weakness – all our weakness, in fact.’

‘You think that you are on a quest to set things right, but the path you walk is a path of corpses.’

‘I have a debt to my brothers. I will repay it.’

‘Your brothers are like you – drowning in lies, sucked down so deeply into the ocean of Chaos that you cannot see the surface. They, like you, should not be.’

‘Tell me, then, inquisitor. When you killed your first man for the Emperor, when you ordered your first purge, when you ordered a world to die for the failings of a few, what did you tell yourself then?’

‘That the price had to be paid, or all would fall,’ she said, feeling anger come at last. Ahriman’s mouth opened, but she carried on. ‘Do not try to say that you do the same. I do what I must, and if that includes my death, or the death of all I care for, then so be it. That is what I am. I am what you can never be, because you meet the cost but never pay it yourself.’

Ahriman just looked at her. She stared back. Between them the fire crackled.

‘So human,’ said the cowled figure. ‘I might have said the same once.’ It shrugged. ‘Perhaps I did.’

‘We,’ said Ahriman slowly, ‘see things differently.’

‘If you were like me you would be loyal to more than yourself. If you were like me you would have killed your Legion, not tried to save it.’

Iobel stood, the blanket still wrapped around her, and turned to look at the cave mouth and jagged sliver of night beyond. She stepped closer.

‘He believes you,’ said the cracked-paper voice from beside the fire. ‘Part of him, deep down, believes you.’

‘You won’t get far,’ said Ahriman softly. ‘Not here, not now. It is over, Iobel.’

She stepped to the lip of the cave and looked down. The cliff face dropped away, its base hidden in darkness. The wind lifted against her skin. She raised her head, and far off she thought she heard wolves howling. She looked down again, and wondered if the idea of a fall could kill you.

‘I will not let you have it,’ she said and looked back at the fire, at the two figures sat beside it. ‘Even if I must die, I will not let you have what you seek.’

Ahriman shook his head slowly.

‘I said it is over. I already have your knowledge of the Athenaeum. I know every detail of your life, every moment you have forgotten, everything you kept secret, everything you wanted and never achieved.’

Iobel’s mind was empty, as though she was floating in a still sea, feeling nothing, thinking nothing. Then the blackness opened in her, spreading wide like a scream.

‘Everything,’ she said. Ahriman nodded, though it was not a question. ‘Then you knew what I would say, here, you knew that I would die if I could to keep the Athenaeum from you.’

‘Yes.’ He nodded.

‘And what I saw in the Eye, the worlds broken, the scars on the warp itself – you saw that too.’

He nodded, and for the first time looked away from her, back down to the fire. Beside him the cowled figure stirred, and turned his hidden head to look at Ahriman.

‘None of that has happened yet, has it?’ she said. ‘It is your future, isn’t it? Stars dying, hell screaming your name as though calling for mercy – that is what waits for you.’

Ahriman said nothing.

‘Fate can be changed,’ said the cowled figure.

‘Fate can be changed,’ said Ahriman.

‘But you won’t, will you? You see what you will do and now you know that you will choose that path, that you have already chosen.’ She let out a tired breath that was almost a laugh, and turned towards the night beyond the cave entrance. She took a step forwards.

‘There is no point in jumping,’ said Ahriman, quietly. Iobel turned back to look at him. ‘You are already dead. You began to die as soon as you began to fight. The palace was the last of you.’

Iobel just stared at him. He looked back.

‘But I am here.’

‘No, you are not. You are a memory – all your memories and thoughts living in my mind, dreamed to reality, thinking with part of my mind, a ghost.’

Iobel turned her head slowly. The cowled figure was looking up at her.

‘He is right,’ it said, but she thought she could hear a smile in the words. ‘But nothing is ever as it seems.’

Iobel shivered. Behind her the wind rose and she heard wolves again. She turned and jumped. As she fell she saw the cave become smaller above her, dwindling until it was just one light in the night sky.

XIII
BLADES

Kadin did not turn as the door opened behind him. The corridor outside the sealed room was as still and silent as when Ahriman had set him to guard… how long ago? He heard a cough and a slow suck of breath, but still did not turn.

How long had it been since he had last heard a noise, or moved more than to breathe? He did not know. It did not matter.

‘Help me, Kadin,’ said Ahriman. Kadin looked and saw Ahriman in the open door, the metal of the doorframe bearing his weight. His armour had a glazed sheen, as though flame had polished it to an oily finish. Ice clung to its recesses. Through the open door Kadin could see scorch marks spreading across the floor and up the walls. A single circle of unmarked metal remained just in front of the black stone coffin. Water dripped from the ceiling as frost began to thaw. Kadin thought that the burn marks looked as though vast wings of heat had spread to the walls.

Ahriman looked at Kadin; his eyes seemed to have sunk into his skull, the skin grown taut over the bones of his face. As Kadin watched, a drop of blood formed on Ahriman’s lip, grew and ran down his chin.

Ahriman took a slow breath, and Kadin heard the rattle and wet gurgle in it.

‘Kadin,’ said Ahriman again, and began to slide slowly down the doorframe. Kadin caught him and gripped an arm with a piston-driven hand. His machine limb tingled where it touched the sorcerer; the sensation puzzled him, but he said nothing. Slowly he pulled Ahriman to his feet.

I could kill him, he thought as he steadied the sorcerer. Blood was dribbling from Ahriman’s lips now, and his eyes had closed. I could kill him now, and there would be nothing he could do to stop me.

‘Thinking of killing me again, Kadin?’

‘You once said that you would leave me my thoughts.’

‘I did. It was just a guess.’ Ahriman’s bloody lips twitched. ‘Besides, I need strength for more than reading your thoughts.’ He spasmed and his eyes opened, pupils wide in blood-streaked sclera. He went very still. Kadin smelt hot metal, and looked down. The fingers of his hand were glowing with heat where they held Ahriman’s arm.

Ahriman exhaled slowly, his breath white in the warm air. His pupils shrank, the blood crazing his eyes draining away to leave their usual cold blue. He straightened, strength seeming to return to him, though his face still seemed drained and hollow. He brought up a gauntlet-covered hand and wiped the blood from his chin.

‘Thank you,’ said Ahriman. Kadin took his hand away. Ahriman took a step, stumbled and caught himself against the wall. ‘Cursed silver,’ he said and spat. The bloody saliva hissed on the floor. Ahriman took another step, which seemed surer, though Kadin could tell that the movement was an act of will. Ahriman looked up at the long corridor, then back at the scorched room beyond the open door. ‘Seal it,’ he said.

Kadin nodded, but Ahriman was already turning away. Kadin felt something he could not place. He had been numb for so long that it took him by surprise. Somehow he had expected Ahriman to say something else, to be different, and as the silence folded back around him he knew what the stray feeling was. He felt suddenly and completely alone.

‘What shall I do then?’ Kadin called. Ahriman turned, his mouth slightly open as though to help him breathe, his shoulders and back stooped.

‘Wait, however you wish.’ Ahriman blinked slowly. ‘I will call for you, Kadin. When it is time.’

‘Did it work?’ Kadin asked the question before Ahriman could turn. ‘Did you get what we needed?’ What we needed… the words sounded strange even to Kadin. Ahriman turned to look at him, surprise blending with pain on his face.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘we have what we need.’

‘And Astraeos – do you know if he lives?’

Ahriman remained still, his eyes holding on Kadin’s.

‘There was no choice,’ said Ahriman. After a second Kadin nodded, still feeling the strange emotion flowing through him. He nodded, dropping his gaze.

‘I…’ he began to say as he looked up, but Ahriman had gone, vanished beyond sight, as though he had never been. Kadin took a final glance at the open chamber door, and then followed Ahriman. There was nothing left in the scorched room that needed guarding, not now, not any more.

Once both were gone the quiet began to settle. Slowly, so slowly that he seemed to be made of stillness, Maroth came from the shadows. He paused at the door of the scorched chamber, his blind eyes fixed on the way Kadin had gone. Then he turned his head, until he was facing the open door and the room beyond.

+Do you understand?+

Ahriman’s thought sank into the waiting silence.

Sanakht said nothing, and beside him the rest of the Circle kept their eyes on the great crystal sphere, in which muted colours swirled, echoing the doubt of some. In its depths the image of the Apollonia system turned, its four planets and bloated sun sketched in cold light. The outermost planet glowed, haloed by Prosperine runes and lines which extended out into the space beyond. It was a gas giant, its blue and ochre surface swirled with titanic storm systems. Sanakht watched the cloud patterns change under his gaze. For a mental projection it was very precise, almost as though it was taken directly from first-hand memory. Normally Ahriman would have joined his mind to that of his brothers to share such information, but for this he had called them to the bridge of the Sycorax, so that they could look at it with their true eyes. Sanakht wondered why.

He glanced to where Ahriman stood in front of Carmenta’s command throne. Ahriman wore full battleplate, and his head was hidden by his helm. Power arced in the air around him, rustling the silk of his robes and the parchment hanging from his armour. That was new, and there was something else, something raw and feverish about the way Ahriman’s mind spoke. The hunched shape of Kadin stood a pace further back, the pistons of his arms and legs hissing and clacking like twitching muscles. Sanakht noticed that the augmetics had taken on a wet rainbow sheen, as though they were sweating oil. He looked up, and met two green slit eyes looking back at him. Kadin blinked, the eyelids sliding in from the sides of his eyes. Sanakht kept the sneer of disgust from his face.

+The objective?+ asked Ignis, his thought voice cold.

+The Athenaeum lies at the centre of a labyrinth beneath the surface of this moon. The moon alone in the system has a name – it is called Apollonia.+ Fresh light kindled within the crystal sphere, haloing a grey orb close to the system’s outer planet. +The moon and its parent planet are locked into an orbital arrangement which creates a permanent eclipse. No sun reaches Apollonia.+

+Kept always in darkness,+ sent Sanakht.

Ahriman turned his head to look at Sanakht, but said nothing. The look made Sanakht’s skin prickle.

+Defences?+ asked Ignis.

+Orbital, and ground-based batteries.+

+Nothing else?+ sent Sanakht. +No standing garrison? No Titans? None of our mongrel cousins living out their lives in a fortress?+

Ahriman shook his head.

+Not that the inquisitor knew of, but we should prepare for the possibility that there might be. Ignis, this task is yours. Break the moon open, and get me into the labyrinth.+

Ignis nodded, his eyes still on the sphere.

+What are the other known factors?+

Ahriman paused, the slightest of shrugs moving his shoulders.

+There is an order of humans that keeps the Athenaeum – its curators. That was what the inquisitor called them.+

+Humans?+ sent Ignis, the flatness of his thoughts struggling against disbelief.

+Yes. A dozen at most.+

+A dozen?+

+That is what was in the inquisitor’s mind,+ sent Ahriman.

At the edge of the circle Gilgamos shifted, lips pursing on his wide face. Sanakht caught the taste of doubt from his brother as it rippled from his open mind. He looked at the former Corvidae prophet, but Gilgamos was looking at Ahriman.

+If this is truly the place we seek, then the Imperium will make us pay a blood price to break it.+ Gilgamos’s thought voice rumbled like stone grating on stone. +A door is rarely left open in a fortress. I have looked down the paths, turned the courses of fate over one by one, but I cannot see how this ends. Uncertainty clouds it. I do not like it.+

+And you are right not to,+ sent Ahriman. Slowly he reached up, and released the catches of his helm. The face beneath was a mask of fatigue. Sanakht felt the wave of surprise run through the Circle. Ahriman looked around each of them, a wan smile on his lips but not in his eyes. +It has cost us much to get this far, and it may cost us more. Nothing is certain. Nothing can be certain. Not with what we intend, not in the war we fight. We are fighting fate, not being guided by it. There is always a chance that we may fail, that we may fall.+ He paused, closing his eyes briefly. +But that is as it must be. We are not on a path of certainty, but a path to break what is fated.+ Silence filled the warp, trembling like a taut string. Then Ahriman turned from the Circle. The image in the crystal sphere vanished.

‘Ignis,’ said Ahriman, his true voice thin as it came from his mouth. ‘Coordinate the rest of the fleet. We will make warp passage within a cycle. The rest of you, order your forces.’

‘Do we accompany you again in the assault, lord?’ asked Gilgamos.

‘No. Sanakht, Kadin and a cadre of Rubricae will go with me.’

‘By your will,’ said Gilgamos.

Ahriman turned away from them, not even making the sign of passing. Sanakht thought he saw Ahriman’s image flicker at the edges, as though it briefly had cast shadows from a light that was not there.

And so, we will have our chance, Sanakht thought within the hidden reaches of his mind. Around him the rest of the Circle moved away, their unsettled thoughts flavouring the warp. The Cyrabor slunk back from the edges of the bridge, cooing over the space the Circle had left. Ignis was the last to go. He caught Sanakht’s eye, and gave the smallest of nods.

‘You are injured,’ said Carmenta. The lenses of her eyes refocused, and Ahriman’s face was overlaid by the rainbow colours of infra-sight. His face was red with warmth, cooler than the white-yellow of the Cyrabor priests in the background, hotter than the cool green and blue of his armour. He did not say anything. She watched a muscle in his jaw twitch. He closed his eyes. ‘You are, aren’t you.’ It was a flat statement. ‘Worse than before.’

‘Is that you speaking?’ he asked, his voice low, heavy with tiredness. ‘Or the ship?’

Something connected to her thoughts clicked through the question and formed an answer.

‘Yes,’ she said.

Ahriman laughed softly, then nodded, and let out a breath.

‘The information extraction did not proceed as intended?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Ahriman, then shook his head and said no more. He leant on the arm of the command throne, head bent. She could hear a wet click in his breathing.

‘There are cracks in you,’ she said. ‘And they are widening.’

He gave her a long look, then shook his head with a low humourless laugh. She wondered why.

‘Keep Kadin close,’ she said. ‘The others… they are unsure, Ahriman. Remember that they followed Amon once, and that they tried to destroy you. They serve you now, but they do not trust you.’

Ahriman stood slowly, his armour purring.

‘And I should trust Kadin?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said.

The muscles in his jaw hardened as he turned away.

‘Sleep, mistress. We are almost there.’

‘The end,’ she said, but the word stuck in her throat, and became a hiss of cogs and code. Ahriman walked from her. On her throne, Carmenta’s head drooped and she went back to listening to the machine within.

‘We must have an advantage,’ said Ignis.

‘This is our advantage,’ said Sanakht. They had walked far from the bridge of the Sycorax, down through the High Citadel into the layers beneath. The space they walked now was a narrow gully between dust-covered machines. High above them, sparks discharged between the metal cliffs. False thunder broke the humming quiet as blue flashes of light stole the gloom. They spoke with their true voices, their minds shut away from the warp by the brass discs that floated beside them. Acid-etched lines and circles covered their surfaces, and each floated and turned in time with each other as though invisible cogs and threads connected them. Inside their orbit they could talk and no other mind could hear them. The discs, like the tongue they spoke, were old and had been made on Prospero before it became ashes. Credence walked three paces behind them, clicking to itself.

‘I will have him alone, separated from the rest of the Circle while you command the fleet in space. How many of the mongrel warbands now will answer to you alone? What would you call that if not an opportunity?’

Ignis stopped and the orbiting discs slid to a halt around them.

‘He is going into the labyrinth alone apart from you and Kadin. Why?’

‘Trust, brother. He does not trust any of you.’

‘But he still trusts you.’

‘I almost died for him once,’ said Sanakht quietly.

Ignis shook his head.

‘There are too many unknowns, too many values that are not set. This may be an opportunity, but we need more than opportunity, we need an advantage,’ said Ignis carefully. ‘You will be alone with Ahriman beneath the surface of Apollonia, but so will a guard of Rubricae bound to Ahriman’s will. And can’t be ignored that abomination Kadin – he might take some killing, even for you. That and we are still talking of Ahriman, no matter how isolated. And all the while here in orbit is a fleet’s worth of firepower and troops. Carmenta is loyal to Ahriman alone, and the Sycorax is strong enough to break us if we move against him.’

Ignis stopped, and frowned. Sanakht wondered if the Master of Ruin had ever spoken so much before.

‘We have an advantage. Several in fact,’ said Sanakht.

Ignis simply stared at him and waited.

‘There is something that Ahriman does not know about Apollonia and the Athenaeum.’

Ignis raised an eyebrow.

‘But you know this fact that has escaped him?’

‘Yes.’ It was Sanakht’s turn to wait in silence.

‘What is it?’ asked Ignis, eventually.

‘That,’ said Sanakht carefully, ‘is something I will keep to myself.’

Ignis shook his head very slightly.

‘How does he not know?’

‘Because the witch inquisitor he captured kept it from him before she died,’ said a voice from above them.

Ignis whirled, his bolter arming with a metallic ring. His eyes went to the dark above, found his target, and pulled the trigger.

Sanakht’s blow sheared the muzzle off Ignis’s bolter an instant before the trigger clicked back. The bolt in the gun’s chamber exploded. Credence surged forwards with a hiss of pistons, fist rising.

‘No!’ shouted Ignis. The automaton halted.

Sanakht held the tip of his sword steady in front of Ignis’s eye, its power field throwing electric blue shadows over his face. Credence stopped.

‘Peace, brother,’ said Sanakht, carefully. Ignis’s blank eyes looked back at him. For a second Sanakht wished he could read the play of the Master of Ruin’s thoughts. Then Ignis nodded, and glanced at Credence.

‘It’s all right.’

The machine burbled back at him in machine code.

‘Yes,’ said Ignis. ‘All right in all senses.’

Credence lowered its fist, and took a slow step back. Sanakht let out a sigh and turned to look up to the shadows from which the voice had come.

‘I did not summon you,’ he said.

‘Summon? No but you called, oh yes you did. I heard, you see. I heard and came.’

Behind him he heard a heavy clang as Maroth dropped from the machines above. Out of the corner of his eye, Sanakht saw Maroth half rise then fold into a crouch on the floor.

Ignis’s eyes flicked to the figure. He stared, and then looked up and nodded once. Sanakht moved the sword away, and felt the blade shiver as the power field shut down.

Ignis stood, looking between the crouched figure and Sanakht.

‘So, another traitor,’ he said.

Maroth laughed, the noise cracking down the machine gorge. High above, a false peal of thunder rolled. Sanakht could smell ozone and lightning charge. ‘This knowledge that Ahriman does not have, it came from…’ Ignis paused, his tongue twitching against his teeth. ‘From it.’

‘The other secret, yes,’ said Maroth. ‘The one that the witch held back before she died. Ahriman thought he had it all but she held one thing back. Clever, strong. Very strong.’

‘But you took it from her after she died?’ asked Ignis.

Maroth nodded, fingers tapping the snout of his hound helm.

‘How?’

‘I ate her corpse.’

Sanakht felt his hands twitch on the jet and alabaster handles of his swords.

‘And what did you learn?’ asked Ignis.

‘Oh no. No. I have told once, and that is too many times to tell it, perhaps.’

Ignis looked at Sanakht.

‘A secret is best kept by ignorance,’ said Sanakht.

Ignis inclined his head.

‘So you have an advantage, but the matter of Kadin and the Sycorax remains.’

‘The iron crone and the beast,’ gurgled Maroth. Sanakht felt his skin itch as he heard the words.

‘The ship is a matter that can be dealt with.’

‘And Kadin?’

‘Will fall before he ever reaches battle.’

‘Treachery is an answer to many questions,’ said Ignis, then smiled, lips pulling back to show teeth etched with black digits. It was one of the most unsettling expressions Sanakht had ever seen on the face of another living thing.

They don’t even see me. Hemellion watched the figures move around him as he crossed the upper platform of the bridge. At least, he thought, they do see me, but none ask why I am here.

A tall spindly figure in billowing ochre moved past him, its long beaked mask not turning to notice him. He shivered, though the air was as warm as blood. I am part of this place. I am marked by one of their masters, and any who see me just see one of themselves.

This part of the bridge was broader than the widest town square he had ever seen, and its roof hung higher than the tallest temple he had ever stepped into. Beyond its distant edge the next level of the bridge extended on, its vast space cleaved by gullies filled with machines, and crowded with cable-hung stacks of metal. He turned his head, blinking, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dappled half gloom. Thirty or more paces away a vast sphere of crystal hung above a plinth of black stone. The air around it shimmered, and its surface seemed to flow like oil poured onto water. A sharp pain brightened just behind his eyes. He coughed, and tasted blood in his spit.

The throne sat before the crystal. Carvings of beasts with claws, feathers and crooked wings covered its back and arms. Polished stones winked from the eyes of the metal beasts. Cables snaked away from its base to vanish into the floor. He could see a figure on the throne, wrapped in red, its small shape shrunken by the seat’s bulk.

He took a step towards the figure and then stopped. He looked around, suddenly uncertain.

Why am I here? There is no need for me to be here. He looked around him, eyes flicking between twisted figures and hissing machines.

This impossible city will burn one day. This throne room will be a coffer of ashes. It will happen. It is certain.

He frowned, pausing, his steps halting on the azurite-inlaid floor. It felt like someone else had spoken those last thoughts. He shook himself, and the questions and doubt vanished. He looked back to the throne. Is this the king of this star city? Ahriman rules here, but is this a monarch of a different kind?

He moved closer, waiting for someone to stop him, for a bone and metal hand to close on his shoulder, or a challenge to ring out. A bloated figure with a mask like a mutilated bear glanced at him from the base of the throne’s dais. Hemellion stopped, wondering if he should run or speak. The figure looked away again. Hemellion waited a second, breathed once, and waited for his heart to slow. He stepped onto the throne’s dais, and felt the stone and metal vibrating beneath his feet. The smell of hot metal and cinnamon that filled the bridge was much stronger here.

Now he was closer he could see that the figure on the throne was slumped in its embrace. If it had a body or shape, it was lost beneath a ragged robe. Cables connected to the throne vanished within the folds of fabric.

‘Who are you?’ said the figure on the throne.

The voice was a half croak.

Hemellion staggered back, and almost fell from the dais. The robe was moving, a head beneath a deep hood rising slowly to look at him. The face within the hood was a mask of cracked red lacquer. Its eyes were lenses of glass lit by green light. He stared back. The mask made him think of someone beautiful, and the voice sounded very human, female, young even, though worn and brittle.

‘I… I am Hemellion,’ he said at last.

‘Yes. The One Time King. That is what they called you when they told me of you.’ She paused. Hemellion heard something click and whir inside the hood. ‘I am Carmenta. I am mistress of the Sycorax.’ Hemellion stared at her. ‘And why are you here?’

Mistress. So this ship, this city of the stars, had a mistress, a queen who ruled it for its master. He glanced at the cables running over the throne to the floor, and then out across the bridge at all its movement and thrumming metal, and out beyond that at the mindbreaking bulk of the Sycorax beyond the viewports. All of it extended from this point. This throne was the centre, and this hooded creature, with the voice of a weary girl, ruled from here.

‘You wander much. Is there no purpose to it?’ she asked. Hemellion looked down again. There was genuine curiosity in the words.

What are you? he wondered, as his gaze flicked over her false face and eyes.

‘I watch and I see,’ she said as though his silence had been a question.

Still he did not reply. She did not look like the Cyrabor, with their yellow robes and beast masks, and hands which could be metal or could be flesh. She sounded different too, like a voice speaking from the sanity of his lost life. Yet here she was.

‘You have a question,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said, and shook his head.

She laughed. Far off across the bridge, machines crackled with blue sparks.

‘Everyone has a question.’

He felt odd, as though, in all the months of hate and strangeness, this moment was a window into something he had lost.

‘Why did they keep me alive?’ he asked. She let out a breath. He found the gesture strangely disconcerting.

‘Forgiveness.’

‘Forgiveness?’ He felt his face twist in puzzlement and disbelief.

Carmenta nodded carefully.

‘And perhaps hope. What else can creatures like them want? What can any of us want?’

Hemellion found his gloved hands had knotted together, his skin prickling. He opened his mouth.

The light in Carmenta’s eyes fizzed. Her head rocked from side to side. Her robed body jerked in the throne, sending the mass of cables thrashing. Jagged sounds spilled from her. He took a step back. Discordant noise filled the vast chamber: clanking, crackling, hooting. Cyrabor froze where they stood, their masked faces turning towards the throne. Hemellion stepped back. A brass hand whipped out from beneath Carmenta’s robe and fastened on his wrist. The hand clamped tight. Hemellion cried out as he felt joints begin to pop under the pressure. Carmenta’s head was twisting, eyes scanning the room.

‘Who are you?’ Desperation and panic bubbled in her voice. Behind him Hemellion heard running feet, and raised voices. ‘Why are you here? What is your name?’ He tried to pull his hand free but the brass fingers just squeezed tighter. She yanked him closer, so that his face was inches from hers. He could smell machine oil and human sweat and burning. ‘Please, what is your name?’ she pleaded, and her voice was no longer that of a woman or a machine, but a child. ‘Please tell me why I am here? Where is father? Is he coming back? Help me. Plea–’

The light in Carmenta’s eyes cut out. Her body slumped back into the throne, her head lolling on her neck. The light from glow-globes and terminals dimmed across the bridge. The vast space was suddenly quiet, as though every breath was being held, every machine waiting for a delayed command. Hemellion stood staring, unable to move. Hands and metal pincers and bronze-cased tentacles pulled at him. His arm was pried out of Carmenta’s grasp. Voices were whispering angrily in his ear. He shook his head, still looking at the collapsed figure beneath the red robes. A moan trickled into the silence.

The lights flickered back on. The air clicked and buzzed as thousands of machines woke to life again. Carmenta’s head rose slowly. Hemellion could see the smallest tremble in the movement.

‘Let him go,’ she croaked. Only then was Hemellion aware of the Cyrabor clustered around him, holding him. Their touch was warm, and their cinnamon stink made him want to gag. They hooted and clicked in reply. Carmenta shook her head. ‘No, it was not his doing. Besides he bears Sanakht’s bond, so I would not consider that course of action wise.’

The Cyrabor glanced at each other, muttered in low machine noises, and let Hemellion go. He shivered, and pulled his robe closer about him. He had no idea what had just happened. He could not remember why he had thought to come here in the first place, but he was very sure that he did not want to be here now. He turned and began to hurry away.

‘Thank you, Hemellion,’ came Carmenta’s voice from behind him. But he did not turn back.

Kadin stopped. Something itched inside his thoughts.

Steam hissed in the air around him, venting from breaks in the pipes which formed passages along the walls and ceilings.

He turned to look behind him, feeling the pistons in his leg twinge with pain. There was nothing there, just the clouds of white vapour and the smudged glow of the lights beneath the floor grilles. All that lay behind him was half a kilometre of passage. In front of him there was another kilometre before the arterial hub. No one else came down here. Even the Cyrabor rarely walked here, and when they did it was mostly the most machine-made of their kind who came clanking and clicking over the metal grates. It was about exposure to something, though Kadin had never tried to understand what.

He knew these parts of the ship inside out. For years now he had walked them while the mockery of night fell on the Sycorax. The ship was a city without days, just the rhythms of the ship’s systems dimming lights and thickening air. Some amongst the slave crew clung to that slow rhythm, calling the down cycles night, the return of brightness dawn. Kadin had wondered why, when Silvanus had told him of this custom, but then he had realised that it was always ‘night’ when he chose to walk the lowest decks. Ever since then he had not been able to think of the gloom-tarnished hours as anything else. After a while he had given up trying.

He turned and took another step. The feeling of unease came again, stronger, like a spider running on the inside of his skull. He kept moving. The grilles clanked under his steps.

+Kadin.+ The word came from just behind him. He turned, shrugging the chainsword loose from his shoulders as its teeth began to turn.

There was nothing there. Part of him just wanted to laugh. He let the teeth of the chainsword slow to quiet, and turned back towards the way he had been walking.

Sanakht stood amidst the clouds of steam. He wore his high-crested helm, its faceplate polished silver and its eyes amber. His hands rested on the pommels of his sheathed swords.

Kadin felt a twinge of pain in his head. He could taste burned meat. He grinned, showing his teeth in their black gums.

‘Get out of my head, witch,’ he growled.

‘You are resistant, aren’t you,’ said Sanakht. ‘Your soul is like an unhealed wound, still slippery with blood.’

It was Kadin’s turn to shrug. He reached over his shoulder and relocked the chainsword to his back. Sanakht watched the movement in silence.

‘Why does Ahriman summon me now? We have not even gone into the warp.’

‘He has not summoned you,’ said Sanakht softly. Kadin went still, the feeling of unease still in his head, growing stronger now, pushing into his awareness. The pistons in his arms hissed, and his slab fingers twitched shut. Sanakht was speaking again, his voice still low, as though he was confiding, or confessing. ‘We were once alike, you and I, at least in one respect. The warp once wanted me too. It had its fingers in the dreams of my mind, and in the shape of my flesh. My eyes changed first. They became like stars, and where I looked I could see the truth of things, all laid out in front of me. It was beautiful for a time. I stopped thinking about why I could not take off my armour. I stopped wondering why I didn’t breathe.’

Kadin felt his machine hands twitch again. The feeling in his head was a building pressure now. His eyes flicked to the pommels of Sanakht’s swords: the alabaster hawk head and jet jackal rested under the blue fingertips. He thought of the weapon on his back, the distance to Sanakht. He shook his head, and made as though to turn away.

‘We share nothing, cripple,’ he spat.

Sanakht seemed to tense, and then shook his head, relaxing again.

‘No, no,’ he said, carefully turning and taking his hands from the pommels of his swords. ‘You are right. We are nothing alike and any similarities we might share, are skin deep.’ Kadin was sure the swordsman was smiling with the last words. ‘But even so I wanted to talk to you.’

‘Why?’ managed Kadin. The sensation in his skull made him feel as though it was about to explode.

‘We once called it honour.’

Move! The thought exploded inside Kadin’s head. He twisted.

Sanakht’s sword cut and activated in a single movement. Kadin had not even seen it leave the sheath. The edge scored across Kadin’s chest. Pain and fire spread from the wound. He smelt the ozone as the blade’s field met the air. The second sword was already in Sanakht’s left hand, slicing out from the scabbard, edge crawling with green flames. Kadin punched out. The force sword was burning a line across his vision. His fist slammed home. Sanakht hit the passage wall with a crack of shattering ceramite. Kadin stepped forwards, his hand pulling the chainsword free from his back in a snarl of spinning teeth. He cut down.

Sanakht’s swords came up together, force and powerblades shrieking as their energies clashed. Kadin’s blow hit the crossed swords in an explosion of light and spinning metal. The chainsword’s motor kept churning teeth into the air. Kadin tried to pull back, but Sanakht was already moving, turning as he scissored the chainsword in two. Light flashed through the steam-thickened air. Half-molten chain teeth smacked into the flesh of Kadin’s face. He stumbled, half falling, blood streaming into his eyes, hand still gripping the squealing stump of his chainsword.

The fall saved his life. A blade hissed above his head, trailing golden sparks. His shoulder crashed into the wall, and he rebounded with a shout rising from his throat, metal fist lashing out.

He could feel something scrabbling at his mind, clawing to get in, mewling as it slid off the tatters of his psyche. The world slowed, the edges blurred, the uncoiling momentum of his body a paused instant.

You are going to die here, said a voice at the back of his thoughts.

His lead foot hit the decking. Sanakht was sliding back, both swords low, green eyes glittering in his silver helm.

He is faster than you are, faster than you ever can be. For an instant he did not place the voice, then he recognised the low tones of Thidias: his lord, his Chapter Master, his comrade in exile. Thidias, long dead in the cold dark.

You die here, brother.

Kadin’s hand descended towards Sanakht’s face, metal fingers wide.

‘No,’ hissed Kadin. ‘Not yet.’

Sanakht whipped his power sword up. The lightning-wrapped edge met the palm of Kadin’s hand. The power field buzzed as it kissed the metal. The fingers snapped shut. Light exploded through the corridor. Steam flashed to white sheets. Kadin’s hand and arm vanished, molecules tearing apart as the power field splintered. Sword fragments rang against his armour and he staggered, the stump of his arm drooling black blood and piston oil.

Sanakht was spinning back, his shattered sword still held in his right hand.

Pain, thought Kadin, the revelation as sudden and shocking as the sensation itself. I feel pain. And something within him, a memory, a last seed of what he had been, broke open. Rage hammered through him, clear and bright. It felt like cold water and ice. It felt like fire, like waking to the sun’s light.

Sanakht spun back, his sword a spike of rainbow flame. Kadin stood tall, pistons hissing. Sanakht lunged. Kadin’s kick snapped out. Clawed toes hit the join between chest and torso plates and punched through. The sound of shattering ceramite cracked through the damp air like a bell breaking as it tolled.

Sanakht fell, blood spraying in his wake, the fire of his sword guttering. Kadin watched him hit the wall, and tumble to the deck. Kadin smiled, feeling the sensation spread across his twisted face. The world was suddenly bright again, living. Part of him wondered why now, but he pushed the thought away.

Sanakht was trying to rise, wet breath hissing from his speaker grille as he scrabbled at the wall. Blood was pumping from the crack in his armour. Kadin listened to the sound for a heartbeat, and watched as the swordsman pulled himself up a few centimetres.

The stump of Kadin’s right arm was still bleeding, but more slowly now, as though machine and flesh were closing off the wound. He raised his foot and placed it on Sanakht’s chest just above the cracked torso plate. He pressed down, slowly, feeling his pistons moving in the place of muscle.

‘Do you wish me to talk to you before you die?’ said Kadin. ‘Or does honour not demand that now?’

Edges of broken ceramite ground over each other as he pressed harder. Sanakht looked up. Kadin saw something move in the swordsman’s eye-lenses, a reflection of something behind him. He began to turn.

The power blade activated the instant before it punched through the right side of Kadin’s chest. Inside his ribs he felt his lung and left heart explode. The blade sawed out of the front of his chest with a hiss of atomising flesh and bone. The world was suddenly slow again, slow and grey-edged and tasting of blood. He tried to bring his arm up, but it was just a stump now. Sanakht was rising, steadying himself on the wall with one bloody hand, force sword gripped in the other. Kadin tried to take a step, but his legs would not move. The power blade stabbed in from behind again, up and through the backplates on his right, and into his remaining heart. He turned his head, feeling the muscles in his neck losing strength even as he moved.

Maroth tilted his blind hound helm as he pulled the power blade free.

‘Trusted…’ rasped Kadin. His lungs were bags of blood. The beat of his pulse in his ears went silent. He no longer had hearts to beat.

‘Exactly,’ hissed Maroth.

Kadin felt Sanakht’s force sword punch through his chest.

It felt like being cut by ice. He had time to think of his brothers, to think of Thidias, of Cadar, and Astraeos, all dead, all grinning at him out of faded memory. Their faces were skulls, and then they were laughing, and then the laughter was all there was.

XIV
CLAWS

Hel’s Daughter was the first to kindle her engines. Behind her the Storm Wyrm and Crone Hammer followed, sliding into position behind the lead ship. Death’s Laughter and Blood Howl came with them, holding station between the larger vessels. All of the ships were scarred black, their colours lost beneath the touch of flames and storms. Damage marked their hulls: jagged gorges ran like smiles across their bellies and backs, rippled craters pocked their prows, and the mouths of their guns shimmered with heat scarring. There were other marks too, twists in the metal and stone of their hulls, as though their substance had run like molten wax and then hardened. Around them, howling storms of light rose against the star field. The faces of beasts seemed to shimmer there briefly. Drifts of vapour the size of continents reached to brush the five warships. This was the edge of the Eye of Terror, but even here the warp storms spilled into the real, lapping against the channel of calm which led to Cadia. Beyond that the Imperium waited.

The Wolves’ ships had sat in the folds of the storm, the clouds of ethereal energy gusting against their shields, thrusters holding them steady beside their sisters. They had sat, waiting, as patient as the turning of seasons, watching for what they needed. It had come at last: a scattering of ships, tumbling towards the light of Cadia’s star. First there had been just one, its engines spluttering red, its hull bleeding gas and energy, rolling on its course like a drunkard. Then another had followed, its weapons firing at nothing, scattering fury and light in every direction. Then another, bloated and black, its hull weeping ectoplasm. Then ten, then ten more, then a hundred: all of them tumbling towards Cadia like a herd driven into a stampede. It was not a true fleet, it had no central command and little drove it towards Cadia besides the blind instinct of a starving predator drawn to light. The storms howled in its wake, and the Wolves waited. Only once the fleet had passed did Grimur give the order to follow.

The ships accelerated forwards, firetrails lingering in the warp’s tainted void. On the bridge of the Hel’s Daughter Grimur listened to the burble of the servitors in the red-stained light. The ship was shaking, the scream of its spirit rising as the reactors poured fury into the engines. An Iron Priest in a plough-fronted helm glanced up at him. Grimur nodded. The ship began to sing in pain as its engines strained.

Beyond the hull the five ships of Grimur’s pack were streaking towards a distant point of light. If the calculations of the Iron Priests, and the augurs of the runes had told true, they would reach Cadia just after the ragged fleet they followed. By that point they would have been accelerating for days, their reactors close to rupturing, engines on the edge of failing, and going fast enough that they would hit the Cadian Gate like an arrow shot from the nether world.

Fire ringed the light of Cadia. Ribbons of explosions lit the void as mines and deadfall torpedoes detonated amongst the first wave of ships emerging from the Eye. Warp-twisted hulls became burning shards and scatters of melting slag.

Within the outer ring of mines the Imperial fleet waited. Hundreds of Imperial cruisers, destroyers and frigates marshalled beside battleships like knights holding station beside their kings. All were commanded by men and women who had earned the right with blood and victory; and as the Eye-ward hemisphere of Cadia filled with fire, they waited.

The rest of the incursion fleet came on, accelerating through the death fires of their kin. Cadia’s defence platforms began to fire, tracing nets of light across millions of kilometres. Chaos-wrought ships burned, exploded, twisted, died and screamed into the silence as they bled. And still they came on.

The Cadian fleet began to move. Battle groups spread into position, squadrons folding out into webs of overlapping fire arcs. Eyes and minds across the fleet had seen the pattern of the threat and measured the response. This was not an attack, at least not one that was likely to succeed despite its size; it was an outpouring, the Eye vomiting out some of the damned held in its guts. It was violent yet predictable, a charge of unfocused fury. It would cost blood but the line would hold and cut the incursion down before it began.

Clouds of bombers dropped from launch bays and began to spiral outwards from their carriers. Wave after wave of torpedoes struck the warp-touched ships in an unforgiving drumbeat of explosions. Hulls became kilometre long shards, fuming flames and metal as they spun. The Imperial bombers fell on the remains, melta rockets and seismic bombs reducing wreckage to crumbs and molten spray.

Dozens of warp-touched ships died in the first rolling firestorm of the engagement, but not all. Some had changed in the Eye, the substance of their hulls bloating, becoming like a living thing, becoming like cancer grown from nightmare. These behemoths came on, heedless as parts of their hulls sheared away and burned, screaming with the voices of the dead. Across the system vox-relays blew out, and people woke from dreams with voices still wailing at the edge of hearing. Behind the sheet of flame formed by the ballet of destruction the warp storms coiled, reaching deeper into reality to caress the bloodshed.

The Cadian fleet met the surviving invaders with sheets of intersecting fire. Battle groups already in place fired on the enemy vessels’ engines as their momentum drove them past. Fast frigates and gunboats cut closer, firing into already open wounds. The first of the great ships died under the guns of the battleship Imperatrix; already bleeding and wailing its pain into the warp, it exploded, the fire and gas of its death shimmering to blood and tatters of oily matter. But the rest of the corrupted vessels were not without teeth, and they did not die easily. Some fired back, roaring tainted plasma at their attackers, swallowing squadrons with sweeps of macro cannon fire. The invaders and defenders locked together, raking and cutting at each other even as they died. And all around them the blackness became an inferno.

Grimur’s ships hit the sphere of Cadia as the battle reached its zenith. Their course had been calculated long before, washed through the half-machine brains of slaved lexmechanics until it was like a line cut by a razor through skin. The ships of the damned had struck the Cadian system in a wild rush, but they were still predictable. In the long weeks of waiting the Space Wolves had guessed how the defenders of Cadia would respond to such an attack. They might not know the precise shape of the forces defending Cadia, but how they would respond to a predictable enemy was itself predictable. The Wolves had picked a path that would slide past the defenders like a stone skimming over water. They had waited for the Eye to lash out at Cadia, lit their engines and begun to accelerate down their chosen path towards the cool darkness waiting on the other side of the system. Now, as defenders and invaders met, and burned together, the Wolves sliced through the edge of the battle sphere.

On the bridge of Hel’s Daughter Grimur listened to his ship sing as the warp storms clawed at it and the fires of battle kissed its prow. He swayed as the ship creaked, his eyes closed, feeling the seconds flick past and finding that they were all still breathing. In his mind he was remembering ships cutting waves like long knives, the wind hissing as it cracked the sails taut, the spray flicking across the bow as the waves met its cutting edge. ‘Running the claws of the storm’, they had called it, dancing across a sea of white-crested mountains with thunderheads spread from horizon to horizon at their backs. And in that moment, his mind living in the past while the present trembled all around him, he knew joy for the first time in a thousand years. It was the joy of skill tested against chance, of running at a shieldwall and knowing that you were rolling the bones of fate and hoping for favour.

‘Entering outer system sphere,’ called a servitor in a dull monotone.

Well now. He felt his lips split over his teeth. Let’s run the storm’s claws, and see if we are still sons of Fenris.

The hull shook, and shook. Alerts and sirens began to ring through the cavern of the bridge. Servitors were calling out in their iron voices. Beside him his brothers stood, weapons held loose in their hands, red warning lights glittering in the coldness of their eyes. The ship shook again. The note of the engines rose and rose. Grimur tilted his head back, his grin splitting wide.

The song of the ship and the scream of the storm were one note, rising up to the sky like the call of the hunt.

Grimur howled. Death’s blade was resting on the threads of fate. Beside him the other Wolves joined their cries to his.

Out in the void the arrowhead of ships cut through the system edge. Weapon fire reached after them. The Wolves’ ships danced and spiralled, kissing the edge of explosions. The pursuing ships began to fall behind, their engines already burning to their white-hot limit. But two did not.

‘They are still coming.’ Halvar’s voice reached through the howls. Grimur went silent, the joy draining from him as he looked at Halvar bent over an auspex readout. One by one the howls of the other Wolves faded. Just the snarl of the ship remained, rolling about them like thunder. Grimur looked at Halvar, his expression question enough. ‘Two ships,’ said Halvar. ‘Very fast. They have stopped firing weapons.’

Grimur nodded. Fire power traded for speed: that was why the two ships were not firing. They had guessed that Grimur’s ships had made the same trade-off, and so would be unlikely to fire back as the distance closed. They were racing to get close, and that meant they intended to use weapons that needed no power; they intended to board the Wolves’ ships.

‘What are they?’ he asked, although he thought he knew the answer already.

‘The mark of Ultramar is in their lines,’ said Halvar, nodding grimly. ‘They are Legion kin, jarl. They are Space Marines.’

Grimur took a breath, let it out, and shifted his grip on his axe, feeling the familiar sensation of its weight in his fingers.

‘Make ready for battle,’ he said.

The Space Wolves ships ran and their hunters came after them. There were two, their engines gouging wounds of flame across the void towards Hel’s Daughter and her sisters. The Lament of Calth was a notched spear blade, the Rubicon a blunt hammer head. Both had once served the Ultramarines, but for two millennia they had borne new colours and oaths. The White Consuls aboard the two ships had served in the shadow of the Eye for a decade and blood had often hidden the white of their armour. They knew their trade, had been bred for it and honed by genetic mysteries.

As the distance to the target ships closed Lepidus, sergeant of the Fifth Squad of the Fourth Company, waited in the boarding torpedo’s dark insides. Around him his brothers sat still, the white of their armour lost in the dark. They waited as the silence stretched, and the torpedoes shook around them. Phrases rolled through his thoughts, canticles and teachings worn smooth by repetition. Under the words his mind worked, flicking through dozens of conditioned possibilities and responses with every double beat of his hearts. Calm, total and complete, filled him. He had seen human warriors tremble before battle, their fear oozing out of them in nervous laughter and hands shaking on weapons. He had heard that Space Marines of other breeds relished the moments before battle, as adrenaline surged in their blood. Both were unfathomable to him. Battle was focus, uncluttered by feelings or thoughts that did not serve the moment. There was a time for fury, a time to take lives like a reaper wading through corn, but they were moments to be chosen and put aside like any other tool of war. That was what the Codex taught.

He blinked, and an image of the space outside the ship opened in his helmet display. The engines of the Lament of Calth and Rubicon burned brighter. Each of them would need weeks to recover from the damage they were doing to themselves by pushing their engines, but they had no choice. Their quarry was almost at the system edge, almost free and clear into the waiting black beyond.

The boarding torpedo rang as mag clamps disengaged. Lepidus felt the vibration through his armour. He kept his eye on the image of the fleeing ships. He wondered what manner of corrupted creatures they held. He dismissed the thought. It was irrelevant. He would see the enemy soon enough, and speculation could cloud judgement.

Red light pulsed through the torpedo. A siren sang in Lepidus’s ear and alerts pulsed at the edge of his sight. The torpedo felt tense, an arrow held nocked and drawn, waiting for flight.

The White Consuls ships waited until their reactors were screaming, until they could go no faster or further, until the quarry were as close as possible.

Lepidus felt the launch as a blow. Amber alerts washed his eyes. His flesh pressed against the skin of his armour.

The torpedoes hit the void and ran clean to their targets.

Grimur felt his fingers twitch on his axe haft as he ran through the Hel’s Daughter. At his back his brothers followed, boots ringing on the floor, strings of claws and teeth rattling against their armour.

‘Mid section, lower arterial corridor. Incursion confirmed.’ The dull drone of the bridge servitor filled his ear.

‘Number of impacts?’ he growled.

‘Uncertain. Two probable. Storm Wyrm and Blood Howl report incursions in progress.’ Grimur gave a silent curse. The boarding torpedoes had struck true and now most of his ships were compromised.

‘Lower arterial corridor. Internal bulkheads breached, sections one hundred and five through thirty. Moving aft.’

Blood of Fenris, they are quick, Grimur thought. Whoever the Space Marines who had boarded the Hel’s Daughter were, they were cutting their way through the ship with ruthless directness. They would be making for the reactors and engines. If they could damage them, the Hel’s Daughter would drift on powerless, easy prey for the rest of the defenders to destroy once they caught up. It was an old tactic, as old as the first time a man had cut the ties of a sail to leave a ship as prey for the waves.

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

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

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

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

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

One second.

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

Two seconds.

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

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

Three seconds.

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

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

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

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

The Space Marines fired.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Sycld,’ said Grimur into the vox.

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

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

XV
CONNECTION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What?’

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

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

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

‘You should be careful of what you say.’

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

‘I–’

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

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

‘Such words are dangerous.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hemellion let out a slow, controlled breath.

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

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

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

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

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

‘What was that?’ he asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She laughed, the thought sound ringing like breaking glass.

‘Liar. You always were.’

+You cannot be certain what will happen.+

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

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

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

+Was that a rebuke?+

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

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

‘Good luck, my friend,’ she said.

‘Are you ready, Navigator?’ asked Ahriman.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Silvanus?’ Ahriman spoke again.

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

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

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

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

‘Are you ready?’

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

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

‘I am ready,’ he said, and looked up.

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

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

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

He looked back to Ahriman and nodded.

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

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

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

+Follow,+ he said in Ahriman’s voice, and across the fleet sorcerers heard and obeyed.

PART THREE

LABYRINTH OF
A LOST KING

XVI
APOLLONIA

‘Help us, Silvanus. Please, my son, help us.’

The voice was real. Silvanus could hear its rasping tones tingle in his ears.

Ropes of green, gold, and red liquid streamed past him, shattered, reformed, changed, swirled and tore. Black voids opened and closed in the kaleidoscope, like winking eyes. Sound screamed in his ears, stuttering like a looped recording, billowing like a storm wind, shrieking like glass shattering over and over again. And all the while he was racing forwards, accelerating, spinning like a seed caught in a gale.

This was not the warp Silvanus knew. Before it had always appeared to him as creases of white and black lines, like an ever redrawn and folded sketch on parchment. This was a different warp, one seen and given shape by another mind. And there were the voices, which called to him from the edge of his sight.

‘Please…’

The worst of them was the voice of his father.

‘Help us…’

His father, a decade dead by the time Silvanus went into the Eye.

‘Can you hear us, my son?’

The old man had withered away in darkness on Terra. In life Silvanus had met the man who had sired him twenty-one times. They had said that, in the end, Yanved Yeshar had died scrabbling in his own vomit, his bloated body unable to rise, his heart no longer able to beat. Yet here was his voice as clear as though he sat just behind Silvanus’s shoulder. Silvanus did not look around. He would not look around.

A sphere of gloss blue and silver stars imploded in front of him. Expanding droplets scattered outwards. Silvanus dived, stretching himself to slide between two spheres which had started to burn with white and black fire. Somewhere, he knew the Sycorax had moved with him, its shielded bulk cutting through the squall. His path was the ship’s, he was the Navigator.

A giggle bubbled up from somewhere out of sight. It felt soft, velvet and milk made into sound.

‘So long watching, but never listening,’ purred a slow voice, both deep and sharp. ‘Do you not want to listen now?’ Stars of silver spun around him. He could taste sweat and smell morning dew.

So soft, so warm, a voice to drown in and never wish for air.

‘Do you not want to touch? Yes?’

He felt his gaze waver. The colours changed faster. The floating spheres broke. Dribbles and strings of rainbow colour became vast cubes, which stacked and combined and broke, tessellated and reformed.

What is happening? The thought screamed in his mind, and he wondered if somewhere he was shouting the question from a mouth he could no longer feel. Even in the Eye it had never been like this, it had never been…

‘What do you wish?’ The voice was the clatter of counting wheels, and the scratching of quills. ‘It can be yours.’ The voice cackled, now buzzing like a hive of insects. ‘It can beeeeee–’

‘Please, my son.’ His father’s voice broke through, louder than before. Silvanus could feel the tears in the old man’s words. ‘We watch you, son. We watch you as you dream and wake. Please help us…’

Then the other voices were all around him, growing louder, blurring into one.

‘Help… Can be… Touch, yes..? Watch… Watch… Watch…’

The way ahead was suddenly a canopy of dark leaves lit by twilight. He could hear howls behind him, chuckling on a wind that made the branches and leaves thrash as he spun towards them. He could feel breath behind him, could smell rank meat caught in sharp teeth.

He wanted to turn to look behind him.

He would turn, he would look.

His gaze began to turn. At the edge of sight he saw yellow eyes glitter through the wind-tossed leaves.

+Follow my voice.+ The words gripped Silvanus and yanked his gaze around. +It is I, Navigator. I am here. I am here beside you.+

Ahriman. Before him the leaves parted to show a gap leading into the dark beyond. Behind him the howls rose, and the voices screamed and pleaded and laughed.

+Follow my voice.+ The words were clear, like the ringing of a bell on a still night.

‘If we can just come with you…’ said his father.

+Only my voice.+

The twilight jungle was falling past him now, faster and faster, the path twisting but never fading.

‘We could be free…’ said a voice.

+They are phantoms, Navigator.+

‘We could all be free…’

How long have I been in here? Am I still navigating the ship or am I gone? Cold terror rose in him. Am I just one more voice trapped in the storm?

+My voice is all that is real.+

‘We could help you…’

And then the canopy of leaves fell away beneath him, and emptiness was all around him.

+Now,+ commanded the voice of Ahriman, and Silvanus closed his eye. The warp vanished and he was flying through blessed blackness, the fading screams of his dead father following him into the welcome silence.

The Sigillite’s Oath trembled as it cut through the warp. Nightmare claws clattered and sparked against its shield, and black currents pulled at its course, but it cut on, straight and true. In its empty strategium Brother-Captain Cendrion watched the image of the moon turn in the cone of cold light. It looked pitiful, a discarded bauble on the edge of greater things. The true planet which it circled was many, many times its size. A vast bloated sphere of gas, its violet surface swirled with white clouds, it owned the right to be called a planet, yet it was its child moon that gave the system its name.

Apollonia. He had read that name on bloodstained pages in the deep archives on Titan. Fragments of prophecy, lore on the nature of the warp and its potential – he had seen all marked with the glyph of the moon whose image now revolved before him. He knew now where those pages of lore had come from he had not known until now.

So many secrets. One layered upon another until it becomes our skin, until it becomes armour.

But that was the point, he realised; there was no absolute armour, nothing which could be buried so deep that it could not be found.

He waved a hand and the projected moon shrank. Apollonia became a speck, pirouetting without a care against the swirled background of her parent planet. The moon’s necklace of weapon stations vanished. The silent drifts of torpedoes and mines waiting in cloud banks became a smudge of distortion. There were defences enough around Apollonia to turn back a small fleet, but it was not a small fleet that they would face. If Ahriman had learned what he needed from Inquisitor Iobel then he would come with all his might. The defences would not stand that.

And so we race through the warp, thought Cendrion, and hope that we are in time. Around him he felt the creak of the Sigillite’s Oath’s shields as the warp tried to grip its hull. It was a fast ship, fast beyond what most would believe possible. Far behind her, lost in the shattered swirl of the warp, a greater fleet followed, heavy with warships loaded with fleet-breaking fire power.

But will even that be enough? He was not a pessimist; he was a warrior, and a warrior could allow himself no false hope. Truth is our weapon, as ignorance is a shield.

Cendrion shivered. His armour buzzed in sympathy.

‘Cold, my friend?’

Cendrion kept every part of his features set, but inside he stiffened. Izdubar stepped up beside him. The inquisitor had donned armour. Black lacquered plates hid his slight body, and a sable cloak hung from his shoulders. A tri-barred ‘I’ ran down the moulded muscle of his chest, wreathed in silver laurels. A tiny daemon’s skull with ruby eyes stared from the symbol’s centre.

Izdubar raised his hand in front of him, thumb and forefinger held apart, as though he was sighting through them at the holo display of Apollonia.

Izdubar’s thumb and finger snapped shut. The inquisitor held his hand still for a second then dropped it with a sigh of servos.

‘If only it were so easy,’ breathed Izdubar. ‘Take what is at this moment one of the greatest dangers to mankind and make it vanish with a snap of our fingers.’

Cendrion shifted, and his silvered armour sighed as it moved with his muscles. He bore no sword, and though that was right and proper, it made him feel uneasy. Within him a fragment of his subconscious spoke the words of detestation and the names of the fallen in a never-ending litany. He listened to the thoughts rise and fall in rhythm. Far off on the edge of his awareness he heard the minds of his brothers, each an echo of his own. The Sigillite’s Oath was just one ship, but seventy-three Grey Knights walked its decks, their minds like torches beside the thousands of candle flames spread through the rest of the ship. Comfort was not a concept he easily understood, but in moments like these he came close to understanding what it must mean to humans.

‘You think that I had that power already?’ said Izdubar, as though in answer to a remark that Cendrion had not made. ‘That I should have destroyed the Athenaeum? If it no longer existed, then Ahriman and his kind would not seek it. We would not now be at risk of letting it fall into his hands.’ The inquisitor rested his hands on the brass rail which circled the cupola. ‘Yes, I could have done that long ago, with a word, with a… a click of my fingers.’

Cendrion turned to look at Izdubar. The man looked young, but was not. Two hundred years, three hundred? Cendrion was not certain, but in all the time he had known Izdubar the inquisitor had never seemed to age, as though he did not have time for it. Direct, deep, ruthless: those were the words which followed Izdubar. Cendrion supposed others found those qualities admirable, but he just found Izdubar unsettling, like a weapon whose balance never felt true but no one could understand why.

‘One gesture and it could all have been gone, but what then? What would we lose? The war we fight is a war of knowledge, and we cannot fight what we do not understand. Destroy this and we blind ourselves. And does it not serve a purpose? A light that draws our enemies to us just as fires once drew wolves to our ancestors. We do not act only as protectors here, Cendrion.’ Izdubar looked up from the star field, his eyes emotionless but glinting with reflected light. ‘We are hunters.’

The Wolves rode on the edge of the storm. It rolled and roared around Hel’s Daughter, rattling its hull with fury. It had begun soon after they had returned to the warp after clearing the Cadian Gate. The storm had grown even as they had tried to outrun it, as though it was pushing them before it. Grimur did not like that; it was an ill omen, one amongst so many.

‘The moon broken at midwinter looks at us,’ rasped Sycld from where he lay on the floor. Ice radiated from the Rune Priest’s body and climbed the navigation chamber’s walls. Blood marked Sycld’s lips, and formed pink crystals on his cheeks. ‘Silver are the warriors of blade and book, and they come to the fire.’

Grimur touched the fragment of red iron on its thong about his neck. They had been riding the bow wave of the storm for days now, and all the while Sycld dreamed and Grimur watched over him, axe in hand. The Rune Priest’s dream was the thread leading them on towards Ahriman, but it was taking its toll. Sycld’s skin was snow white beneath its crust of ice, his face so hollow it seemed a skull. Grimur did not want to know how Sycld was holding onto his dream hunt. Other Rune Priests guided the other ships, but each followed Sycld’s lead; he was the master of the pack, the strongest, and the one who saw the path most clearly.

What if he fails now? thought Grimur. What if the evil that has touched us worms its way into his flesh? What if I have to cut his thread?

‘The king without a land, with a blade like the moon in his hand,’ gasped Sycld, and Grimur’s fingers twitched on the haft of his axe. Around him the witch ice thickened on the navigation chamber’s walls, and the storm beat on their hull.

‘Peace, brother,’ whispered Grimur, although he did not know why. ‘Lead us true. Do not fail us now.’

A storm was coming. Silvanus lay on the floor of his tower and wept. The tears were pink with blood against his white skin. He could feel the warp itch and tug at the edges of his thoughts. They had ridden a storm to reach Apollonia, and now it seemed to have followed them, circling the moon, its growing fury grating against reality like claws. He could taste it, could see it sometimes out of the corner of his eyes when he opened them. He kept them clamped shut now, but even in the darkness behind his eyelids the storm still laughed at him.

‘Go away,’ he moaned. ‘Please, please leave me alone.’

The chamber door hissed open. Silvanus did not look up. It would be one of the other slaves come to bring him food, or… He did not care who it was. The storm was inching closer with every beat of his heart. The laughter was a raw chuckle of sharpening steel and dry bones now.

The floor rang like a struck gong. Silvanus looked up, eyes wide. Colours blurred and mixed at the edge of his sight, but even through his tears he could see the shape that stood above him. It towered to the ceiling, a brutal approximation to a human form made from pistons and flame-orange plating.

‘What are you…’ he began, then realised what he was talking to, and swallowed. Above him Credence cycled its shoulder plates. The whir of gears grumbled like a resigned sigh.

‘Navigator.’ The word boomed from its speaker grilles. Silvanus clamped his hands over his ears, but in the ringing echo he recognised the recorded voice of Ignis. The cannon on Credence’s back turned from side to side, before arming with a cold metal clang. ‘You. Come. With. Me.’

The seismic shell rushed into the void on a tongue of flame. Twenty-seven milliseconds later its secondary charge fired. Rockets drove the fifty-metre-long metal dart down into gravity’s grasp. Thin atmosphere skidded down its length. Its point began to glow. Thirty-six seconds after it had left the muzzle of its gun, it shed its primary rockets. Curved sheets of ceramite came free, caught the moon’s atmosphere and snapped away. Now a finned blade of silver, the warhead fell, spinning, drawing a luminous line across the moon’s black sky. Inlaid patterns of golden wire began to melt from the warhead casing. White-yellow drops formed spirals in its wake. The slim silver arrow struck the grey crust and vanished. Dust plumed into the thin air, rising high on the weak gravity. Driving deep, its adamantine casing glowed as it drilled through rock and compacted dust.

The warhead reached its final depth and detonated. It had lived in flight for a hundred and seventy-two seconds. The surface of the moon crazed around the impact site, collapsed and then exploded upwards. The ground rippled like water, dust rising in waves across grey dune seas. Rocks sheared and slumped into chasms. At the centre of the detonation a jagged wound stared up through the spreading clouds of dust like a shattered pupil in a blind eye.

Ignis watched as the breaking of Apollonia’s surface unfolded across his helmet display. His armour was shaking around his flesh, ringing in time with the Word of Hermes’s rolling fire. In his right eye the latticework of fire and explosions above the moon multiplied in complexity.

The moon’s defences were still active. Slaved weapon platforms, drifts of mines and deadfall torpedoes glittered like chains of jewels hung against the sable of space. The defences were formidable indeed, but not enough, never enough. Grids of turbolaser fire reached out towards the ships of Ahriman’s fleet. Energy shields shattered. The fleet replied. Torpedoes slid into weapon platforms to explode in flowers of white light. Broadsides of plasma fire sliced through orbital stations. Globules of burning matter tumbled through a haze of vented gas and liquid. The numbers, the timings, the angles, all were just parts of a growing pattern which he had set in motion and he controlled.

Something stirred at the back of his mind, and he felt a silent chuckle shiver through him. He stood at the pattern’s centre, his mind linked to a psyker on each of the vessels, his soul feeling the warp echo as the numbers and angles built and built. The warp spun around the moon, spiralling into it like a whirlpool, pressing close, thinning the skin of all things. The moon itself glowed like a sun in his mind. Space close to it blurred with skeins of colour. Distances seemed to change as he looked at them, and smudges of unlight crackled across its surface. He could see it with his soul, like lightning bleaching storm clouds to white. It had been a long time since he had let the ratios of ruin have full sway, and the possibility was just too tempting, and far, far too dangerous.

Ignis shook his head, and went back to watching his ships strip Apollonia’s defences a piece at a time. Another weapons platform fragmented into fire. Thick lines of las-light flickered out from another platform and drew a line across the hull of a ship, slicing off sheets of pale bone and oily blue growth from the hull. The ship rolled, its engines misfiring.

The Synetica, thought Ignis, and recalculated the fleet’s effectiveness based on this loss. Numbers spun through his awareness. His hearts beat faster, as wild deviations entered into the matrix of destruction. The Synetica exploded, its hulls bursting with fire like a corpse bloated with air. Behind the fire cloud the rest of the fleet moved around the moon. Flowers of plasma bloomed amongst the las-light and the stitched lines of turret fire. It was beautiful to Ignis’s eyes, a sculpture in calculation etched in fire. The calculations resolved and became a sum which reached into the infinite. All was ready.

+Surface breach open,+ he sent.

Astraeos lay bound to his bed of steel. Consciousness returned to him again, and with it came pain. The empty sockets of his eyes ached with the dull rhythm of his pulse. The bolts securing the metal hood to his scalp were hard points of sharpness. The needles linked to the tangle of injector tubes twitched every now and again, as they sucked blood from his veins and pumped drugs in. Over it all the sickening shadow of his warp-blocking guardians smothered every thought and sensation in a coiling blackness. The shackles were vibrating against his flesh. The edges had rubbed and cut into the meat of his arms. And he could feel dry blood layering his skin.

This time when he awoke he made no sound. He had already emerged from the drug coma several times over the last… in fact he had no idea how long it had been since the inquisitor had left. There had just been dreams in which he would see the home world of his Chapter burn again and again. The dream always ended in the last moments before he fled the inferno. He would look back through the flames and see the silver warriors, and the Dreadnought striding at their head. He would wake, as now, to the bitter sharpness of his imprisonment. He would lie for a few moments in the blackness of his blindness, then the needles would jerk in his flesh, and the drugs cast him back to his dreams of a burning fortress and a dying world.

He kept his breathing low, his pulse controlled. The vibration of the shackles and the slab beneath him was a new sensation to wake to. He thought he knew what it was – battle. The ship he was on was firing its guns and receiving fire, recoil and explosions juddering its metal bones. He tried to judge the severity of the battle from the shudder of the metal; intense was his guess, a big storm of a fight.

Is this the death of Ahriman? he wondered. Have I woken to the moment when the Inquisition enact their execution? A hollow space opened within him at the thought. My last oath broken.

He felt his pulse rise, fought to slow it, but too late. A machine chimed nearby.

‘Biorhythms rising,’ said a metallic voice. He heard a rustle of fabric and a click of gears as the tech-priest came close. He opened his mouth, drew breath. The needles in his flesh twitched and he felt the dull hammer of the sedatives fall.

‘No–’ he managed, and then he was falling back into soft darkness and the rising crackle of memories.

Hemellion sat and listened to the scrape of steel on stone. Every now and again, he stopped and raised the crescent of metal up, so that its edge caught the light of the oil lamp. He turned the blade over, watching its sharpness emerge. A distant clunk rang dully through the small room. Beside him the flame from the bowl of burning oil fluttered. He turned his eyes up to the shadow-clung corners of the chamber. The sound faded. He dropped his head and started sharpening again.

The blade had been a piece of metal he had pulled from the edge of a floor. He had been sharpening it for days now. First by the light of the glow-globes, then in the half dark when the globes had failed a few hours before.

He began again. The stone scraped down the edge, and he listened as it became sharper.

He thought of Helana back on Vohal, scraping a stone down the edge of her sword every morning. She had stopped every now and then, raised the sword, looked at the edge and continued. Ten years. Ten years of keeping her blade sharp to protect him from assassins. She had been one of the last to die. He thought of looking down into the fortress courtyard on so many mornings, of the sparks flying into cold winter air as the grindstone sharpened swords, and scythes, and knives. He thought of the corpses he had seen in the last days before Vohal died. Ragged smiles grinned up at him from necks, and he saw the knives still clasped in the hands of the corpses who lay furthest from the others. Mercy, a gift given at a knife’s edge at the end of hope.

He thought, and listened to the whisper of the stone on the blade’s edge.

He thought of the dust on the cracked lips of starving mouths.

Dust.

That was all that remained.

Dust scattered on the wind, dropped from an uncaring hand.

Ahriman’s eyes had looked down at him, and then Sanakht’s.

He thought, and thought, his memories winding around his hate. He did not think of the passing time, or of the shake and shudder of the ship, or why he thought of it now as a ship and not a city. He did not wonder why no other thoughts entered his mind, or what he was going to do. He thought of the blade, of the razor scrape of the stone on its edge, of its sharpness.

+Send us,+ sent Ahriman. Light shot into the air from the serpentine patterns cut into the floor. Sanakht felt the warp twist around them. He fought to keep his head from spinning. He stood beside Ahriman. Beside them sixteen Rubricae stood in two perfect circles. The chamber was a blur beyond a brilliant curtain. Rainbow light shattered from the crystal pyramid above them.

Sanakht’s lips peeled back from his teeth as pressure built in his skull. The transposition to the inside of Apollonia was possible only now that its shell was broken. Wild currents of warp energy surrounded the moon like a shifting mesh. Something about the moon itself seemed to cause these distortions, as though to protect it from exactly what Ahriman was doing. Opening up a gate through such a tangle of warp eddies and streams was close to suicide.

The breach blown in the moon’s crust by the seismic charge had opened a channel of opportunity. That channel was narrow and dangerous, but Ahriman was still going to take it. They could have dropped into the labyrinth by gunship, but he had wanted to get as close to the core of the moon as possible. That, at least, was what he had said.

The curtains of light surrounding Sanakht and Ahriman turned blinding white. Ahriman’s focused power screeched around Sanakht’s mind. The chamber vanished around them and he was streaking through oblivion like a burning arrow shot at the night sky.

XVII
PATTERNS

Darkness ahead, darkness behind, thought Sanakht, as he followed Ahriman. The tunnel around them was circular and completely smooth, as though carved from the black rock by water. No light reflected from the walls, floor or ceiling. The Rubricae’s eyes shone cold and lifeless in their helms, but did nothing more than sketch the lines of their armoured heads. Even his helmet display could not pierce the gloom. The warp did not help either. He had tried to reach out with his mind, but at once had found his focus ripped away as though caught in a racing river.

The Labyrinth. That was what Ahriman had called it, and Sanakht now understood why. The moon was not solid. Tunnels extended beneath its surface, forming a vast honeycomb of polished black rock. At its core, at the end of a path twisted through the dark, lay the Athenaeum. The warp was here, running through the walls and the still air of the tunnels, pouring down to some invisible depths. It was not just a labyrinth in the physical realm, it was a labyrinth of the psyche. It felt familiar, though he had no idea why, like walking through the ruin of a long-lost home. How deep they had descended or how far there remained to go, he did not know. Ahriman alone moved with purpose, floating ahead of them, robes rippling as though in an invisible wind.

Sanakht felt the sudden tug of the secret that he had buried within himself beneath layers of thought baffles and masking. It nestled there, warm and tempting with its promise. It would begin soon. No, he would not allow it to come to the surface. Not yet. He was too close and there was still too much risk.

Ahead of him he saw Ahriman twitch, and then stop. The Rubricae froze around him. Sanakht felt his hearts still. Had his mask of surface thoughts slipped? Had Ahriman looked deeper into his mind for some reason? No – he would have known. Weak as he was, he would have known, and besides what cause would Ahriman have not to trust him?

+Is something amiss?+ asked Sanakht, and heard his thoughts echo as real sound.

‘Amiss… amiss… amiss…’

+Is this labyrinth different from what the inquisitor told you?+

‘Told you… you… you…’

Ahriman turned where he hung, and looked up as though at a sky which was not there.

‘It is not a labyrinth,’ said Ahriman with his true voice. No echo followed. ‘These tunnels and the warp currents which surround them are simply a by-product of how it formed. It is a map, carved out of the moon’s cold core by the warp. The whole structure is a stabilised ball of substance and aether.’

‘It was made by chance?’ said Sanakht.

Ahriman’s reply cracked dully through the air.

‘No, nothing here is chance. Its passages are a map of trickery and deceit, and the warp vibrates through it.’ Ahriman pivoted back to face the darkness ahead. ‘It was made by thoughts pouring from beyond into reality. It is an echo of those thoughts, like a footprint left on the soft sand beside an ocean.’

The Rubricae clattered back into motion as Ahriman glided forwards. Sanakht followed, his hand brushing the pommels of his swords.

‘Whose thoughts?’ asked Sanakht, as he came level with Ahriman. ‘You said that this place was shaped by thoughts, but whose?’

‘Our father’s,’ said Ahriman.

Hemellion stepped onto the Sycorax’s bridge. He stopped, staring down at the worn brass of the floor, noticing the old marks cut into the head of each rivet.

Why am I here? He knew where he was. He had been here before, many times. He knew that, knew that this was the… bridge? Yes. That was it. He knew that this was the centre of the ship…

But what is a ship?

A figure moved past him, moving fast, its tattered robe flicking in its wake. He blinked. He was not sure he knew what a ship was or why he knew that he stood on one, but he knew that it did not matter, and neither did why he was here. All that mattered was that he was here.

He looked up, his eyes slowly focusing. Something was happening. He could see figures moving about the tiered pits of metal sunk into the bridge’s deck. They wore yellow and had masks like animals. He stared at one. Its mask was in the shape of a snake or a lizard with scales of opal.

Cyrabor… Was that their name? It felt like it should be.

More cries filled the air, rising over the metal clatter. There was some kind of panic, he was sure, but it all seemed very distant. He was where he needed to be, and that was good.

He looked down at his hands. They looked old. How had that happened?

No. That was right, he was old. He had grown and lived on a world of stone, and rain. He was not there now, he was here, on a ship…

He began to shuffle forwards. The silver chains around his ankles clinked against the brass floor. No one seemed to look at him. Shouts and clanks of metal echoed up to the high roof above. Black smoke chugged from a cluster of slab-like machines. Strange thick smells filled his mouth and nose. He kept moving, weaving between hurrying Cyrabor. In the distance the command throne rose above the smoke, sound and rushing figures. He could see a red figure on the throne, made small by distance and the vastness of the chamber.

In the folds of his robe the sharpened sickle of metal sat in his hand. It felt cold. He could not remember why he had it, or where it had come from, but that did not matter. All that mattered was that he was here.

He kept moving.

Ignis glanced up as Credence came to stand beside him. He did not need to ask if the Navigator was secure; he could feel the pathetic man’s thoughts scratching at the walls of his new prison.

The automaton clattered and buzzed at him.

‘All is well,’ he said, then nodded to himself. It was true, all was as it should be, every piece was in place, every factor in the pattern calculated, and every progression unfolding on its necessary path. His mind was connected to other minds throughout the fleet. Some of those minds commanded ships, some simply stood beside those that did. That web of coordination had been necessary to get Ahriman into the correct position, but it was not necessary now, at least not in the same configuration. He broke the connection to several minds, and focused on others, bringing them to the surface. They had all been waiting for this moment; all of them stood ready to act.

+Now,+ he sent, and in his mind the pattern bloomed into full life.

Carmenta saw the first shots and thought it was a mistake. Ahriman’s fleet was spread in high orbit above Apollonia. Some clustered together, others spread far apart, arranged by Ignis in a pattern that she had not tried to understand. The last of the moon’s defences had been stripped and most of the ships had settled into silence.

The Malicant was the first ship to move. Shaped like a serrated spearhead of soot-crusted copper, it was the warship of Mavahedron and his slave clans. It pirouetted away from the rest of the fleet on a burst of thrust. Carmenta watched it, her sensors drawn by the movement. The Malicant fired its guns. Light raked the void, and exploded around a pair of black-hulled frigates. Carmenta saw the shockwave as their shields collapsed, and suddenly time was crawling as surprise flooded her. The Malicant fired again, and the frigates exploded one after another.

Then time snapped forwards, and more ships were breaking formation and firing. Sound exploded from the vox. Cries of shock and rage rang through Carmenta’s sensors. Fire slashed the dark. Shields burst. Plasma and laser energy carved into hulls, and atmosphere vented into the void. Where there had been order, there was now a spinning tangle of ships scrambling to bring their guns to bear. Where there had been a single fleet there was now the fire and rage of battle.

Treachery, or terrible error, it did not matter; Ahriman’s fleet was tearing itself apart. She had always doubted that the ties of allegiance binding the fractured warbands together would hold, and now they were shattering before her eyes. She would not allow it. Orders flowed from Carmenta into the Sycorax. She began to turn, her sensors reaching for firing solutions, tiered batteries of her guns rotating to targets.

She froze. The impulses commanding her weapons teetered on the edge of completion. She had missed something, something obvious yet significant. She gazed at the ships spinning wildly above Apollonia, at the streaks of flame and the fires kindling in wounded hulls. Then she realised what had held her will from firing. None of the ships tearing at each other had fired on her. She sat untouched, while the rest of Ahriman’s fleet began to burn.

No, not all of the rest. She saw it then, the ships that floated amongst the unfolding carnage, untouched, serene.

What was this? What was happening?

She thought of her words to Ahriman.

‘Remember that they followed Amon once, and that they tried to destroy you.’

She felt numb. Treachery: it was the only answer. Ahriman had gone, and now his enemies moved against him.

Her will surged into her guns, and her sensors reached and locked onto targets.

The silver ship ripped into existence with an exploding pressure wave of aetheric energy.

The Sigillite’s Oath punched through the fabric of reality like an arrow through ragged cloth. Its engines burned to nova brightness. Around the fire-ringed moon of Apollonia ships began to turn like vulture heads looking up from a corpse. The strike cruiser accelerated, twisting its course into a corkscrew as the first distant salvoes streaked past it. Its own guns were still out of range, but would not be for long.

Transit from the warp to reality was dangerous. Making that jump within the bounds of a star system was suicidal. The smallest of navigational errors and a ship could exit into the heart of a sun or the core of a planet. Few ships ever attempted such a feat and survived, but that was exactly what the Sigillite’s Oath had done. Steered by the finest Navigators in the Imperium, it had cut through the warp storm gathering around Apollonia, and emerged almost on top of Ahriman’s fleet.

Cendrion felt the backwash from the warp exit spill over him as he marched through the pulsing yellow alert light. His brothers marched beside him. The clank and hiss of armour echoed in time with the ring of their strides. The shriek of torn reality was fading in his mind, but he could taste the rise of the growing storm. It tasted of lightning and blood. Above it the psychic voices of the Eighth Brotherhood rose in communion.

+Mahalalel stands ready.+

+Iofiel stands ready.+

+Gadal stands ready.+

The sendings soared through Cendrion’s awareness. He could feel the ghosts of his brothers’ thoughts. Barakon’s psycannon was a brief weight in his hands. The dark closed over him as the hatch of a Stormraven hissed shut behind Sabaoc. Pain itched up his spine and neck as he was Anak waking in the embrace of his Dreadnought coffin. He listened, allowing the walls between his mind and his brothers’ minds to dissolve. They were one, a brotherhood joined in blood and soul.

+Strike force Ishen stands ready. Launch pattern locked. The blade is drawn.+

+Strike force Sangrian stands ready. The blade is drawn.+

+Strike force Caspian stands ready. Teleportation targets confirmed. The blade is drawn.+

‘They have already broken through to the labyrinth fortress?’ Izdubar’s words pulled at Cendrion’s focus. The inquisitor lord strode ahead of him, his oil-black armour gleaming in the pulsing light. The two other inquisitors, Malkira and Erionas, walked beside him. Both were armed and armoured. Malkira was a giant of pistons and chrome, Erionas a spectre in grey robes and layered red plate. Cavor followed them, his body bulked in an armoured enviro-suit. Holstered pistols and bandoliers of bullets clinked in time with his steps.

‘Apollonia’s surface is breached,’ said Erionas. He was breathing hard, as though not used to moving so swiftly. ‘An assault is likely to be in progress. But…’ Erionas stopped in his tracks, crystal eyes dancing with data.

‘What?’ barked Izdubar.

‘The enemy fleet is firing on itself.’

‘An unexpected advantage,’ nodded Izdubar. ‘How long until the rest of the fleet catches up to us?’

‘We don’t know,’ said Erionas. ‘The storm is rising up fast. Perhaps they will not arrive at all.’

‘Then we stand alone,’ said Izdubar.

They turned a corner and a blast door peeled open in front of them. Before them a wide chamber opened and spread into the distance on either side. Machines towered into the space above, crawling with lightning. Incense and ozone hung thick in the air.

+Ship weapons approaching range. We are at the moment of execution.+

Cendrion stopped at the centre of a circular depression in the deck. Behind him the thirty brothers of his strike force followed to stand in clusters around him. The inquisitors stood next to him. He could hear the pulse of their thoughts: Malkira’s eagerness bright beside Erionas’s cold indifference, Cavor’s fear of what they were about to do bleeding out of him even as he tried to control it. Above them the vast machines began to keen. The beat of the yellow alert lights rose. The warp was churning around them now, scraping the skin of reality thin.

He glanced at Izdubar. The inquisitor lord looked back, the red eyes of his lion helm glowing bright.

He nodded once.

Cendrion blinked an amber rune at the edge of his sight. The yellow light became red. A heat haze blur rose around the machines.

He looked at the red rune. Cendrion could feel the teleporters poised to reach into the warp, gripping it like fists ready to yank them through space and time. In their gunships and boarding torpedoes the rest of the brotherhood waited to be unleashed into the void.

+Strike force Cendrion stands ready.+ He blinked the activation rune. The machines shrieked. +The blade falls.+

Ignis was shaking. Geometry glowed in the air of the crucible. Lines and circles broke, reformed and connected into a different pattern. This was how he saw the battle as Ahriman’s fleet consumed itself, not as the projection of machines, but as arcs of warp fire cut into reality. His mind held all the values of strength, and his senses saw the death he wrought as it created geometry in the beyond. The storm rose in answer. The patterns and ratios written in death and fire pulled the billowing fury of the storm on and on, faster and faster. It was coming. It was almost complete. Almost.

The silver ship flickered into his awareness. It streaked across the void, dancing between the fires of the slaughter. It was fast, very fast, and more importantly it should not have been there. For a second his mind just stopped. The plan, so carefully crafted, was about to fall apart.

‘No,’ he gasped, and the word misted cold white in the heat of the crucible. ‘No, no, no! Not now. Not now.’

The growing pattern began to change, slowly at first then faster and faster. Lines and sacred ratios shifted, values exploded to infinities, and all the while the warp roared in the voice of an oncoming storm.

Too fast. His mind danced with calculations realigning the fleet into a thousand possible configurations, homing in on one that would still fit.

Behind him Credence was clattering in machine cant.

He could still do it, he could still bring the pattern into alignment. The plan could still work…

His mind stopped. The geometry of his battle design began to crumble into shadow and sickly light.

It was not supposed to happen like this.

Alarms began to shriek around him.

The shockwave of teleportation displacement blew him across the crucible.

He rose in time to see the silver-clad Space Marines come at him in a blur of blades and gunfire.

+What was that?’+ Sanakht sent.

The smooth walls of the labyrinth were ringing with the clatter of feet and the thrum of power armour. The pressure of the warp was tight around his mind. His teeth ached, and he could taste burning sugar and stagnant water. Ahriman was gliding beside him, robes rippling as though in a wind. The Rubricae marched behind.

The walls shook again.

+What–+

+Battle,+ said Ahriman, still moving, not even looking around. +The Inquisition have raced to stop us before we can reach the Athenaeum.+

+You have seen this?+

+No, but who else could it be?+ asked Ahriman.

Sanakht twisted to look. A glow formed in the darkness behind them, growing even as he stared at it. A high keening filled his ears.

+How could they find us in this?+

+It is their fortress,+ replied Ahriman. +They move swiftly, but we are close, very close. I know it.+

Maroth began to run as soon as he was in the passage. The silver doors at the end of the narrow corridor were already glowing, the runes on their surface reacting to his presence. He breathed a curse and they guttered to shadow.

He had nearly left it too late. Things were moving faster than they were supposed to.

He raised a hand and the doors hinged open before him. He bowed his head as he crossed the threshold. The chamber beyond was white with frost. Icicles hung from the chains holding his master’s host. The body floating above him had changed again. Skeletal wings hung from its shoulders, the tips of iridescent feathers budding at their edges. Its head was smooth skin broken by a wide grin of teeth. An extra set of joints had appeared in its arms and legs. It looked down at Maroth slowly. Air hissed from between its teeth. Even without eyes Maroth could see his master in his mind as a shadow defined by blue fire.

‘Sire,’ he began.

+Yes.+ The daemon’s voice crackled like burning paper. +He will call me soon. This part of me must be free when that comes to pass. I must be able to go to him.+

‘Sire…’

+Rise, Maroth.+

Maroth stood slowly, head still bowed. He was shaking, his dented armour rattling.

+You have served me well.+

‘Please,’ said Maroth.

+But you are a weak soul.+ The daemon hung in silence and turned its sightless head, looking at Maroth. +You have been part of something greater than you understand.+

‘No.’ Maroth forced the word out of his mouth. His flesh was trembling as though he was a human child standing lost in a blizzard. He could feel his tongue burning behind his teeth. ‘No…’

+Maroth,+ the daemon purred. Pain skewered through Maroth. He tried to cry out but his tongue had gone. He felt hands reach into his muscles, felt fingers that were not his own flex. His hand began to rise. +You will serve me once more, Maroth.+

Maroth’s hands were reaching for the daemonhost’s pale skin. The fingertips began to burn.

You said I would not die, he screamed inside his skull. You said I would rise.

+You will, my broken son. You will.+

Carmenta saw the silver ship skim the atmosphere of Apollonia and spiral back out into the fire-kissed void. It was a ghost, a blur in her sensors like a moving patch of fog. Around it the ships of Ahriman’s broken fleet spun about each other, firing and taking fire. She had to reach the silver ship, had to burn it to nothing. It was the Inquisition, she was sure. But still she did not fire.

She could feel the Sycorax waiting for her to unleash it, waiting for her to let it become. She could no longer remember who she was. She tried to remember her name but there was just a growing pressure in her mind like a hand clamping over her skull. Screams of static howled in her sensors. Outside her hull the stars were shimmering as though through a heat haze.

It is coming, my sister, said a voice in her thoughts. It is coming as it was called. Can’t you feel it? You will not live through this. Give yourself to us. Let us be one. Let us rise.

No, she thought. No. I will not. I am Carmenta, I am mistress of this ship. It is mine. It is…

Her thoughts ran out, and she was just aware of the battle, of her guns fuming heat as they hungered to fire, of the warp rising in a storm wave just beyond the veil.

The Sycorax reached into her senses and embraced her. Her skin was iron, and her heart was the roiling fire of plasma reactors.

No… I am Carmenta… I am Titan Ch… I am… I am… I…

The blade was cold as Hemellion touched it. The command throne loomed from the polished deck. There seemed to be some form of panic. Lights pulsed on and off across the vast chamber. Metal screeches and rumbles rolled like thunder through air, which smelled like smoke and storm charge. Figures rushed past him, sound beat against his ears, but he moved without seeing or hearing them. His fingers closed around the fabric grip of the blade. He took another step, and another.

Your world died, said a thought in his head. It felt different, softer, deeper, like a command.

My world died.

The anger came then, bright and clear like a sun rising above the dawn horizon.

You were made a slave, said the voice in his mind.

I was made a slave. He had been a king once. He had tried to rule well, to do his duty to the Imperium, to be just, and fair, and without malice.

Ahriman took that from you.

Ahriman took that from me. The sorcerer had made him a king of dust. He should have died there, in the dust of his world. He had failed his people; he had failed them all. What is a king if he rules only the bones of the dead?

You lived for a reason, said the voice, but Hemellion was not listening now. He did not need to listen. His mind was already a narrowing point of fury. He was not feeling the deck beneath his steps. You lived for vengeance.

He was at the foot of the throne now.

My world, my land, my people…

He climbed one step higher. Carmenta sat unmoving on her throne, her form hidden beneath robes and cables.

My realm is ashes and dust…

He was beside the throne. Carmenta stirred, but did not raise her head.

As his realm will be…

He pulled the blade from beneath his robes. Carmenta quivered again. He leant closer. Her hood-framed face jerked up. Two glass lens eyes flared with light and recognition.

‘Hemellion?’ croaked a voice that sounded so human.

XVIII
REVELATION

The Sycorax went dark. Her engines spluttered then cut out. Her guns went silent. The arc of her course twisted as thrusters fired at random. Night fell in her hull, flowing down through the kilometres of passages and chambers like a cascade of black water. In the deep engine spaces hundreds of eyes that had never seen the light of stars looked upwards as their world turned black. Gunfire became strobing light in the passages and chambers as gun-servitors and thrall warriors opened up on each other. Lightning ran across every surface, cackling with a madman’s glee.

In a deep and forgotten corridor an armoured figure in a hound-shaped helm raised his head as the feeble light cut out. Beyond the open door behind him, the pale, mutated body thrashed in its web of chains. The sigils worked into the silver chains and shackles pulsed with a dull blue light. It was trying to scream, but the only sound to come from its mouth was a rattling hiss. The flesh host held within the chamber had served it as needed, had kept part of its essence anchored in reality close to where it needed to be. But now that flesh was a limitation, and so it had taken Maroth’s skin and bone as its own. The wards and spells woven into the chamber, which had been its home but never its prison, needed a soul to hold. So it had exchanged places with Maroth, one soul for another. Maroth’s essence and mind now thrashed and hissed from the body held in the web of chains, while his body became a vessel. That would not last; Maroth’s body would burn out with change in time, but it did not need it to last for long.

The figure in the hound-shaped helm gazed back. The chained creature thrashed more wildly. Then the figure raised a hand and the silver doors closed. Flames flared from the torches lining the corridor. A trembling ran through the deck. Night filled the Sycorax, and beyond it all the pieces moved as they should, unknowing and blind. Things were almost at the point that it required. It just needed to wait now. Once when it had lived it might have indulged in hope at such a point, but hope was only needed when faced with uncertainty, and though matters still had to run their course the mortals involved were nothing if not predictable. What they imagined made them unique simply made their choices certain.

No, everything would proceed as it needed to.

The figure began to walk. The blue flames blinked out in its wake, and the shadows crawled beneath its steps.

The darkness closed over Sanakht and Ahriman when they saw the doors.

The doorway was circular, an open mouth stopped with a plug of copper and silver. Faces circled its centre. Rags of silver covered the sculpted eyes and mouths. Intricate designs spiralled out from that centre. Sanakht recognised them – they were a mirror of those that had once closed a door on dead Prospero. They were the marks that had guarded the sanctum of Magnus the Red. The warp dispersed as the recognition filled his mind.

The blankness began on the edge of his thoughts, and moved inwards like night falling across a sun-drenched land. The sensation of the warp flowing around him vanished. Chill clutched at his skin. He stopped in his tracks.

In front of him Ahriman tumbled from the air to the floor. The Rubricae kept moving, and then one joint after another locked. Juddering, they turned their heads towards Sanakht. The lights in their eyes dimmed, spluttered, and went out. The dead suits of armour looked down at him.

They must be screaming, but I cannot hear them any more.

Silence closed around him. His breath and the beat of his hearts rang inside his helmet. He took a step towards Ahriman, aware of the buzz of his armour. He could hear running feet close by. He wondered how much time he had. He thought of all the years, the slow centuries, the dead and lost heaped in the desolation of his past. He thought of Khayon, of Amon, of all the rest. His hand went to his power sword. The steel whispered free. Ahriman was pulling himself slowly from the floor. The sorcerer seemed shrunken, as though he had withered while staying the same size.

‘It’s the keepers of this place,’ said Sanakht, softly. Ahriman looked around. The vox clicked. Wet laboured breath filled Sanakht’s ears as Ahriman fought to speak. ‘They wait beyond that door. An order of untouchables to watch over the Athenaeum. We are close enough now that the warp is lost to us.’

Ahriman was reeling where he stood, as though the floor beneath him was a wave-tossed deck.

‘Sanakht…’ rasped Ahriman. His hand rose towards the swordsman as though trying to reach something to hold onto. Sanakht did not move. Part of him could not believe that it had worked; that the misdirection and plans had brought him to this point. Ahriman drew a rattling breath to speak again. ‘San–’

‘Does it hurt?’ said Sanakht and the words echoed in the stillness. ‘To be without the warp again, to be just flesh? Is the silver eating your hearts yet – does it hurt, old friend?’ Ahriman shivered and tried to straighten. Effort screamed from every movement. Sanakht paced slowly forwards, his movements careful and controlled. ‘This was a secret the inquisitor witch never told you – that you would have to walk through the dark without the warp to reach the Athenaeum. But I knew.’ He stopped three paces from Ahriman. The power sword crackled to life in his hand. Cold, bound lightning made the gloom into dancing shadows. ‘You have done so much to get us here, to lead us into the next step of your design, but this moment is mine, not yours.’ He took another step closer. Ahriman’s breath was a ragged hiss on the vox. ‘Even now your fleet is being torn apart, your few allies are dead, or have turned against you.’

In the tunnels behind them the glow of light which had followed them grew brighter.

‘Even our enemies are here,’ said Sanakht, glancing around at the light and then back to Ahriman. ‘This is the end, Ahriman. There is nothing beyond this, no dreams of salvation, no false hope.’

Sanakht raised the power sword, its lightning crackling over the blank plate of Ahriman’s helm. With a flick the power field vanished. Sanakht held the deactivated sword for a second, and then tossed it at Ahriman’s feet. Slowly he drew his force sword, the lifeless steel remaining cold, its runes unlit. ‘I could never face you with the warp open to your call. But here, here on the threshold of our father’s secrets, this is just a sword, and you. You are just flesh.’

Ahriman turned his head, and looked at the sword at his feet.

‘Why?’ he rasped.

‘Pick up the sword,’ said Sanakht.

‘The Legion–’

‘Is dead!’ roared Sanakht, rage sudden and bright in his skull. ‘Everything we believed was a lie, every decision was flawed. We are lost. We are damned, Ahriman.’

Ahriman shook his head.

‘No, no, we can rise, my friend. We will rise again.’

‘Pick up the sword,’ said Sanakht, taut control in each word.

Ahriman reached down, and gripped the hilt of Sanakht’s power sword. He straightened stiffly to full height.

‘Don’t do this, Sanakht,’ said Ahriman, his voice a dry whisper. ‘There can be another way. This is a path you don’t have to choose.’

‘Light the sword,’ snarled Sanakht. Ahriman raised the power sword, and it shook in his grip. The lightning field unfurled down the blade. Sanakht raised his own sword in salute. The vox clicked as though Ahriman was about to say something.

Sanakht unfolded in a blur of cuts. Ahriman moved back, sword rising to meet Sanakht’s and finding only air. Sanakht read the sorcerer’s movements, fast for a human, but slow for him, so, so slow. The sword was a flicker blur in his hand, each feint pulling Ahriman’s guard and footwork apart. Their swords did not even touch. Sanakht ducked a blow, spun and slammed a kick into Ahriman’s torso. The impact juddered up Sanakht’s leg as Ahriman lifted from his feet. Sanakht spun back and cut Ahriman as he fell: once, twice, three times. Blood sprayed through the dark, splashing the passage walls with a soft patter. The severed hand clattered to the floor a second later.

Ahriman skidded across the smooth stone towards the sealed doors to the Athenaeum. Sanakht walked forwards, sword spinning in his grip. Behind him the growing glow filled the tunnel mouth.

Ahriman tried to rise again. Blood glossed his robes and armour. The stump of his right hand pulsed liquid into a growing pool. A razor line between the chest and lower torso plates was weeping thick, red runnels. Another wound grinned across Ahriman’s lower back. None of them were kill wounds, at least not ones that would kill fast.

‘Do you ever wonder why I saved you?’ asked Sanakht. ‘On Sortarius, when Khayon broke the pact, do you wonder why I stopped him?’

‘You…’ rasped Ahriman, ‘were loyal.’

‘I never believed in the Rubric, Ahriman. How could I believe in what I could not understand?’ Sanakht felt the smile form and fade on his face. He bent down, and released the seals of Ahriman’s helm. The face beneath was ashen pale, and gleaming with sweat. The pupils in Ahriman’s eyes grew and shrank as they tried to focus. Sanakht stared back. ‘But I believed in you.’

Sanakht looked to where the power sword lay amongst the spreading pool of Ahriman’s blood. He picked it up and stood. He looked down at Ahriman.

‘Your life was mine from the moment I saved you,’ said Sanakht. ‘Every moment you have lived since then has been mine. The futures you dream of are not yours. They are mine, and they end here.’

He dropped the sword next to Ahriman’s remaining hand.

‘Stand up. Take the sword.’

Ahriman shook his head.

‘Sanakht…’

‘Stand up! Stand up, damn you. Take the sword.’

‘I knew,’ said Ahriman.

Sanakht did not move. He could not move. Ahriman looked up at him, then closed his eyes and shook his head. ‘I have always known.’

Sanakht felt the words punch through him. He stared at Ahriman, sword in hand, able to move but frozen. Ahriman coughed and blood wetted his lips. He looked again at Sanakht, and maybe there was supposed to be sorrow in those blue eyes, but Sanakht felt cold spread through his blood under their gaze. ‘I brought you here,’ said Ahriman. Behind Sanakht the glow of approaching light brightened in the tunnel mouth. ‘I brought you all here.’

Ignis saw the Grey Knights unfold from the lightning of their teleportation. Five figures, their armour silver white and black shadow in the flash of light. He opened his mouth to give Credence a command, but too slow. The Grey Knights fired. His eyes saw the muzzle flare. A part of his brain that would never stop until he was dead read the angles of flight, and the heat pattern of the bolts igniting as they kissed the air. That same part of his brain began a calculation which would never complete but whose outcome was certain; he was going to end here.

Credence’s fist hit Ignis and shot him through the air. The bolts exploded against the wall of the crucible behind where Ignis had stood. Ignis hit the floor. The Grey Knights charged, still firing. Credence turned its shoulder plates into the wall of fire. Explosions rang off its armour. Piston-driven legs tensed under the impacts, then stepped forward. The cannon on the automaton’s back opened up with a stuttering roar. Each shell was the size of a clenched fist, their sigil-etched tips heavy with explosives. A Grey Knight vanished as three shells reduced his head and torso to a tangle of ceramite splinters and pulped flesh. Credence shifted stance and the gun raked fire into two other Grey Knights. One fell, his legs blown from beneath him in a cloud of bone splinters and shrapnel. A third spun back, the left side of his body a ruin of silver and wet red. Twin jets of flame spat from Credence’s fists, and cooked the flesh of the dead warriors inside their broken armour. The surviving two Grey Knights did not hesitate. The air around their blades shimmered, keening with sharpness.

Ignis pulled himself to standing and shrugged the lightning claws free from the backs of his fists. The blades lit with a whipcrack of static. Anger cut sharp in his mind. It was not supposed to have happened like this, it was so nearly perfect and now it might all become nothing.

The two Grey Knights reached Credence. The automaton shuffled back, torso twisting to bring its weapons to bear. The Grey Knights spun their blades down and hacked into Credence’s leg pistons. Hydraulic fluid gushed out, and hissed to vapour on the Grey Knights blades. The automaton shuddered to its knees.

Ignis charged towards the pair. One of them turned to meet him, its halberd a spinning blur. He could hear the warrior’s mind singing sharpness into the blade’s edge. The other Grey Knight raised his sword, point down, above Credence’s carapace. Ignis raised his claws as the halberd whipped towards him.

It was a fast blow, beautifully fast, but its beauty was predictable. Ignis’s crossed claws caught the blade. Light exploded from the touch. Ignis ripped the claws apart and felt the halberd blade shear into fragments. He rammed the claws forwards and the tips punched deep through hard armour and into flesh. He wrenched them back. The Grey Knight fell. Ignis heard Credence give a blurt of machine code, and saw it try and twist to strike its executioner. The last Grey Knight stabbed down with his sword. Ignis roared as his claws sliced out. He was still roaring as he slashed again and again, and the Grey Knight became shreds of sinew and ceramite.

He blinked. His orange armour was washed with blood. Red meat and silver fragments lay heaped at his feet, steaming and smoking into the reeking air.

Credence gave a clatter of binaric.

‘No,’ said Ignis, breathing slowly. ‘That will not be necessary.’

The automaton hissed static and slumped to the deck. Ignis let out a slow breath and nodded.

Ignis shook himself. Alarms were blaring through the ship. He let his mind ripple out. There were more Grey Knights, more inside the hull of his ship cutting their way through to the engine decks and reactor levels. That was not good. That was decidedly outside of what should have been happening.

+Ahriman?+ He shouted the question into the warp, but no reply came. He wondered what else had not gone as intended. He refocused his mind and saw that most of the pattern remained in the warp. The renegades were tearing themselves apart, their ambition, and spite, and treachery pouring into the Great Ocean as they bled and died under each other’s guns. Beyond it, under the star-pierced sheet of space, the storm rose in the warp. The pattern called to it in a voice of subtle numbers, invisible geometry, and inscrutable calculations. All it needed now was a final catalyst, a rod to call the lightning.

As his mind touched the pattern it seemed to pull at him, demanding to be set free. But was it the right moment, he wondered. Was this the right or the wrong time? Then he shrugged.

‘As good as any,’ he said. The fire just needed one last spark to light it, one last moment of ritual and sacrifice. He nodded to himself. He reached his mind out to the ships that filled the void with their fire. Treacherous and vile each of them, but some would answer.

+This is Master Ignis of the Word of Hermes. All who hear obey this command… +He paused. The moment gathered around him, awesome and terrible in potential, an atrocity waiting to become a revelation. +Fire on the Sycorax.+

‘I knew,’ said Ahriman again. He could feel the blood pulsing out of him even as his body fought to clot it. Sanakht had cut well. Not so deep as to kill, but deep enough to bleed him of strength. The silver was there too, scattered through his chest, cutting deeper with every suck of breath and beat of blood. The pain was a muted scream held inside a wall of his will. Worse though was the presence of the deadening minds just behind the door to the Athenaeum. He felt so weak, as though his body had been cut in two. He buried both lights of agony deep down and continued to hold Sanakht’s stare as he spoke. ‘I knew what you planned. You are here because you chose this path, but I allowed you to walk it.’

Sanakht was shaking his head.

‘No,’ breathed Sanakht. He was shaking now. ‘Not even you, not even you could–’

‘I made this moment, Sanakht. Your treachery is your own, but you walked here on a road I made for you to follow.’

‘No.’ Sanakht shook his head again. ‘You have no weapon left but lies. Your fleet is burning, Ahriman, your allies are dead, you bleed and will die with one more stroke of my sword.’

‘Then why do you hesitate, old friend?’ said Ahriman. ‘Think, how could I not know you would betray me, and if that is true, how could you succeed if I did not help you?’

‘Ignis–’

‘Is my creature, not yours. I knew of him, and Hemellion, and those whose loyalty could easily be transferred to another.’ Sanakht rocked back, and Ahriman heard the breath hiss from his lungs. ‘My fleet burns, but only with a fire that will consume the treacherous. It is a fire that will carry from this moment into the future. A storm is rising, Sanakht, and it rises at my command.’

‘Hemellion…’ Sanakht’s face was pale, drained of blood. ‘Kadin… Carmenta… the Sycorax…’

Ahriman thought of the figure swathed in her red robes, flesh withering around the tubes binding her to the ship which ate her mind. He saw Kadin rise from the blood tank on chains.

‘You won’t let me die,’ Kadin had said. ‘You don’t have the strength.’

He heard Carmenta, her voice brittle with pain and crumbling control.

‘There are other voices in here with me,’ she said. ‘They are getting stronger and I am getting weaker. Soon I will be gone, and they will remain.’

He thought of the fate he had seen for Kadin, dead on a rusted deck, his head severed under Sanakht’s sword. He thought of Hemellion, the one-time king’s hate shaped by Sanakht until he walked onto the bridge of the Sycorax with a blade in his hand.

He sank the thoughts beneath his will.

‘Sacrifice must have meaning,’ he said. ‘It is the price for salvation.’

Sanakht’s mouth worked to form words. His eyes were wide with shock and rage. He looked like a wild animal that had just felt the snare tighten around its leg.

‘Why,’ he formed the word between slow breaths, ‘am I here?

‘Because I need you to serve our Legion one last time. I need one of our blood and brotherhood, one who can become what our Legion needs. You chose yourself, Sanakht.’

Sanakht looked down at the spreading pool of blood, then at the bloody-edged sword in his hand. Ahriman saw the question without needing to hear it.

‘I had to be certain,’ he said. ‘I had to be sure.’

‘The others will turn on you,’ snarled Sanakht. ‘Our brothers will not trust you, after what you have done, and if I fall here.’

‘But you will not fall here, brother,’ said Ahriman. ‘You will rise. None beside Ignis know what I have done, and none of them will. You saved me before, and now you make another sacrifice. That is what they will believe.’ He paused, coughed and tasted his own blood bubble from his lungs. There was not much time left.

Sanakht was still. Ahriman watched him and waited. He saw him again as he had been, brilliant, and loyal and blind.

‘I am sorry it was you who had to stand here, brother,’ said Ahriman.

‘No,’ spat Sanakht, and his sword rose in his hand again. ‘You have no power here, and you will die here, now.’ He lunged forwards.

The Grey Knights came out of the tunnel behind Sanakht with a spray of bolter fire.

The world was shaking. Astraeos ran for the doors to the landing platform. Behind him, the fortress of his brotherhood was dissolving and crumbling as fire and lightning ate its stone. In front of him Thidias and Kadin ran, their bronzed armour oily red in the inferno light. Behind him the clatter of booted feet blended with the din of battle. A flash of stark white light flooded the passage behind him. An instant later the blast wave lifted him from the ground and slammed him down. Liquefied rock pinged off his armour as he pushed himself to his feet.

‘Well met, my friend.’ Astraeos froze as he met the blue eyes. Ahriman stood above him, unarmoured, clothed in blue and silver robes, his face still and emotionless. He smiled. Nothing else moved. Dust and glowing gobbets of stone hung in mid-flight, the shadows cast by the flash of the explosion unmoving on the stone walls. The ground was still shaking, rumbling as though growing to a quake.

‘You…’ began Astraeos.

‘I am not here, Astraeos, wherever here is for you.’ He paused and the smile faded from his face. ‘And neither are you.’

Astraeos looked around at the motionless shrapnel and light of the explosion. An armoured figure hung in the air on the edge of the blast wave.

‘Memories,’ said Astraeos. Ahriman carried on with no sign of having heard.

‘If they took you and broke your mind then whatever you place at the core of your being will be where you are now.’ Ahriman turned his head, though his eyes did not focus on the scene around him. ‘This is a moment of definition for you, something that formed you and made you as you are now, the last point and lowest ebb. And if you are here so is this gift.’

Astraeos let out a breath that he knew was not real.

‘You knew,’ he said, shaking his head, blinking at the stilled memory of his brotherhood’s last moments. ‘You knew I would be taken. You knew they would strip my mind…’ His skin was tingling.

‘You are wondering if this is what I intended all along, if I abandoned you to death and torture.’

Astraeos turned away, his gaze meeting the frozen eyes of Thidias, twisting as he ran towards the doors.

‘You did, though, didn’t you? You wanted them to know where you were going, and you wanted them not to question how they knew.’

‘I will not pretend that what has happened will not have played out to my advantage, but it was not a certainty. Nothing is, Astraeos. It was merely a possibility that I prepared for.’

‘Why?’

‘You do not remember why because you could not be allowed to. That memory and others wait for you beyond this one, buried behind a moment you do not wish to move past.’

‘Why?’ growled Astraeos. Ahriman’s blank face turned to speak to the air.

‘There are advantages in the Inquisition’s coming. Draw one’s enemies together and they will destroy one another. But that is not why you, or I, are here now.’

Ahriman paused. A sound like distant thunder filled the silence, and the ground and walls shook. No other part of the scene moved.

‘It was your price, Astraeos, this possibility, and this gift hidden in the puzzle box of your mind. I could not deny you after what I asked of you, and what you have done.’

The thunder came again, louder, closer. Astraeos felt the sensations of the memory grow faint as the figures around him dissolved into cold blue light. Only the image of Ahriman remained, still staring towards some lost horizon.

‘If you live, then you will be amongst them. You will be amongst the forces of the Inquisition who destroyed your brothers.’

‘What was the price I demanded of you?’ asked Astraeos. His throat felt tight.

Ahriman’s head turned to Astraeos. He smiled sadly.

‘Revenge, Astraeos. The price was revenge.’

The world shook, and he wakened to the gun-roar of the Sigillite’s Oath.

XIX
AWAKENING

The doors rolled wide, and the figure which wore Maroth’s skin pulled itself from the lift shaft. The shadow-filled bridge fell away from it. Gravity had failed across most of the ship. Beads of blood and oil floated like polished stones in the monochromatic gloom. Other things drifted through the space too, corpses mostly, dead from fire or the pressure changes that rippled through the darkened Sycorax like a god shivering. Fires burned across the bridge, glowing in spheres as they ate oil and promethium.

The figure pushed off with its borrowed hands, and spun down the bridge. The Sycorax shook around it with a sound as familiar as the beat of its heart. Someone was firing on the ship. Beyond the bridge’s viewports light strobed from bright blue to angry red. The chamber lurched around it as the explosion twisted the ship in space.

Maroth… Maroth… Maroth… The name gargled and chuckled at the edge of its awareness, seeping from the flesh it inhabited. It had come here because the first truth of the universe was that nothing was insignificant, and what was about to happen needed the trappings of ritual.

It spun around a dead cogitator tower and saw the command throne. A robe-wrapped corpse drifted past, and it felt its body’s flesh shiver with change inside its armour. The armour over its back cracked. Wings unfolded with a snap of shearing ceramite. Viscous fluid sheened the iridescent feathers. It paused, and steadied itself on a towering bank of machinery. Then its wings creaked to their full span and beat the air. It could feel more change trying to press into the flesh of its host. It had to wait, had to control the bleed of its essence into the real. Too much too fast and it would burn this body to liquid, and then this fragment of its being would be forced back into the warp. It could not allow that. It needed to be here, it needed to be close, so that it was ready.

It pushed off again, and glided towards the command dais. The figure of Carmenta floated above her throne, tethered in place by the cables linked to her flesh. Her hood had fallen back, and the slit in her throat smiled beneath the red lacquer mask. Close to her, the torn limbs and tattered flesh of a dead man hung in the air. A foot pirouetted lazily, glinting with the silver shackles of one of the Thousand Sons slaves. Hemellion: the human had been torn apart by machine claws. It noticed a hand, severed at the wrist, its fingers still clutching a crescent of sharpened metal.

It reached out and gripped the throne. Its fingers grew to claws and it cut through the cables holding Carmenta to her throne with a single swipe. She floated up, limbs slack and waving. For a second she looked almost as though she was alive and falling not up, but down into the drowning embrace of dark water. But she was dead, and the flicker of life was just an illusion. Another explosion rocked the ship. Somewhere a still-functioning alarm began to wail.

The figure settled onto the throne, the wings at its back furling behind it.

Yes, this was the right place to wait. This was as it should be.

Slowly it reached out with its clawed hands and peeled Maroth’s hound helm off as though it were rotting cloth. The face beneath changed even as it met the still air of the bridge. Flesh flowed, bloated and withered, eyes vanished then reappeared. A crown of horns rose from its temples, curling as they grew. Out beyond the towering viewports a warhead exploded, stuttering white light through the bridge. The creature saw the light, and felt the threads of destiny twist tighter.

‘Biorhythms rising.’ The dead machine voice welcomed Astraeos back to consciousness. Tremors ran though him. The ship was shaking to the drumbeat of its guns and the breath of its engines. His muscles clenched. The bands of metal around his body holding him to the slab bit into his flesh. Blankness filled his sight. The link to the servo-skull, which had allowed him to see during his interrogation, was broken. He was blind, his world a cocoon of touch and sound. Alarms were sounding somewhere in the distance. The needles embedded in his flesh trembled. His hearts were racing in his chest.

‘Neural overload detected.’

Close by he could hear the hum of the tech-priest floating closer, and the rising tone of bio-monitors. Somewhere further away he heard the Seraph guards left by the inquisitors shift under their ragged wrappings. His mind reached automatically for the warp, and found a cold wall of ice. There was no way out.

Something was coming closer. He could hear the wheezing sigh of the tech-priest’s breath pump. Memory shivered down his nerves. Seeds of knowledge cracked open in the core of his mind, and grew, blooming through his mind and body. The warp could not answer his call, but that was always a possibility, and one that they had prepared for. The tech-priests watching over him knew he had woken. He heard a click of metal fingers on control keys. The needles twitched in Astraeos’s flesh as they prepared to dump sedative into his blood.

‘Neural storm detected.’

‘Hidden behind this last memory is a gift,’ said the echo of Ahriman.

The last seed in his mind opened.

Astraeos convulsed. His muscles bulged. The metal bands across his chest and limbs bit deep. His hearts beat faster and faster. The chime of the bio-monitors was a stuttered scream.

‘Bio-rhythms critical,’ said a machine’s voice.

Astraeos gasped. His hearts were twin hammers in his chest. The tech-priest was almost beside him. He felt his hearts beat once more, and stop. His body slumped in the restraints.

The bio-monitor alarms silenced. In his mind everything became still, a bright whiteness. The tech-priest paused, as the silence grew second by second. A high dead tone rose from the machines beside Astraeos.

‘Total bio-neural failure.’

In the empty possibility of his suspended mind he heard the machine voice, and felt the touch of robes as the tech-priest leaned over him. Instruments extended with a low metallic click and electric whine. He could almost see the chrome and brass probes extending towards him. Something pricked his skin, stabbing deep. He did not move, he could not move. He was a last thought stored in a prison of flesh.

The tech-priest was leaning closer, oil-thick breath hissing from its mouth. Astraeos heard the whir of augmetic eyes focusing. Metal fingers touched his arm.

‘Life signs nil.’

The probes dug deeper into his skin. He heard a puzzled click of binaric. Everything was slowed as though held back behind a dam of stored seconds. The tech-priest’s joints hissed as he leaned even closer. Fabric brushed the back of Astraeos’s right hand.

The suspended stillness of his mind and body shattered. He twisted his hand, grabbed the tech-priest’s robes and yanked him off his feet. The adept fell across Astraeos, scrabbling, burbling panicked machine code. Astraeos clamped his grip closed, and yanked his head up. The plate and cables bonded to his scalp ripped free. He felt blood run down his face.

The Seraphs had sensed something was wrong. They were moving, ragged cloth swishing, bare feet thumping on metal.

The dried flesh and machine-grease stink of the tech-priest filled Astraeos’s nose. The collar around his throat stopped his rise, but it did not matter. They had muted his mind, bound him and taken his weapons. But he still had teeth.

‘Life signs nil,’ droned the bio-monitors.

The tech-priest thrashed. Astraeos twisted his head and bit down.

Blood and oil gushed into his mouth. Electricity burst across his gums as he bit deeper. The tech-priest was twisting and thrashing, gurgling in gasps of static. Astraeos’s teeth cut through cogs, and into flesh. Sensations burst into his awareness as his body ripped information from the meat. Fear, malformed logic and machine data poured into him in a rushing mess of impressions. With panic came the tech-priest’s desperate thoughts of the sedative and control restraints set into his wrist.

‘Life signs detected.’

The sound of the Seraphs’ accelerating steps rang on the decking. The dead numbness surrounding Astraeos’s mind tightened. The tech-priest was shrieking now, a single buzzing note of panic.

Astraeos shifted his grip on the tech-priest’s arm, fingers feeling for keys and switches on the metal limb. He found one and pressed. Something in the slab beneath him clicked and began to whir. A new alarm began to sound. The dying tech-priest twisted. Astraeos’s grip almost broke.

‘Restraint release process stage one activated.’ The machine system’s voice was almost lost beneath the blare of overlapping alarms.

His fingers fumbled at the wrist controls. He heard a series of pneumatic thumps from close by as aggression drugs were dumped into the Seraphs’ bloodstreams. His fingers found the keys on the tech-priest’s wrist again. He heard a crackle of activating power fields, and a wet snarl as the first Seraph leaped at him. He depressed the keys. The restraints snapped back into the slab.

He rose, throwing the tech-priest’s corpse from him. Cables and tubes pulled free of his flesh in a shower of blood and sparks. He was still blind, still locked into a world of sound and touch, but he was free. He heard the last paces of the Seraph’s charge, and dived aside.

A mane of energised cables whipped past him. The empty slab shattered. Astraeos hit the floor in a crouch. The Seraph was close. The buzz of its power lashes raised the hairs of his skin. He could hear its feet move as it twisted to strike again. He stood, and lashed a kick into the space where he knew it must be. His foot hit muscle, and he felt something break beneath the impact. The Seraph staggered, snarling a tongueless cry. The sound of two more sets of running feet rose against the peal of alarms. He ran to meet them,

The air sang as the Seraphs’ weapons lashed down towards him. He leapt. The shaking deck vanished beneath his feet, and he was twisting through a world made real only by sound. He knew that the Seraph he had kicked was already rising from the floor, ready to dive after him. He knew that the other two Seraphs were beneath him, their momentum driving them forwards even as their strides faltered. He had seen their kind before, in what seemed now like a life lived by someone else. He could almost see them, faces hidden by visors of beaten metal, the tatters of their robes fluttering from muscled, hunched bodies, the stumps of their arms trailing lightning-sheathed whips.

Then he landed and the moment ended. He grabbed the closest Seraph as he came down. Instinct screamed at him to let go, but his hands clamped shut. He felt skin and muscle tear as he yanked the Seraph off its feet. It writhed, blood sheeting down its muscle. Astraeos’s hand found its head, locked around it and wrenched back. Vertebrae separated with a gunshot crack.

The second and third Seraphs were on him. He thrust the corpse of their kin at them. An energy whip ripped the dead Seraph in two. Warm liquid burst over him. He could hear the two Seraphs hissing. He spun the split body of the dead Seraph into the source of the sound. The energised whips on the corpse’s arms hit meat with a jolt of discharging lightning.

Silence. Astraeos went still. It was not true silence; alarms still trembled through the air and the deck still growled to the rhythm of distant battle. It was the silence of transition. For a long drawn-out instant Astraeos’s mind remained shackled, its thoughts cycling within his skull. The dead Seraphs twitched at his feet. Their psychic deadness vanished, and the warp returned. It almost overwhelmed him.

He dropped to his knees. Ice formed on his skin and vaporised in fire. His thoughts tumbled. Rage, elation and sorrow spun and snagged through him. He could hear voices calling him, telling him to let go, to let his mind free. Ghost hands pulled at his limbs, and claws plucked his skin. His will cut off the sensations like an axe. His mind hardened, focused. Thoughts formed and exploded outwards, found the warp and remade the real.

He began to walk forwards. Tongues of flame formed in his footprints, and licked up his body. His flesh tingled as wounds closed. Needles and cables fell to the floor as his muscles smoothed over puncture marks. He could feel time flowing around him, thick as tar. The Inquisition and their servants would know now that something was wrong, that he was free. That was good, it suited his purposes.

The metal hood clamped to his head glowed with heat and sloughed away in molten scabs. His face blistered as fresh skin and sinew grew. The fire drained into his eye sockets, spiralling around points of darkness. Sight returned. He looked out at the world through the pulse of flames, and saw that it had changed. Colours bled from every angle, swirling like ink stirred into water. Ghost impressions, too faint to see clearly, shifted through the air.

He turned his head. The chamber spread out from the slab that had been his bed, and the machines that surrounded it. Empty darkness crawled at its edges, spilling up walls that glowed with burning wards. The flames of other minds moved beyond that barrier; he could see them pulse and shimmer, seemingly in time with the drone of alarms. They were coming for him.

He kept walking, his pace quickening with every step. There was no gap between the fire without and the inferno in his skull. A sphere of blue light formed in front of him, growing, curling tendrils of white and orange heat. The globe of light leaped forwards from Astraeos when he was three paces from the chamber’s slab doors. It struck the metal. Warding words etched in silver and gold flared and liquefied, drooling down the portal as it blackened. The sphere melted into the door like a sun sinking below the sea at sunset. It blew outwards in a spray of metal, and Astraeos walked through the molten ruin.

Cendrion fired, and saw the rounds punch the swordsman back off his feet. The threat rune marking the tumbling figure flickered amber then held red. Beside him came his brothers, behind him Izdubar and his fellow inquisitors followed. The silence of psychic deadness surrounded him as he ran forwards. He fired again, and beside him his brothers’ guns rose in chorus as they charged. He blinked as a wave of nausea blurred his eyes.

Immobile suits of armour with high-crested helms filled the passage before the door. Threat runes spun in amber above the Rubrical as he looked at them, but it was the two figures before the doors that were his focus. The figure he had just hit was not moving but there was another, and he was rising to his feet. Cendrion could see blood-spattered armour and the stump where the warrior’s right hand had been. The red targeting rune pulsed above the warrior as it stood and turned to the door at its back. It had a pistol in its remaining hand.

‘Ahriman!’ shouted Izdubar, and the figure glanced back at them as he placed a hand on the centre of the circular door. Cendrion fired and bolts hammered into Ahriman’s back. He slammed into the door, chunks ripping from his armour’s backpack, sparks crawling from the exposed fuel core. He did not fall, though. He pushed and the doors, the doors that had no key, opened.

The chamber beyond the door was circular. Niches of rolled parchments and stacked books lined the curved walls. At the centre of the circular chamber a lectern of iron and brass rose from the black glass floor. A figure sat atop the lectern. It had been a man once. Cendrion could see that at a glance, but its humanity was now just a shell of dry, translucent skin and wasted muscle. Cataract-clouded eyes stared down from sunken eye sockets. A single arm moved across the roll of parchment on top of the lectern, writing in a stuttering blur. A circle of nine figures in grey robes surrounded the lectern. Silver masks with one eye hid their faces.

This was the secret Izdubar and his comrades had kept chained here, a conduit into the mind of a fallen demigod. This was the Athenaeum of Kalimakus. Ahriman stood on its threshold, seemingly frozen.

Cendrion ran forward, still firing. Rounds ripped into Ahriman, flaying his armour to splinters. Ahriman staggered, almost falling, but somehow remaining upright. The grey figures pressed closer to the lectern. He looked at the grey-robed circle for an instant then raised his pistol.

‘No!’ screamed Izdubar. Ahriman fired. The burst of explosive rounds turned the grey figures into clouds of fire, blood and splintered bone. The psychic deadness vanished. The withered man on the lectern looked up, jaws working to shout with a tongueless mouth. Ahriman’s shot hit the withered man in the mouth and blew his skull to vapour.

A long, delayed instant filled Cendrion. Then the warp crashed back like a storm tide. Blue fire burst into the air around the lectern at the chamber’s centre. Turquoise flames rushed up the walls and spilled over the floor. Cendrion saw it in his mind as well as with his eyes. It looked like a flock of birds rising into the sky, their feathers burning as they flew.

Ahriman turned to face them. The pistol dropped from his hand. Beside and behind him Cendrion heard the immobile suits of armour come to life with a clatter of arming guns.

XX
SORCERY

Fire danced in Ignis’s mind as death cradled Apollonia. There was not even the semblance of order now. In his mind’s eye a dozen torpedoes hit the Sycorax and blew out a chunk of hull the size of a city. Debris rode on the fire wave. Thousands of bodies burned and tumbled beside the shredded stone and metal. The ship was taking some killing. Beyond and around it ships spun and died. In the warp the storm wave was cresting.

He was holding it all in his mind now, feeling the ratios narrow. They were running out of time. The storm had to break and it had to break now.

The Word of Hermes fired again. Lines of lance fire sliced into the open wounds in the Sycorax. Ignis heard things that had lived in the ship’s bones begin to shriek into the warp. The storm answered. Blossoms of livid light spilled into the darkness between blazing ships. Rainbow lightning crackled across the darkness.

But where was Ahriman? No matter, the pattern of ruin could not be stopped now. In front of his eyes the Sycorax began to crack and burn.

+Brothers,+ his thought voice roared into the storm, and found the minds he called. They were all Thousand Sons, all brothers to him and Ahriman, and while the rest of the fleet had torn itself apart they had remained untouched. They had not known why, but they had Ahriman’s orders, and now they answered Ignis as one. He called them and they began to converge on the Word of Hermes.

Ignis turned his thoughts to the ship and found the shivering mind of Silvanus the Navigator.

+Look to the warp, Navigator. The moment approaches.+

‘There is no way out. There is no way out,’ moaned the Navigator. Ignis had a flash vision of the man curled against his cell wall, hands covering his head. ‘They are coming.’

+I command you,+ sent Ignis, but the Navigator pitched his head up and screamed.

‘They are coming!’

Ignis felt the storm force rising, felt the elements of the pattern slip towards alignment. He reached deeper into the warp and realised that he had been wrong. It was not the storm that the Navigator had seen.

The first Imperial ship broke from the warp with a flash of tearing reality. A second later the sisters of its fleet followed.

The Grey Knights came for Astraeos as he broke through a door into a high chamber of vaulted stone and polished granite. Statues looked down at him from the bases of great pillars, their faces set in cold marble and their armour tarnished bronze. Braziers hung from chains which stretched from the roof, and the smell of incense clung to the air. Skulls stared at him from brackets on the walls and from crystal-covered niches in the floor.

There were four Grey Knights. The first Astraeos knew of them was a shiver in the air like a sudden gust of wind. Then they were there, their shining presences looming out of the warp. They charged across the chamber, armour moving like slab muscle, bolt-rounds spitting from the guns on their wrists. Astraeos’s kine shield snapped into existence around him. Explosions filled the air in front of him, but the Grey Knights had been fast, very fast. A bolt ripped his shoulder to bloody shreds and pitched him from his feet. Chunks of his bare muscle tore from his bones, blood misting the air around him as he fell. The wounds were already closing as his blood spattered the floor.

He hit the ground, rolled and came to his feet as the Grey Knights cut through his kine shield with a synchronised shrug of mental force. The telekinetic shield imploded with a blink of lightning. Astraeos reeled with the impact, and had time to leap back as the edge of a sword sliced down towards his head. They were all around him, cutting towards him from every angle. Golden nimbuses of light grew above the Grey Knights, flowing together as their powers joined, feeding each other, caging him between them. The warp was singing with high clear voices. Time slowed to a greasy crawl. The instants that were about to be, and the instants that would be, became one. A halberd spun up and sliced down so fast that it was a circle sheet of white light.

Astraeos’s mind spiralled up into the chains holding the braziers high above, and shattered them with a thought. The cages of coals fell, broken lengths of chains lashing behind them. The first brazier struck one of the Grey Knights in a roar of twisting iron and spilling embers. Time blinked back into full flow. The Grey Knight struck by the brazier reeled back, shards of red coal cascading down silver armour. Astraeos ducked closer to the staggering Terminator. The blades of the other Grey Knights sliced through air.

The other braziers hit the floor in explosions of sparks and shattered stone. Astraeos caught the severed lengths of chains with his mind before they touched the ground. Frost crystals glittered in the air. The chains whipped around a Grey Knight’s halberd and flicked up his arms. The chains flashed with heat. Astraeos saw the Grey Knight’s mind begin to react a second too late. A glowing tip of chain hit the red crystal of the Grey Knight’s eyepiece, and punched through into the eye and brain beneath. The Grey Knight fell, blood turning to steam as it gushed over the hot links of chain.

The three remaining Grey Knights brought their storm bolters up as one and fired. Astraeos leapt. The warp flowed through muscle and fibre. Heat and shrapnel lashed his back as he landed and spun. Fire-edged blood scattered from him as his mind snapped the chains taut, pulling the halberd from the dead knight’s grasp. The weapon spun, a blur in the air around Astraeos’s glowing form. Lightning spat from the three remaining Grey Knights. Astraeos’s mind grasped the crackling arc as it formed, and yanked it out of being. The lightning vanished.

Astraeos snapped the halberd out. The blade was cold, its psycho-active core quiet, but it was still sharp. It struck the lead Grey Knight on the helm. His head turned just before the blade struck. The edge bit into the forehead plate, gouged upwards and slammed into the helmet’s crown. The chain and blade yanked back, and the helm was wrenched from the Grey Knight’s face. Astraeos saw dark eyes in a scarred face. He faltered. In his head he saw the fortress of his Chapter crumbling in fire.

The Grey Knight tore the remainder of his ruined helm from his head.

The air was shimmering around Astraeos, weeping liquid light and colour. He could hear sounds crackling like burning leaves of parchment. Louder but more distant, the voices of Cadar, Thidias and Kadin were shouting over the sound of the sky falling in fire in an unchangeable past.

The fire of his memory formed in the air, black-edged and red-cored. It shot towards the Grey Knights, spreading out as it grew, and the fire swallowed them. Astraeos felt a formless roar break from his mouth.

The fire drained away. Astraeos heard his cry of triumph die in the air. The Grey Knights walked from the flames, silver armour stained red and streaked black by the flames that soaked into it like water into sand. They seemed to move slowly, as though they were walking to a different beat of time. Their golden auras were flowing together, overlapping, becoming one. Astraeos felt a breath form in his throat. The spinning chains and halberd were moving in stopped-time rotations.

Golden wings unfolded in the air around the Grey Knights, first two, then more and more. Astraeos watched the shape grow in slow slices of seconds. It was a thought form, a projection of a mind on the fabric of the warp, but this was like nothing he had ever dreamed could exist. It was not one mind but many, the powers and wills of all three Grey Knights unified and harmonised. As he beheld it Astraeos found the one thought in his mind was of an idea old before the stars were conquered.

An angel, he thought. An angel of execution.

A single high note rang in his ears.

Time in the real world stopped. The chamber bled to the edge of his eyes, and the warp was all there was, more real than real.

The Grey Knights’ thought form rippled, white light shivering from its edges.

Voices, both old and new, poured into his mind.

We are not made by our blood, said a voice at the centre of his thoughts. It was cold, calm, like a steel blade. He knew it very well, but still it seemed strange, as though it belonged to another person. It was his voice, speaking from his past. We are made by our oaths.

Astraeos’s mind rose into the warp. The angel’s thought form dived.

Astraeos’s thought form took shape as it flew. For a second it was like the shadow of a bird, its beak and eyes a flash of cold light. Then that brief shadow was gone. A serpentine body of smoke and fireglow stretched into the warp. Scales of silver ice flickered into existence. Wings of bone and fire spread behind a long saurian head.

But when all others are broken, one oath will always remain.

Astraeos roared, and flame greeted the descending angel.

The oath to defy defeat.

Fire burst across the golden feathers, and spun away in glinting spirals.

To defy to the last.

The angel struck.

Astraeos’s thought form shattered.

The Rubricae fired as one. Crawling blue fire burst across the Grey Knights as they ran towards Ahriman. The flames ran together, flashing white hot as the Rubricae continued to fire. Ahriman rose into the blazing air. Behind him the Athenaeum chamber roared as the inferno grew.

The warp fire engulfed Ahriman. He felt it flow over his armour and skin. He felt the runes etched in his armour twist, felt his bones judder inside his flesh. His mind was tumbling away from his body, burning and melting like a ball of wax in a furnace. The bloody silk of his robe whipped in the gale as the fire reached up to cradle him. Tendrils of flame wormed across his body, writhing across the stump of his arm and the gouges in his flesh. Flesh bubbled up in the wounds, before armour spread across them like liquid. It felt like breaking the surface of water after going to the edge of drowning. Sensation and light whirled through his mind as the warp fire prickled the edge of his thoughts. Part of him just wanted to let it race through him, to let its currents lift him. There were voices rushing from the burning chamber, whispering in the voices of lost friends and dead brothers.

‘Listen to us,’ they said. ‘Listen to all we can tell you of what was and what will come.’

He shut the instinct away, pushing it deep within. He needed calm now. It came, and with it he felt his mind spread through the aether. Patterns of thought amplified. He looked at the reformed flesh of his hand as the armour hardened over it again. He lifted his fingers to his mouth, and wiped the half-dried blood from his lips.

The Rubricae marched from the flames before the door, blue armour cast black in the stark light. Ahriman reached down with a thought and pulled the crumpled form of Sanakht into the air with him.

Blackened figures broke from the blazing corridor behind Ahriman. He felt Cendrion’s sword as it cut through a Rubricae. The split armour fell to the ground. A high-pitched wail stabbed into Ahriman’s thoughts. The armour began to judder and dissolve into grey dust.

The rest of the Rubricae turned to fire at Cendrion, but he was already moving, already hacking two more down. Beyond him Ahriman saw Izdubar break from the fire, and with him more Grey Knights.

He reached out with his mind and yanked the Rubricae and Sanakht through the door into the Athenaeum chamber. The Grey Knights surged forwards. Ahriman slammed the bronze door shut. Its edges glowed, fusing to the stone. The Rubricae hit the flame-covered floor with a clatter. Ahriman turned to look at Sanakht, still held above the ground by his will.

Sanakht’s skin was pale, but his eyes were open. Behind him the pillar of blue and golden flames at the centre of the chamber roared as it sucked in air. Ahriman could see nothing else with his mind, just the rushing infinity of knowledge pouring from the warp into reality, looking for a vessel.

‘The Athenaeum is not a book, brother,’ said Ahriman, his true voice rising above the rushing air. ‘It was not the books of Kalimakus, it was Kalimakus himself, his link to Magnus. It is a river of knowledge, ever seeking for a way into the world. It consumes all those who dip their minds into its water. But a son of Magnus could perhaps be a strong enough vessel to last longer. That is the fate treachery bought you. You will become the Athenaeum, my brother.’

‘Always teaching,’ sneered Sanakht. He began to laugh. ‘Everything you try will fail, Ahriman. That you do not know why only makes you more the fool.’

Ahriman’s jaw tightened.

The laughter died in Sanakht’s throat.

‘Do not say that you are sorry,’ he said.

Ahriman shook his head.

‘More than you will ever know,’ said Ahriman, and sent his brother into the heart of the fire with a thought.

The Imperial fleet spread out as it closed on Apollonia. Dozens of vessels churned the void as they dropped from the warp. Most were warships summoned by the power of the Inquisition. They bore new names for this service, names that spoke to the intent of their purpose. Wish of Purgation, Seventh Judgement, Damnation’s Answer: if they survived this battle their crews would go to the fire, and their hulls would be reconsecrated under their old names. But for now they existed only as the tools of the Inquisition’s judgement.

Amongst them ships of three Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes broke from the aether together. The Immortalis was a daughter of the Jovian forges bound to the Black Consuls; beside her rode the First Oath, battle-barge of the Praetors of Orpheus, and the vast Brazen Claws battle-barge Sunderer. Called by old oaths they moved forwards as the fleet spread to their sides.

Ignis watched the scene play out in his mind, and across the lenses of his helmet. The Imperial ships began to fire into the already scattered remains of Ahriman’s fleet. He started to count vessels, and calculate arcs. The fires of battle brightened. The ships of his Thousand Sons brothers were close now, clustered around the Word of Hermes. It was the renegades, the scattered ships of the mongrel warbands that took the opening salvoes. Some of the ships broke away and raced towards the Imperial fleet, bleeding and firing ragged broadsides as they went to their deaths.

Silvanus was right, there was no way they could reach the system edge now, no way they could drop to the warp. No way out, no way at all.

Ignis shivered, and looked to the Sycorax. Impossibly it still held its shape even as it burned and fresh explosions ripped through its structure. Space was rippling close to its hull, bulging and smoking with sickly light as the warp pressed through the thinned skin of reality. The ship was a pyre, and the storm was rising to meet its death. Ignis reached out his thoughts to the Thousand Sons ships which had gathered close. He gave the order and the ships fired on the Sycorax as one.

Astraeos saw his own body quiver and start to fall. It moved with the slowness of a jammed pict-feed. The three Grey Knights were still, their silver armour shining golden light across the rubble-strewn floor. He saw all of this as though looking down from a great height as the scene grew distant beneath him. His mind was a thousand spinning fragments of pain and emotion. The angel thought form was everywhere, melting his will, shredding it into scraps.

He could not think clearly. Everything was a jumble of sensations. Memories flicked around him like tarot cards tossed into the air. He was not even aware of time or the past or the present any more. Some small flare of clarity spluttered as images ripped into smaller and smaller pieces.

I am being torn apart, the lone thought said. My existence is being shredded, and the scraps burned. He had not stood a chance, not really, not with all the arts that Ahriman had taught him, or the need for vengeance boiling through his soul. A splinter of pain lanced into his fading thoughts, sudden and vicious in its urgency. His last thought spun on in confusion. The pain came again, like a barbed hook tugging into flesh.

Why has this happened? The question rang clear in his thoughts. Why has all this happened? He remembered his home world burning, and the inquisitor shaking his head.

Why had his Chapter died? They had kept their oaths, but the Imperium had broken theirs and slaughtered them as traitors. That unanswered question had driven him for so long, carrying him to the Eye of Terror, and into the service of Ahriman. Why had it all happened? What reason had the Imperium had to kill his brothers? How had it begun?

He saw it then, the answer that had eluded him, that made no sense unless you accepted the broken logic of the warp. He knew why his Chapter had died.

He understood how fate had unfolded and heard its laughter.

He cried out, and the scream was silence. The pain and rage were beyond even the agony of his soul ripping to shreds. There had been no hope, not for him, not for his brothers. There was nothing left, not even the comfort of the lies he had believed.

‘Ahriman,’ he said, and heard the bitter name come from his lips. Vengeance, yes, there was still vengeance to live for.

+Astraeos,+ said a voice in his mind. It sounded very distant but familiar, as though it had always been there. +Astraeos, my son. I am here.+

+What are you?+

+I am waiting.+

And within him a connection made long ago emerged for the last shreds of his soul; it came as though summoned, it came like an answer.

The bond, the link to the creature bound by Maroth, the daemon he had bound to his will once but never called on again.

He touched the connection to the daemon.

But it cannot answer, he thought. It was locked away on the Sycorax behind silver doors and wards. Even as that thought formed he felt something respond, something that called in a voice of brittle ice.

+Call me and I shall come.+

The angel thought form was slicing through the last pieces of him. It was not separate from him now, it was the universe.

Call me and I shall come… the words lay in the last scrap of his awareness, black as a fall into night, sharp as a razor. He could see his true body, slumped on its knees amongst scattered embers.

+I call you to me,+ he said, with voice and thought.

The creature on the throne of the Sycorax looked up. Light exploded through the bridge. The crystal of the viewport shattered. Fire and molten shards billowed inwards. Then the air was rushing around it, pulling debris towards the vacuum. The creature sat unmoving on the throne.

It could feel the bond to Astraeos now, snapping in the winds of the warp like rope whipping in a gale. The bond had been made in ignorance, but it had been made willingly. Soul bound to soul, will to will.

A chunk of twisted metal spun into it from above with bone-breaking force. It felt the shock of impact as the metal sliced into its shoulder. Blood showered from it in strings of wet globes which burned as they spun away. It did not move from the throne – it could not. It needed the end of its host and the call of the one it had waited for to occur together.

The bridge was a spinning blur. Its flesh and armour was flowing together, setting into bronzed chitin and glowing soft flesh. A wash of glittering energy spilled through the bridge. A spar of girder shot through the burning wave and transfixed its chest to the throne. The skin of its skull blistered. Flesh began to melt from its bones. Black liquid bubbled between its glass teeth. For a second the flesh of its face settled into a single twisted mass of scar tissue above a ragged slit of a mouth. Above the smile a single bright blue eye looked out.

‘I call you to me,’ Astraeos’s voice echoed from all around.

A salvo of macro shells hit the last remains of the Sycorax and turned the world to bright oblivion.

The ghosts of bloody feathers were falling around Astraeos as he opened his eyes. He looked down at his hands. Fire burned beneath the smooth skin, then blinked to nothing. He looked up. The barrels of a Grey Knight storm bolter looked back at him. It fired. He felt the fragments and fire slice through the air. He stopped them. A sword flashed towards him, its edge running with lightning. The blade slammed into the floor. Astraeos looked down at the blade. He stood a metre from where it had struck.

He looked back up. The Grey Knight tried to wrench the blade up. His armour would not move. The air around the warrior was glowing; he was sweating frost and blue light as he strained. The wards woven into the ceramite were keening under the psychic pressure. The Grey Knight’s arms started to move. The sword started to rise.

Astraeos felt a stab of pain in his eyes. The Grey Knight’s armour imploded with a wet thump.

There were three more Grey Knights on the floor, one dead, the other two unconscious from the psychic feedback of their thought form’s destruction. Astraeos turned away from them. He had to leave. He had to be far away from what was about to happen. It would take time to prepare, vengeance always did.

‘Ahriman,’ he said, and shadows formed in the wake of the word. Yes, it would need time, but time and fate were on his side.

He closed his eyes. When they opened again they were fire. He raised his hand. The air shivered and then split. Astraeos looked into the tumbling madness beyond and stepped through.

Ahriman watched as Sanakht rose in the pillar of flame. To his mundane eyes the flame-shrouded shape still looked like Sanakht, still the slim lines to the face, still the silver-worked blue armour, still the slight crease at the edge of his mouth and eyes which hinted at mockery or laughter. But to his second sight the figure was not Sanakht. The inferno drained into it. It was a void, a shadow cast by an absence, an outline of a figure with wings and arms and curled horns. It had no size but it seemed both to tower beyond the confines of the chamber and to be small, as though it was shrunk by vast distance. It was not a living thing any more, it was a point in the universe where knowledge converged and bubbled to the surface of reality. It was not Sanakht; it was the Athenaeum.

The Athenaeum hung in the centre of the suddenly silent chamber. Then it fell to the ground in a clatter of ceramite on stone. It lay on the floor, body held in a seated position by its armour, head lolling in the collar. Its eyes were cataract white in the dead skin of its face. Ahriman started forwards and then froze. The Athenaeum’s lips were quivering as though it was trying to remember how they worked. Fire-cast shadows appeared on the walls, but there was no fire.

‘And the Wolves come,’ it said in a dry corpse voice. ‘They come out of the night. Red are their axes, and their dreams and wishes are for blood and frost. The black-clad son of the thousand…’

Words tumbled from its mouth. Ahriman listened to them, hearing things that he understood and more that he did not.

‘…the path, the path, the path written in the blood of red suns, the path…’

He moved closer, extended his mind and hand towards the Athenaeum.

‘…the ashes of Prospero are the embers of the new flame…’

He was just a step away. He held his mind still. His thoughts brushed forwards as light as a breath. His fingertips touched the polished blue of a shoulder guard. Sanakht’s head rolled up and back. Ahriman stared at the Athenaeum, and the shadow it cast in the warp. He could not look away. He felt his mouth open, and the slightest tremble move his tongue.

‘Ahriman,’ said the Athenaeum.

His hand and mind snapped back as though he had tried to touch something hot. His mouth and throat were dry.

‘Yes,’ was all he could say.

‘All things draw to a point, and the sins of the past and future create a new darkness.’

‘What… what is close?’

‘Focus is blindness. We create our own enemies.’ Its head lolled back and it began its drone again.

Ahriman looked down at the Athenaeum, and felt a sudden shiver of uncertainty.

A dull crack filled the air, then another, rattling through the stillness like a chaingun. Stone fragments tumbled from the wall beside the door. He spun around, reaching out with his will even as he felt the telekinetic force strike the door again. Cracks spiralled across the glass-smooth stone.

Thunderheads reared in the warp. He felt the surge of vast currents roll around him like the waves of a storm-darkened sea. His Rubricae had turned towards the doors, their guns rising. A thought pulled his helm from the bloody floor. A broken horn on the right temple reformed as it settled over his head. He reached out with his mind and pulled the body of the Athenaeum up. It was time to leave.

The door blew out of the wall and spun through the air towards Ahriman. His mind met it. The door burst into glowing dust. The Rubricae were firing through the ragged breach in the wall. Blue and red flames flashed in the dust cloud.

Cendrion came out of the murk. In the warp he was a single tongue of white flame. Cracks were still spreading from the broken doorway. Chunks of stone fell from the ceiling.

Five paces separated Ahriman and the Grey Knight.

Ahriman tilted his head. A slowed slice of time spread between them.

Five paces.

He took a breath, felt it soak into his muscles.

His left heart beat once.

Cendrion flew forwards, sword rising. Flame poured from Ahriman. The silver of the Grey Knight’s armour flashed to white heat. Ahriman reshaped his will. A whirl of shadows rose around him, beating with a thousand dark wings. Crow voices screamed in his mind.

Four paces.

Cendrion rammed a blunt spear of mental force at Ahriman. He met it and spun its power into his own. The shadow birds around Ahriman flew faster. Izdubar and a cluster of other armoured humans broke into sight. Gunfire buzzed towards him. He unmade the rounds in flares of light. They kept coming.

Three paces.

Ahriman held the thought of the beating wings, pouring himself into each one, feeling his mind and body become like smoke. Cendrion’s sword was a splinter of sharpness and sunlight above his head. He could feel the pressure in the warp building and building.

Two paces.

Ahriman vanished, and in his place a cyclone of shadow and carrion cries roared. Chunks of stone ripped from the floor. Cendrion leapt, spinning his body into the turning wind, sword slicing.

One pace.

Cendrion’s sword cut through the spiral of shadow. The mass of wings parted like a slit sheet of silk. Ahriman felt the pain of the cut, felt the Grey Knight’s will pouring into the blade. But he was ready. The Grey Knight was strong, strong in ways that he had never imagined, but he was like his sword, a weapon, and that focus made him blind. Ahriman focused his whole mind for an instant. Cendrion’s sword shattered. Silver fragments spun through the air.

He felt the Grey Knight’s shock. He almost smiled. Then the flock of shadow birds tore through Cendrion. Wards woven into the silver armour held and then cracked. Splinters of ceramite tore into Cendrion’s muscles. A wall of telekinetic force lifted him from the floor, spinning his bulk like a dry leaf. Polished plates buckled and tore. Ragged edges of metal punctured his flesh. Bones in his chest and arms shattered. Warning chimes sang from around his collar. His flesh burned as warding runes melted on the inside of his armour. Liquid silver dripped from the Grey Knight as he fell.

Ahriman pulled his dispersed mind back together, feeling the substance of his body flickering back into reality.

He looked down at Cendrion.

His right heart beat once.

XXI
STORM BREAK

The killing salvo hit the Sycorax. Plasma conduits ruptured. Fires raced through her machine decks and blew plates from her aft hull. Then the fire found a primary reactor core. The explosion ripped the ship in two. A disc of blue-white fire razored outwards. Clouds of gas spread in a flower of furnace light. The two halves of the ship twisted in different directions. Half-melted cliffs of honeycombed metal crawled with flames as pockets of gas and fuel ignited. The front section exploded first as munitions held close to its forward guns cooked off in a kaleidoscopic display of overlapping detonations. The aft of the ship lasted a little longer, turning over slowly like a fire-blackened mountain tossed into the heavens. Then the warp drives sucked it into a single bright point, before blowing it outwards. A sphere of glittering, metallic sand pattered against the larger chunks of debris. The scream of the Sycorax’s death became silent, like a voice cut off by a knife across the throat.

The battle seemed to hesitate for a second as the great ship died. The curtains of warp flame trembled. Volleys of macro-cannon fire stuttered in mute fury. Ships drifted for an instant, course correction forgotten.

A line of lightning appeared in the empty space where the Sycorax had been. It shone like a razor slit in a black veil, lengthening slowly then faster. Impossible cries rolled through the vacuum. Crew screamed in the guts of ships. Globes of blood formed in the void, flowed together, split apart. The line widened, buzzing between colours.

The slit of light touched the Wish of Purgation as it thrust at the head of the Imperial fleet. The warship shone, rainbow colours sparkling over the pitted metal of its hull. Dazzling splinters broke from it like shattering crystal. The ship held its shape for a second and then collapsed, its angles folding into each other, as though nothing had ever been there.

The warp storm boiled through the widening tear.

Vapour the colour of skinned flesh spilled into the vacuum. Vast faces, rolling eyes and smiles of teeth congealed into being, divided, shrank and divided again until thousands of shapes were tumbling in the void. The shapes twisted and began to scramble through the vacuum towards the light of the battle. The writhing ball of daemons reached the heavy cruiser Damnation’s Answer, and swarmed through its hull into the air-filled decks within. The crew began to die, flesh running from their bones at the daemons’ touch. Its weapons began to fire at random as hallucinations danced in the gunners’ minds. Its engines still burning, it slewed through its own fleet like a drunken madman.

Ships fired back. Macro-cannon rounds struck shoals of daemons and churned them to foaming blood and fire. The battle-barge Sunderer turned into the tide spilling towards it, and sawed through it, defence turrets and macro batteries lighting its hull with a cloak of explosions. The other two Space Marine vessels held course. Locking their firing grids together, they burned through the clouds of ectoplasm, and bore down on the ships clustering close to the moon.

Ignis felt the pressure of the storm release in his mind, and saw it swamp the last of Ahriman’s fleet that they had sacrificed to create this symmetry of destruction. The alignments of number and angle were there, beautiful in their purity. It was done. The pattern was complete, and this moment, this perfect moment of birth was like the touch of sunlight after night. He shivered and turned his awareness back to the world around him. He stood in the high Navigation cupola. At his feet Silvanus Yeshar wept.

+Turn towards the moon, full power to engines,+ he broadcast, and knew that each of the Thousand Sons ships would obey.

He heard Silvanus’s despair as he brushed the Navigator’s mind.

‘No way out, no way out, no way out…’ said Silvanus, over and over again. Ignis sent a jolt of will into the Navigator.

+Look,+ he sent.

The Word of Hermes and its clutch of ships were pointing towards Apollonia now, engines thrusting them towards the black surface of the moon.

‘No way out…’ wept Silvanus as he crawled into the Word of Hermes’s navigation cradle.

+Look,+ Ignis sent again. Silvanus looked, staring out with all three of his eyes. He gasped.

Ahriman looked up from Cendrion’s broken form. Three paces from him a fissure split wide, stone collapsing into the opening. A sulphur-yellow glow pulsed through the cracks in the walls. He took a breath, and tasted burning hair and copper. The moon was breaking apart. The Athenaeum had been at its heart for so long that it was like a keystone in an arch, but now the Athenaeum was gone and the warp was crushing its hiding place. Sickly light poured through the web of gaping cracks. Grey Knights began to fall or to launch themselves from the crumbling floor.

He reached out and called the Rubricae. They came, firing as they ran. The Athenaeum floated close to him. He reached out a hand and grasped its armoured collar. His fingers tingled with the contact. It was still speaking, droning on with Sanakht’s mutilated voice. The final step awaited them.

+Are you there?+ he called. +Ignis?+

‘Ahriman!’ The cry made him look around. A gun looked back at him. Izdubar stood before the lightning-lit smoke, pistol aimed. His finger closed on the trigger. The gun spat fire and silver. Ahriman’s mind brushed the round as it came from the barrel. It was cold. His mind slid away from it. The warp creaked around him. He could feel the Grey Knights’ minds linking, energy and will following between them as they came forwards. He watched the round spin on its tail of flame. To his mind it was a hole cut in the warp-saturated universe. It was death if it struck, sure and certain.

The silver round was a swelling black dot in the eye of his mind.

+We are here,+ came Ignis’s voice. It sounded distant, like several voices shouting at once above the crash of breaking waves.

+Guide me, brother.+

Stillness: as though the entirety of existence had stopped. Sound and colour and shape split into tatters. The walls of the floor and chamber bulged outwards. The silver round struck Ahriman’s armour. The world vanished. Everything was rushing past him, through him, and he knew that all that was holding the storm from tearing him apart was a single thought linking him to the call of his brothers.

The moon of Apollonia imploded. Cracks spread out from its heart as its substance dissolved into the warp. The dark hole at its heart sucked inwards as the black rock crumbled. The curve of the moon reversed, became a concave pit, and then snapped back. It broke apart. Ghost light fountained up from fissures, sickening auroras looping far out into the dark. Then it seemed to explode backwards, burrowing through the storm like hot water through snow.

The storm carried Ahriman, rolling him in its fingers. Leering faces swam past him, smiling at him with rotting teeth. Great voices roared and chuckled at him. He let it take him, holding all the while to the distant presence of familiar places and the call of his broher’s voices. The Athenaeum remained with him, the collar of its armour clamped in his hand. He saw geometries etched into reality, each one pulling at him, calling to him like a light guiding a ship to harbour. He focused on them. The curtain of reality parted before him, and he tumbled through into a circle of etched sigils.

Ignis looked down at him. His orange armour was grey with frost, his eyes gloss red with haemorrhaged blood. He just looked at Ahriman, black pupils swelling and shrinking in his blood-drowned eyes. The patterns of ruin hovered around him, spiralling and iterating into new forms even as Ahriman looked at them.

+You have it,+ said Ignis, and looked at the Athenaeum still gripped by the collar in Ahriman’s hand. Ahriman nodded and stood.

+Bind it in a tower for now. Only I may see it.+

+And what do we say of Sanakht to the others?+ asked Ignis, looking at the motionless body on the ground, its lips moving but its eyes staring blankly at nothing.

+What we agreed, that he took this burden for the future of the Legion.+

Ignis looked up at Ahriman, the geometric tattoos spiralling into new patterns across his forehead. Ahriman held Ignis’s gaze for a long second.

+How many of our Legion brothers are still with us?+ asked Ahriman.

+All but one ship.+

+The other vassals?+

+Fed to the flames.+

Ahriman nodded once, and turned away.

+The Imperial fleet still has strength enough to stop us.+

Ahriman turned back, and reached his mind out to listen to the storm roar of the warp.

+Do you hear that?+ he asked. Ignis cocked his head, then frowned. Ahriman nodded. +The Wolves howl.+

The Wolves came from the storm-churned warp. Hel’s Daughter, Storm Wyrm, Crone Hammer and Death’s Laughter crashed into the battle sphere, the bow wave of their exit seeming to shake the stars in their settings. They poured fire ahead of them, splitting the assembled ships like a burning axe blow. Shields shimmered and blew out. Hull armour distorted and ran like fire-touched wax. The storm tide rolled across the barrier of reality, sucking back briefly before crashing down again. The fires of battle blinked from one colour to another. There was no order to the battle now, no lines or formations, just a twirling mess of ships and torn light. Daemons swarmed, whooping as they rode the death waves of ships, cackling even as some were swallowed by the hungry currents.

Boarding torpedoes ripped from the snouts of the Wolves ships. The Imperial fleet turned its eyes and guns towards the newcomers and greeted them with scattered fire. The torpedoes slammed into hulls and the warriors within were loosed from their harness. Creatures of dented armour and twisted flesh spilled into the bowels of Imperial ships, axes rising and falling, clawed hands ripping into any flesh they found.

Grimur felt the shudder of the boarding torpedo as it prepared to loose from Hel’s Daughter. At his side Sycld shook and coughed blood onto the deck as the torpedo tensed in its breech.

‘The silver craft,’ hissed the Rune Priest between wet gasps. ‘It is the exile. Silver like the snow under a storm sky. Silver of the new moon on water. Silver…’

Grimur said nothing. In his helm he was staring at the battle fires that greeted him. There were ships already burning, already dying in the storm break, but more remained. All would soon be black bones and carcasses of metal. They had found their prey: the end of the hunt was close, it was a blade swing away.

Beside him Sycld was shaking in his harness, bones rattling and jumping against his armour.

‘The dream is here, it is here. Silver…’ The words were a bared-teeth groan. Grimur could feel muscles bunching inside his armour. He could not stop it. There was blood on his tongue. His teeth were cutting his mouth as they lengthened. He gripped the fragment of red iron armour at his neck.

‘Silver are their tears. Pull them down to the red ground, mix their bones with the mud, let the ocean swallow their bones.’ White and blue arcs of storm lightning were running up and down the babbling Rune Priest, and hunger and rage radiated from him like cold from a glacier.

Part of Grimur thought of calm, of forcing the wolf within back into the dark. But there was no point, they were running over snow, beneath the moon and the dome of darkness, and the blood of the prey was salt and iron on the air. It was the end of oaths long kept. He let go, and the howl rose through his throat. Around him his brothers howled, and the battle howled back.

Cendrion was still conscious when the strike forces flashed back into existence on the Sigillite’s Oath. He saw it through the eyes of his brothers, as his true vision faded to smudged red and black. They appeared in the teleport chamber, twenty-eight Grey Knights and four humans. Dirty smoke rose from their armour, as residue from the flash teleport. Izdubar ripped his helmet free. Beside him the crone stood unmoving in her exo-armour. Erionas was waiting for them, his mane of cables locked into ports in the chamber’s walls.

Izdubar’s face was a pale mask, veins ticking at his jaw and temple.

‘We still have strength,’ said the inquisitor lord, biting off the words as though they were pieces of bitter fruit. ‘They cannot break out. Gut every last ship, then we can search the ashes for his corpse.’

Erionas’s face twitched around, his silver eyes dancing with projected data. A look of panic was spreading across his face.

‘Lord Izdubar…’

‘That makes no sense,’ said Malkira, acid voice booming from her armour’s external speaker. Izdubar turned to her. ‘If Ahriman has what he came for he should run, try and break out.’

‘My lord…’ Erionas’s voice was a high whine.

She is right, thought Cendrion as he heard the words through the haze of his wounds. But they are missing something. We are all missing something. The warp was roaring in Cendrion’s mind, rattling his fading thoughts with rising fury. His projected awareness began to slip, the image of the inquisitors growing dim as his senses seeped back into the mess of his broken body. He could hear something, a psychic noise which rose over the storm. It was a howl. ‘He would have planned a way out,’ said Malkira.

‘Lord!’ shouted Erionas. Silence fell as every eye turned to him. Cendrion felt his grip on consciousness break. Erionas opened his mouth to speak as the first boarding torpedo hit the Sigillite’s Oath.

A tongue of flame plucked a brother from Grimur’s side. The stink of sorcery was rank in his mouth. He was not seeing the enemy, not really; his mind was dancing with scents: blood, ozone, offal. He roared, fangs wide, and brought the grinning edge of his axe down on the sorcerer’s head. Armour broke beneath the blow, scattering splinters and shards of lightning. The sorcerer’s corpse was falling, but Grimur was already moving, breathing the smell of the blood as it misted the air. Another sorcerer came at him, fast, very fast, blade singing with light. He swayed out of the way without breaking stride, and struck back and down. The head of his axe took the sorcerer’s right leg from beneath him. He looped the axe up and took the falling warrior in the throat. The axe sheared the top of the helm off and another corpse went down to feed the Underverse with its blood. Beside him Sycld was speaking even as he moved between the dead, words broken by the lash of lightning from his staff and the crackle of ice as it spread through the blood of the dead beneath his feet.

‘The dream is no more,’ rasped the Rune Priest, pointing forwards, fingers splaying to send a whirl of broken shards and shadow towards a cluster of red-robed humans. His eyes were rolled back into his head, his skin ice white. ‘The moon rides red in the sky, and its tears are silver.’

Sycld was in the grip of the dreams that had led them here.

A blow struck him and spun him from his feet. He had not seen it coming, had not seen the warrior that struck it. He fell, seeing a shape in vast Terminator armour loom above him. Sorcerous fire washed from the Terminator, and the great sword in his hand, tinting the silver of his armour the colour of forge fire. He remembered Prospero, and the smell of flesh charring in armour as the Thousand Sons had turned their witchcraft on Grimur and his brothers. The sorcerers had worn crimson then, but now they were creatures of silver that glittered like the flanks of the glass pyramids on that now-dead world.

The sorcerer’s sword was descending. Grimur sprang up, turning the blow with the flat of his axe and ramming its edge into the sorcerer’s eyepieces. Crystal and silvered ceramite shattered. Blood kissed the axe’s field and cooked into smoke. Grimur let go of the axe with one hand and grabbed the ruined front of the sorcerer’s helm. Claws ripped from the tips of his fingers and tore the helm from the sorcerer’s head. The face beneath was a mask of blood and white exposed bone.

The sorcerer twisted away, still alive and somehow still able to see. Grimur leaped, his claws closing on the sorcerer’s skull and ripping it from the collar of the armour. He landed on top of the silver giant as it hit the ground. He paused, feeling the race of life in his veins. Around him the pyramids of Prospero burned again in his memory. He raised his clawed hand, looking at the blood drooling from the broken skull. This was victory unfolding around him, victory and release. Ahriman would not survive, for they had run him and his kin down. He wanted to touch that realisation, to know his victory through his dead enemies’ eyes.

He opened his mouth and let the blood of his enemy touch his tongue. Ice and heat shuddered through him. The sorcerer’s last sensations and thoughts unfurled in blurred tatters in his awareness. He went still, seeming to shrink, breath coming slow and shuddering from his bloody lips. He looked around, blinking, eyes focusing and refocusing. Slowly he stood.

He turned his eyes to Sycld. The Rune Priest seemed to feel his lord’s gaze, and turned his head at the same moment.

‘The path, the red path beneath the moon,’ croaked Sycld. ‘We are there, we are at the dream’s end.’

Grimur looked at the Rune Priest, at the ghost light crawling over his staff. He looked down at the head of his own axe and the blood thickening on his clawed hands. He thought of all that he had done to reach this point, and all the things that he had allowed or caused to be done.

We followed dreams. And we never asked who was their master. The prey that runs may run from fear or to draw on the hunters. Revenge, he thought, is an axe with two smiles.

He looked into Sycld’s blank eyes. The Rune Priest had gone still as though propped up on a stake.

‘I…’ he said. ‘I can’t see it any more… the scent, the dream path… I…’ His voice cracked, faltered and became something else.

‘Wolf,’ said Sycld’s mouth, but the voice was a hollow rumble. ‘The thread of your fate is yours again. No longer will my dreams guide you. You may live, or you may fall, and I will care not, but I wish you to know one thing. I want you to remember it until your soul goes back into the pit of night.’ Sycld’s mouth twisted into a smile as though pulled by strings. ‘I want you to know that you have served me well this day. That truth is my thanks.’

Grimur stood, silent, hunched and bloody in his patched and battered armour. Then he brought his axe up. Sycld shuddered and opened his mouth to speak again. The axe fell.

Silvanus kept his eyes shut, all of them. He pressed his hands over his face, and did not move. It did not help. He could still see. He could see the warp. It shone on the other side of his fingers, lighting his veins and bones. And it was angry. He knew that with a certainty that frightened him because he did not know how he knew.

+Navigator,+ the voice in his skull called: Ignis. He would not answer. He would not do what they asked. He would not look, he would not.

+Navigator.+ The thought voice roared in his skull. Bright motes of light burst in his mind.

‘No,’ he moaned. ‘No, please.’

+Navigator, you will heed our will.+

‘No,’ he moaned again, and felt bile rise with the words. His teeth felt wrong in his mouth, and the vomit taste was sweet on his tongue. He was suddenly aware of the loose flaps of skin on his face and between his fingers, the red veins bright in the light of the warp. ‘No,’ he whispered.

+Silvanus.+ The voice was like cool water. Silvanus stopped moaning. He felt the defiance in him rise and break. His hands fell from his face. His eyelids were closed, but the folds of skin over his face made it seem as though they were just two shut eyes amongst many.

He opened his eyes. Vision filled his tri-ocular awareness. The chamber walls were simply a sketch of substance, the ship a ghost, and the souls within it made of light that changed colour with every beat of their hearts. He breathed, focusing and trying to calm the twitching in his face and hands.

He raised his gaze. The black vortex, which had formed where the moon had vanished into nothing, spun before his eyes. It was like looking into a lightless tunnel. Storm winds ringed it, spiralling down into its core like water draining through a hole. The Word of Hermes was poised on the edge of that vortex, and beside it a clutch of other ships.

‘That is where we must go?’ he asked.

+Yes, we will pass through the storm.+

‘And then?’

He waited, feeling Ahriman’s presence still at the edge of his thoughts.

+Then we begin the path back to where this began.+ Ahriman’s thought voice paused. +We return to the Planet of the Sorcerers.+

EPILOGUE

Leaves of crystal crunched beneath her feet as she crossed the summit of the tower. Ahriman did not look up at her approach, but kept his eyes on the transparent sliver of mirror lying on a plinth of black marble.

‘You have rebuilt it,’ she said. ‘Or should it be you have rebuilt yourself?’ He straightened. The cloth of his robes caught the warm wind, and pressed itself against his skin. The shard of mirror winked the deep blue of the sky back at him. ‘This place is different,’ she said.

‘Everything changes,’ he said. Carefully he picked the piece of mirror up between thumb and forefinger. He gazed into the still surface for a long moment, and then tossed it up into the air. The shards of crystal on the floor followed it in a cascade of colours. A tree formed in the air, its trunk a rainbow, its branches a swaying pattern of reflected light.

He looked down from the tree. The palace of his memory extended away and down around him. Towers of rippled black stone and silver rose like half-burned candles from a web of bridges and stairs. Some were brass, others jade, others verdigris-dusted bronze. Domes and cupolas sat like blisters amongst the reaching fingers of the towers. Here and there the white marble of the original palace could be seen peeking out from the new. The whole now resembled something grown rather than built, a vast coral reef of stone and metal, which sprouted new structures even while he watched.

‘You will fail,’ she said, her voice closer behind him.

‘So you have said before,’ he replied and turned.

Iobel stood before him. She had shape, but it was like a charcoal sketch pulled into three dimensions, a blur for a body, limbs that bled into nothing, a face formed by suggestion and shadow. She turned, and appeared to look out over the memory palace.

‘You did not try to find me.’

‘I have found you now,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘What need is there to hunt you through my own mind?’

She smiled.

‘You don’t know how I am still here, do you? Have you ever thought how much of your mind now exists beyond you, out there in the warp?’ He watched her but said nothing. ‘I have walked the edges of your psyche, Ahriman. There are parts of you which are not wholly yours any more, parts which think and dream outside of your skull.’ She looked back at him, her eyes two smudges of shadow under the sun. ‘I am here with you now and forever, sorcerer. I live in the shadow of your mind, and until you fall I will walk with you.’

He turned away from her, and started down a flight of stairs which spiralled down from the tower’s summit.

‘You will fail,’ she called to him, but he did not respond. ‘I have seen the insides of your knowledge, I have walked your thoughts. Even with the Athenaeum you will fail. The Crimson King will oppose you. Time itself will defy you. You are alone. Kadin, Carmenta, Astraeos – everyone gone, all spent to take you closer to ruin.’ Ahriman kept walking, descending through the towers and storerooms of his past. High above him Iobel’s voice called after him. ‘Only enemies and betrayers remain to you now, Ahriman.’

The waking was slow and filled with pain.

Cendrion, Cendrion, Cendrion… his name beat softly around him, like a reminder left for him to find as he returned from sleep. His limbs were dull aches, both numb and brittle at once. Shocks ran up and down his nerves, while blackness filled his eyes. He reached out with his mind as soon as he was aware, and found the minds of his brothers present but distant.

+What is happening?+ he asked them, but they did not reply.

He tried to wake further, tried to move, but could do neither. He waited.

Sight returned, sudden and sharp in its brightness. He tried to blink, but could not. Static fuzzed across the monochrome vision of a chamber hung with thick cables and chains. Inquisitor Izdubar stood in front of him, a patient expression on his thin face. The crone Malkira and the glass-eyed Erionas stood at his shoulders.

‘He has woken?’ asked Izdubar, glancing to someone that Cendrion could not see.

‘Where. Am. I?’ Cendrion heard his own voice echo through the chamber like metallic thunder. Izdubar looked up at him again.

‘Titan,’ said Izdubar. ‘The Hall of Ancients.’

Cendrion understood then. The knowledge shivered through his body which was now no more than a broken foetus curled inside the iron womb of a Dreadnought sarcophagus. The pain in his limbs was a ghost, a scrambled sensation that now related to nothing at all.

‘How. Long?’ he asked.

‘Eight years since Apollonia, seven in warp travel, one in preparation,’ said Erionas, with cold precision.

‘Ahriman?’ he growled.

‘Escaped with a few vessels.’ Izdubar paused, his tongue poised on his teeth. ‘And with the Athenaeum. Only the Sigillite’s Oath returned from the battle. Ahriman had… allies that attacked us and gave him a chance to dive back into the storm.’

‘The. Storm…’ he began, the words forming ponderously.

‘We cannot hope that it destroyed him. He planned for it, and the allies that rode on its winds,’ said Malkira. Cendrion thought that she had withered even further in the time since he had last seen her.

‘Allies?’

‘Space Marines taken and twisted by the warp,’ said Erionas. ‘They fled after Ahriman dived into the storm. We recovered bodies, though. The creatures bore the mark of Russ.’

‘The. Wolves. Of. Fenris?’ Cendrion growled, half in shock, half in anger.

‘A remnant perhaps, or a diseased offshoot.’ Izdubar tilted his head. ‘Perhaps.’

‘Our eye has turned on the sons of Russ,’ said Malkira.

Cendrion let the thoughts and information flow around him. He kept feeling the tug of unconsciousness, like a hand trying to beckon him down a dark set of stairs. He shut it out, and asked the question that above all others he now needed answered.

‘Why. Have. You. Woken. Me?’

‘Because it is not only the inheritance of Ahriman’s saviours that we have discovered,’ said Erionas. ‘The gene-samples taken from the traitor Astraeos, before his escape, have been identified, as has the Chapter that created him.’

‘Chapter?’

‘Oh, yes,’ smiled Malkira. ‘He is not of the ancient breed of traitors, but of a Chapter that lives now, and still claims loyalty to the Imperium.’

Izdubar looked from the crone back to Cendrion.

‘I know I have asked much of you, but now I must ask more of you and your brotherhood.’

‘What. Is. Your. Will?’

‘Their home world, and every one of their kind must burn, Cendrion. You will lead the execution of that sentence.’

Cendrion looked back into Izdubar’s thin emotionless face.

‘As. You. Will. It,’ he said.

The warriors watched the sorcerer as he walked between their lines. The polished bronze of his armour shimmered under the dirty light of the fires. Blue and green stones set amongst etched patterns of feathers and claws winked in the low light. A helm covered his face, its surface smooth and featureless except for a single blue gem set into its forehead. A serpentine amulet of azurite, brass, and copper hung from his neck. The silver staff in his hand tapped on the stone floor in time with his steps. Some amongst the warriors stirred as the sorcerer passed, their hands brushing their weapons as though half in temptation and half in threat. The sorcerer paused in his procession, his head turning slowly to look at the stirring warriors. Stillness formed under that gaze. After a second the sorcerer continued, his tread unhurried.

When he was at the foot of the altar he stopped and looked up at the three figures who stood beside a wide bowl in which yellow and red flames danced. Each of them wore armour that bore the echo of Prospero in its lines. The heads of serpents, hawks and jackals looked out from carved armour plates, and high crests rose above slit-visored helms. They watched the sorcerer for a long moment, not moving.

‘I am Calitiedies,’ said one. ‘These are my brothers, and this is our circle of warriors.’ Calitiedies paused, and his eyes flicked to the armoured figures lining the temple’s tiers. ‘You come before us bearing the marks of ancient lore on your armour, and knowing the words of passing from ancient Prospero.’ Calitiedies blinked slowly, and the air became taut. Beside him the flames in the wide bronze bowl dimmed and shrank. Throughout the temple weapons armed with a roll of metallic clatters and the shiver of energy fields. ‘But you are not of our blood, and you have never seen the skies of Prospero. Who are you, that you can come so before us and hope to live?’

The sorcerer looked around slowly, as though taking in the temple and all its occupants with brief interest.

The fire in the bronze bowl exploded upwards, flames writhing blue as the light drained from the air. Calitiedies began to move, but the voice stopped him in mid-step, and the invocation forming in his mind died before it could complete. The voice was not loud, but the air quivered at its sound.

‘I am Astraeos,’ said the sorcerer, ‘and your oaths will be mine.’

HAND OF DUST

The dust blows from my hand towards a far horizon. I watch it turn on the wind. My mind can feel every particle of it, can taste the bone, metal and flesh that it once was. I can hear the dead in the dust’s soft touch. For a second I think I recognise a voice, but then it becomes just the soft rattle of dust against my armour. The sun is setting. The sky is a pyre of molten colour. The wind shivers close to my skin. It has a voice of thirst and whispers. I look down to where the dust has heaped against the charred remnants of a building. This is the place where everything began, and everything ended. I thought I would never return here, but here I stand and wait and watch the dust dancing on the wind and I remember. I am Ahzek Ahriman, exiled son of Magnus the Red, destroyer of my Legion, and I remember.

I remember red. The red was the blood gloss of armour under the high sun. A warrior crouched before me on the polished, white stone. Ivory edged his armour and symbols curled in silver on the polished plates. He was trembling as though from a chill.

‘Helekphon?’ I said slowly. He did not move.

I shifted half a pace forward. Deep, laboured breaths buzzed from the vox-link.

‘Brother?’ I tried again. Nothing. Just the trembling and the hiss-sigh of breath and static.

+Helekphon?+ I sent.

His head snapped up. Blank eye pieces met mine. The trembling stopped. He had gone very still. I shifted my grip on my boltgun. I could feel his eyes follow the movement.

+Ahriman?+ he sent, his voice a crushed whisper of thought.

+I am here.+

+Please…+ The thought was a moan. It tasted of desperation, of the last breath of life. +You have never… seen this before… have you? You were not on Bezant… or Clorphor.+

He paused and I felt the dull echo of his panic as his will slipped. +You have heard… but have not seen. This is our curse, boy. This is our fate. You should have killed me when it began. Do it now, before…+

His thought drained away, and the hiss of his breath rose in my ears again.

+Brother I cann–+ I began, but never finished the thought.

Helekphon’s head wrenched back and he screamed to the noon sky. His shape distorted. Armour shrieked as it tore apart. Wet flesh expanded out of the cracks. Blind eyes rolled in the branching mass of blood-slicked flesh. Claws and hands reached down, slapping on the stone floor as the flesh that had been Helekphon pulled itself from the cracked shell of his armour.

I fired. I fired again and again, until the firing pin clacked on an empty chamber. Then I stood for a long time, looking at the blood and pulped flesh glinting red under the sun.

The memory slides away with the dust, becoming small and distant as I watch. I breathe. I can still smell the blood. The wind and the dust rise from my hand.

I remember water. The water was black and still, like a mirror waiting for light. The still surface shattered as my hand scooped up a palm of water to my mouth. It tasted of pollution and chemicals, and life allowed to rot out of the sight of the sun. I took another mouthful and gulped it down. My mouth was still dry.

Where am I? I thought, as though the question alone would bring an answer. I looked up. There were stars in the sky, but their light did not reflect from the water’s mirror. A swirl of colour lay across the blackness like a stain of rot blossoming on a bandaged wound.

‘The Eye of Terror still holds me then,’ I said to myself as I looked down from the bruised night. A world of leaping flames and broken stone extended away from me on all sides. Somewhere in the distance gunfire chattered and rippling detonations smudged the horizon. My armour hung from me, blackened as though by fire. My shattered staff lay beside me, still smoking. I closed my eyes and saw again the face of Magnus, and felt the roar of the warp as I tumbled away from that face.

Banishment: the last word spoken by my father, the word which followed me as I had fallen through the warp. Seconds had become years and years seconds. I had passed through fire, light and ice so bright it was blinding. All the while the last word spoken to me by my father had followed me, and with it the fact that the Rubric had failed – that I had failed.

Pride – last of sins – it finds us in the end. Always.

I reached for more water and saw the figures watching me. I should have sensed them approaching, should have heard their thoughts and read the paths of their next moments before they reached me. But I did not. My mind was a dull stone in my skull.

There were five of them. Their armour was the ochre of dried bone. Their weapons glinted in the light of the Eye above. I stared at them, my hand halfway to my mouth, the water draining between my fingers. They looked at me for a long moment, and then one spoke in a voice like gristle cracking between teeth.

‘Who are you, who comes to our realm?’

Who am I? I thought.

I am Ahriman, came a thought that sounded like a distant shout fading into the distance.

Banishment. The word rang clear and fresh through my mind. I looked down at my hand. The water had drained away.

I am failure, I thought. I am the sinner chained to life for his hubris while all he valued became dust.

I looked up.

‘I am Horkos,’ I said.

The memory fades. The sun is setting in a final glimmer of red fire.

I am still banished, I am still an exile, but I am no longer broken by the burden of the past.

I see fading light. The last rays of the red sun catch the motes of dust as they spread through the air. I see the future in their dust dance. Possibilities and unborn fates spin before my eyes, each one a universe that shall live, or shall remain unborn. I see worlds burn, and ashes become the beds of the children of humanity. I see all that was, and I see how it may end. I see hope. We will rise again. Salvation will come, even if it takes ten thousand years.

The sun has set, and this dead land of ashes and dust is an ocean of black velvet beneath my feet. I let my hand fall, and watch with my mind as the last of the scattered dust settles with the night. I turn. Behind me a sea of eyes glow bright in armoured faces. They wait, silent, watching.

‘Come, my brothers,’ I say. ‘It is time.’

KING OF ASHES

Someone is calling me. I feel his voice pull me to wakefulness. How long has it been? Cold darkness surrounds me, unbroken by the beat of a heart, or the hiss of breath. How long have I slept? Why can’t I see? I try to look around, but there is nothing to turn through, no light to break the blackness. I could be falling. I could be tumbling over and over without realising.

Who am I? The question echoes, and is lost in silence.

What am I?

Then I remember. I remember what I was, and the first time I glimpsed what I would become.

I remember gold. A golden web of glowing threads, spreading through the black, stretching into infinity. The threads split and divided, met and joined, over and over, slicing the emptiness into sharp slivers. I spun through the web. My body blinked between shapes: a silver hawk, a circle of fire, a sickle of moonlight. Rainbow sparks danced in my wake, and the golden web sang at my passing. I felt joy. I had made that journey many times in dreams before that moment, but that was the first time I had dived into the Great Ocean at my own will. It felt like breaking into air after drowning. It felt like returning home. I flew, my thoughts stretching across time and space, my will snapping realities and remaking them. It was so easy, it was like nothing, but it was everything.

They came for me then.

I felt them before I saw them. They cackled with voices of cracking ice. The golden web became fractures running through a plain of obsidian. I fell and hit the black glass. My shape became that of a human, hard-muscled and black-haired. I stood, and turned my single eye to the shadows which crawled above the ground. Cold poured over me. I tasted blood, hot and spiced. Laughter breathed across the idea of my skin…

None of what I saw or felt was physically real – it was all metaphor, a shadow play projected onto the curtain of the aether. But unkind dreams can burn deeper than true fire.

A wolf stepped from behind the darkness. Blood matted its pelt and hung in droplets from its teeth. Scars marked its muzzle and twisted between eyes the colour of molten brass. Those eyes did not leave mine as it paced forwards. Breath panted from its open mouth, and I felt rage and hunger in each exhalation. It began to circle. I thought I heard laughter in the click of its claws.

+What are you?+ I asked. The wolf growled, jaws snapping out and back, faster than a blink of lightning. I felt the tips of its teeth brush the skin of my face. Pain detonated inside me at the touch. The obsidian beneath my feet shattered and I plunged down, through into the oblivion below.

The wolf was all around me, circling like a hurricane-force wind. I pushed against its presence with all my strength, but the storm swallowed my power. Its hate surrounded me, hot and red, but even as its teeth ripped me I could feel that it was sparing me, that it was holding itself back. I was not afraid. I had always known that there were creatures in the Great Ocean, things that call it home just as I do. Old things, formed from mislaid thoughts and stranded dreams, dangerous, cruel. They had always seemed to ignore me. Until that moment.

I hit another glass plain, and pulled myself to my feet. Aetheric blood was sheeting down the idea of my skin. The wolf was circling again, but it was not alone. Three other shapes stood beyond the wolf. A serpent glided and coiled across the black glass, its scales changing colour with each stretch and squeeze of its body. There was something soft and obscene about its every movement, like the taste of vomit made solid. It reared up and looked at me with a human face. Its features were perfect in every way. I knew as I looked back that it saw everything I had ever hidden from anyone or anything. It licked its lips, the hood of scales flaring behind its smiling face. Behind it hovered a thing like a rotten moth with the cataract-white eyes of a dead fish. Its thorax shuddered as it expanded and contracted, phlegm popping and rattling with each breath. There was another shape further away, indistinct, yet I was sure that it had had its back turned to me. The wolf circled nearer, and the snake glided in its wake.

+I know what this is,+ I said, and there was laughter in my thought-voice. Even now, with all that has happened and all that I am, the foolishness of those words makes me shiver. +I know what you are.+

The wolf paused. I could see the blood-clotted fur on its back rise into serrated spikes. The snake laughed, and the moth buzzed its wings. I did not respond. I was sure, so sure that I understood.

+The bloody wolf, which represents destruction from within. The serpent, which is the temptation to turn aside. The spectre of the grave, which is the fear of failure. You are my weaknesses come to pull me back to the dark. The seeker of truth must face you all if he is to ascend, but you are nothing more than reflections, and I do not fear you.+

‘Is that what you seek?’ said a voice. It was quiet, but it shook with different sounds, as though stitched together from many voices. The wolf went still, and the serpent hissed but did not move. The rotting moth buzzed backwards. The hunched creature at the edge of the circle turned and looked at me. It had the head of an eagle, a crow and a vulture stacked one above the other. Its eyes burned gas-flame blue. ‘Is the truth why you are here?’ It paused, savouring its next word. ‘Magnus.’ The words chilled me. The creature should not know my name. It should not know me. ‘Oh, but how could I not know you, my son?’ it said.

+No,+ I said. +You are not my father.+

The four creatures laughed with a crackle of bones and a rustle of feathers. Their shadows grew, crawling towards me. Their hunger was all around me, pressing close, churning like waves against my mind. Then, suddenly – so suddenly that I felt their absence as a cold shock – they were gone. I was alone, surround by nothing but silence.

Where had they gone? Why had they gone? The answer came, clear out of the silence. They had fled. And that meant that the silence was a lie.

I was not alone.

I felt it then: the presence in the emptiness, vast and so bright that I could not see it.

+Why are you here?+ I asked. When the answer came it echoed through my being.

+I have been searching for you,+ it said, +my son.+

I open the idea of my mouth to answer, but the memory is gone and I am falling again, trying to remember if I answered, or if in that moment I was, for the first time, afraid.

The memory has gone but it has given me part of myself.

I am a son.

A son…

I remember earth. The earth was red, it rose in dry ribbons on the wind. He stood before me, his armour powdered by dust and marked by fire. His brothers stood beside him: Amon with his head bowed, Tolbek, his face blanked by shock, and the others. My sons. My defiant sons. My murderous children. So clever, so gifted and so blind.

Ahriman stared back at me. He knew what he had done; I could see the truth haloing him like black smoke around a flame. He had defied me, he had wielded the fire of the gods to remake the present, and he had failed.

I turned and looked at what my son had left of my Legion. Thousands of blank eyes stared back at me from the helms of motionless suits of armour. I could see the soul caught in each one, held like smoke in a bottle, drowning in oblivion, dead yet not gone.

Rage. Even now the memory shakes me. Our anger is not the anger of mortals. It is the lightning bolt which breaks the high tower – the hammer blow which shakes the heavens.

I looked back to Ahriman, to my son, the best of my sons. We spoke, but the words held no meaning. There could be only one answer for what he had done.

+Banishment.+ I spoke the word, and the word remade the world.

Ahriman was gone.

My son is gone. I remain. Falling. It is he that is calling me, back to the world of mud and flesh. I see his face as I fall from the cradle of gods. Was it a memory of what has been, or is it yet to come? Is there a difference?

I am not what I was. I am not even a fraction of what I was.

I am the broken son of a false god.

I am dust.

I am time scattering from the hand to be blown on the wind of fate.

I am the whisperings of the dead, forever cascading into the grave.

I am the king of all I see.

I open my eye. Reality screams around me as it rushes and tumbles past. Time surrounds me, scattering and gathering me. Once I would have thought this power, but it is not; it is a prison.

There are shapes in the tempest: faces, towers and plains of dust, possibilities waiting to be seen, to be made real. I can decide to make them real, or to make them fade. I can slip back into the dark silt of dreams that might not be dreams. I choose to let them become real. My throne builds itself from shadow. The boiling sky and dry red plain congeal and harden above and below me. I still have no form besides a jagged line of golden light which hangs above the throne like frozen lightning. Then the tower splits the ground beneath me, and thrusts me up into the air. Other towers shimmer into sight as I rise, a great forest of obsidian, silver and brass. I look, and see through the veils of matter, see the weave and flow of the aether beneath. It has been a long time since I have taken my throne, an age in which empires could die and be forgotten. For the half mortal creatures which dwell in the towers, though, I have been absent for no more than a turning of one of this planet’s nine suns.

My remaining sons are waiting for me. They kneel, high-crested helms dipping, silk robes rustling in the wind. Each of them sees me differently. I know this, though I cannot know what it is that they see – that insight is denied me. Perhaps they see me as I was when I was half mortal: copper-skinned, red-maned, and crowned by horns. Perhaps they see only a shadow cast across my throne as though by a flickering fire. Perhaps they see something else.

Knekku raises his head first, and the questions begin to form in his thoughts. What is my bidding?

+The exiles are returning,+ I send. I feel their shock, their anger, and their hope. +He is returning, and war is coming with him.+

AHRIMAN: UNCHANGED

‘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.

PART ONE

SONS OF
THE FATHER

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.

PART TWO

PATHS TO NOWHERE

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.’

PART THREE

TEMPEST

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.+

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John French has written several Horus Heresy stories including the novels Praetorian of Dorn and Tallarn: Ironclad, the novellas Tallarn: Executioner and The Crimson Fist, 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
Night Lords: The Omnibus.

It was a curse, to be a god’s son.

To see as a god saw, to know what a god knew. This sight, this knowledge, tore him apart time and again.

His chamber was a cell, devoid of comfort, serving as nothing more than a haven against interference. Within this hateful sanctuary, the god’s son screamed out secrets of a future yet to come, his voice a strangled chorus of cries rendered toneless and metallic by the speaker grille of his ancient battle helm.

Sometimes his muscles would lock, slabs of meat and sinew tensing around his iron-hard bones, leaving him shivering and breathing in harsh rasps, unable to control his own body. These seizures could last for hours, each beat of his two hearts firing his nerves with agony as the blood hammered through his cramping muscles. In the times he was free from the accursed paralysis, when his reserve heart would slow and grow still once again, he would ease the pain by pounding his skull against the walls of his cell. This fresh torment was a distraction from the images that burned behind his eyes.

It sometimes worked, but never for long. The returning visions would peel back any lesser torment, bathing his mind once more in fire.

The god’s son, still in his battle armour, rammed his helmed head against the wall, driving his skull against the steel again and again. Between the ceramite helmet he wore and the enhanced bone of his skeleton, his efforts did more damage to the wall than to himself.

Lost in the same curse that led to his gene-father’s death, the god’s son did not see his cell walls around him, nor did he detect the data streaming across his retinas as his helm’s combat display tracked and targeted the contours of the wall, the hinges of the barred door, and every other insignificant detail in the unfurnished chamber. At the top left of his visor display, his vital signs were charted in a scrolling readout that flashed with intermittent warnings when his twin hearts pounded too hard for even his inhuman physiology, or his breathing ceased for minutes at a time with his body locked in a seizure.

And this was the price he paid for being like his father. This was existence as the living legacy of a god.

The slave listened at his master’s door, counting the minutes.

Behind the reinforced dark metal portal, the master’s cries had finally subsided – at least for now. The slave was human, with the limited senses such a state entailed, but with his ear pressed to the door, he could make out the master’s breathing. It was a sawing sound, ragged and harsh, filtered into a metallic growl by the vox-speakers of the master’s skull-faced helm.

And still, even as his mind wandered to other thoughts, the slave kept counting the seconds as they became minutes. It was easy; he’d trained to make it instinctive, for no chronometers would work reliably within the warp.

The slave’s name was Septimus, because he was the seventh. Six slaves had come before him in service to the master, and those six were no longer among the crew of the glorious vessel, the Covenant of Blood.

The corridors of the Astartes strike cruiser stood almost empty, a silent web of black steel and dark iron. These were the veins of the great ship, once thriving with activity: servitors trundling about their simple duties, Astartes moving from chamber to chamber, mortal crew performing the myriad functions that were necessary for the ship’s continued running. In the days before the great betrayal, thousands of souls had called the Covenant home, including almost three hundred of the immortal Astartes.

Time had changed that. Time, and the wars it brought.

The corridors were unlit, but not powerless. An intentional blackness settled within the strike cruiser, a darkness so deep it was bred into the ship’s steel bones. It was utterly natural to the Night Lords, each one born of the same sunless world. To the few crew that dwelled in the Covenant’s innards, the darkness was – at first – an uncomfortable presence. Acclimatisation would inevitably come to most. They would still carry their torches and optical enhancers, for they were human and had no ability to pierce the artificial night as their masters did. But over time, they grew to take comfort in the darkness.

In time, acclimatisation became familiarity. Those whose minds never found comfort in the blackness were lost to madness, and discarded after they were slain for their failure. The others abided, and grew familiar with their unseen surroundings.

Septimus’s thoughts went deeper than most. All machines had souls. This he knew, even from his days of loyalty to the Golden Throne. He would speak with the nothingness sometimes, knowing the blackness was an entity unto itself, an expression of the ship’s sentience. To walk through the pitch-blackness that saturated the ship was to live within the vessel’s soul, to breathe in the palpable aura of the Covenant’s traitorous malevolence.

The darkness never answered, but he took comfort in the vessel’s presence around him. As a child, he’d always feared the dark. That fear had never really left him, and knowing the silent, black corridors were not hostile was all that kept his mind together in the infinite night of his existence.

He was also lonely. That was a difficult truth to admit, even to himself. Far easier to sit in the darkness, speaking to the ship, even knowing it would never answer. He had sometimes felt distant from the other slaves and servants aboard the vessel. Most had been in service to the Night Lords much longer than he had. They unnerved him. Many walked around with their eyes closed, navigating the cold hallways of the ship by memory, by touch, and by other senses Septimus had no desire to understand.

Once, in the silent weeks before another battle on another world, Septimus had asked what became of the six slaves before him. The master was in seclusion, away from his brothers, praying to the souls of his weapons and armour. He had looked at Septimus then, staring with eyes as black as the space between the stars.

And he’d smiled. The master rarely did that. The blue veins visible under the master’s pale cheeks twisted like faint cracks in pristine marble.

‘Primus,’ he spoke softly – as he always did without his battle helm – but with a rich, deep resonance nevertheless, ‘was killed a long, long time ago. In battle.’

‘Did you try to save him, lord?’

‘No. I was not aware of his death. I was not on board the Covenant when it happened.’

The slave wanted to ask if the master would have even tried to save his predecessor had the chance arisen, but in truth he feared he knew the answer already. ‘I see,’ Septimus said, licking his dry lips. ‘And the others?’

‘Tertius… changed. The warp changed him. I destroyed him when he was no longer himself.’

This surprised Septimus. The master had told him before of the importance of servants that could resist the madness of the warp, remaining pure from the corruption of the Ruinous Powers.

‘He fell by your hand?’ Septimus asked.

‘He did. It was a mercy.’

‘I see. And the others?’

‘They aged. They died. All except for Secondus and Quintus.’

‘What of them?’

‘Quintus was slain by the Exalted.’

Septimus’s blood ran cold at those words. He loathed the Exalted.

‘Why? What transgression was he guilty of?’

‘He broke no law. The Exalted killed him in a moment of fury. He vented his rage on the closest living being. Unfortunately for Quintus, it was him.’

‘And… what of Secondus?’

‘I will tell you of the second another time. Why do you ask about my former servants?’

Septimus drew breath to tell the truth, to confess his fears, to admit he was speaking into the ship’s darkness to stave off loneliness. But the fate of Tertius stayed trapped within his forethoughts. Death because of madness. Death because of corruption.

‘Curiosity,’ the slave said to his master, speaking the first and only lie he would ever say in his service.

The sound of booted footfalls drew Septimus back to the present. He moved away from the master’s door, taking a breath as he glanced unseeing down the hallway in the direction of the approaching footsteps.

He knew who was coming. They would see him. They would see him even if he stayed hidden nearby, so there was no sense running. They would smell his scent and see the aura of his body heat. So he stood ready, willing his heartbeat to slow from its thunderous refrain. They would hear that, too. They would smile at his fears.

Septimus clicked the deactivation button on his weak lamp pack, killing the dim yellow illumination and bathing the corridor in utter blackness once more. He did this out of respect to the approaching Astartes, and because he had no wish to see their faces. At times, the darkness made dealing with the demigods much easier.

Steeled and prepared, Septimus closed his now-useless eyes, shifting his perceptions to focus entirely on his hearing and sense of smell. The footfalls were heavy but unarmoured – too widely spaced to be human. A swish of a tunic or robe. Most pervasive of all, the scent of blood: tangy, rich and metallic, strong enough to tickle the tongue. It was the smell of the ship itself, but distilled, purified, magnified.

Another demigod.

One of the master’s kin was coming to see his brother.

‘Septimus,’ said the voice from the blackness.

The slave swallowed hard, not trusting his voice but knowing he must speak. ‘Yes, lord. It is I.’

A rustle of clothing, the sound of something soft on metal. Was the demigod stroking the master’s door?

‘Septimus,’ the other demigod repeated. His voice was inhumanly low, a rumble of syllables. ‘How has my brother been?’

‘He has not emerged yet, lord.’

‘I know. I hear him breathing. He is calmer than before.’ The demigod sounded contemplative. ‘I did not ask if he had emerged, Septimus. I asked how he had been.’

‘This affliction has lasted longer than most, lord, but my master has been silent for almost an hour now. I have counted the minutes. This is the longest he has been at peace since the affliction first took hold.’

The demigod chuckled. It sounded like thunderheads colliding. Septimus had a momentary trickle of nostalgia; he’d not seen a storm – not even stood under a real sky – in years now.

‘Careful with your language, vassal,’ the demigod said. ‘To name it an affliction implies a curse. My brother, your master, is blessed. He sees as a god sees.’

‘Forgive me, great one.’ Septimus was already on his knees, head bowed, knowing that the demigod could see his supplication clearly in the pitch darkness. ‘I use only the words my master uses.’

There was a long pause.

‘Septimus. Stand. You are fearful, and it is affecting your judgement. I will do you no harm. Do you not know me?’

‘No, great lord.’ This was true. The slave could never tell the difference in the demigods’ voices. Each one spoke like a predator cat’s low snarls. Only his master sounded different, an edge of softness rounding out the lion-like growls. He knew this recognition was due to familiarity, rather than any true difference in the master’s tone, but it never helped in telling the others apart. ‘I might guess if told to do so.’

There was the sound of the demigod shifting his stance, and the accompanying whisper of his clothing.

‘Indulge me.’

‘I believe you are Lord Cyrion.’

Another pause. ‘How did you know, vassal?’

‘Because you laughed, lord.’

In the silence that followed those words, even in the darkness, Septimus was certain the demigod was smiling.

‘Tell me,’ the Astartes finally spoke, ‘have the others come today?’

The slave swallowed. ‘Lord Uzas was here three hours ago, Lord Cyrion.’

‘I imagine that was unpleasant.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘What did my beloved brother Uzas do when he came?’ The edge of sarcasm in Cyrion’s voice was unmistakable.

‘He listened to the master’s words, but said none of his own.’ Septimus recalled the chill in the blackness as he stood in the hallway with Uzas, hearing the demigod breathe in harsh grunts, listening to the thrum of his primed battle armour. ‘He wore his war-plate, lord. I do not know why.’

‘That’s no mystery,’ Cyrion replied. ‘Your master is still in his own war armour. The latest “affliction” took hold while we were embattled, and to remove the armour would risk waking him from the vision.’

‘I do not understand, lord.’

‘Don’t you? Think, Septimus. You can hear my brother’s cries now, but they are muffled, filtered through his helm’s speakers and further constrained by the metal of his cell. But if one wished to hear him with a degree of clarity… He is screaming his prophecies into the vox-network. Everyone wearing their armour can hear him crying out across the communication frequencies.’

The thought made Septimus’s blood run cold. The ship’s demigod crew, hearing his master cry out in agony for hours on end. His skin prickled as if stroked by the darkness. This discomfort – was it jealousy? Helplessness? Septimus wasn’t sure.

‘What is he saying, lord? What does my master dream?’

Cyrion rested his palm against the door again, and his voice was devoid of the humour he’d hinted at before.

‘He dreams what our primarch dreamed,’ the Astartes said in a low tone. ‘Of sacrifice and battle. Of war without end.’

Cyrion was not entirely correct.

He spoke with the assurance of knowledge, for he was all too experienced with his brother’s visions. Yet this time, a new facet was threaded through the stricken warrior’s prophecies. This came to light some nine hours later when, at last, the door opened.

The demigod staggered into the hallway, fully armoured, leaning against the opposite wall of the corridor. His muscles were like cables of fire around molten bones, but the pain wasn’t the worst part. He could manage pain, and had done so countless times before. It was the weakness. The vulnerability. These things unnerved him, made him bare his teeth in a feral snarl at the sheer unfamiliarity of the sensation.

Movement. The god’s son sensed movement to his left. Still pain-blind from the wracking headache brought on by his seizures, he turned his head towards the source of the motion. His ability to smell prey, as enhanced as every sense he possessed, registered familiar scents: the smoky touch of cloying incense, the musk of sweat, and the metallic tang of concealed weaponry.

‘Septimus,’ the god’s son spoke. The sound of his own voice was alien; scratchy and whispered even through the helmet’s vox speakers.

‘I am here, master.’ The slave’s relief was shattered when he saw how weak his lord was. This was new to them both. ‘You were lost to us for exactly ninety-one hours and seventeen minutes,’ the slave said, apprising his master in the way he always did after the seizures struck.

‘A long time,’ the demigod said, drawing himself up to his full height. Septimus watched his master stand tall, and was careful to angle away the dim beam from his lamp pack, casting its weak illumination onto the floor. It still provided enough light to see by, bringing a reassuring gloom to the hallway.

‘Yes, lord. A long time. The afflictions are getting longer.’

‘They are. Who was the last to come to me?’

‘Lord Cyrion, seven hours ago. I thought you were going to die.’

‘For a while, so did I.’ There was the serpentine hiss of venting air pressure as the demigod removed his helm. In the low light, Septimus could just make out his master’s smooth features, and the eyes as black as pools of tar.

‘What did you dream?’ the slave asked.

‘Dark omens and a dead world. Make your way to my arming chambers and make preparations. I must speak with the Exalted.’

‘Preparations?’ Septimus hesitated. ‘Another war?’

‘There is always another war. But first, we must meet someone. Someone who will prove vital to our survival. We must go on a journey.’

‘To where, lord?’

The demigod gave a rare smile. ‘Home.’

A Black Library Publication

Ahriman: Exile first published in 2013.
Ahriman: Sorcerer first published in 2014.
Ahriman: Unchanged first published in 2015.
‘Hounds of Wrath’ first published in Honour of the Space Marines in 2014.
‘King of Ashes’ first published in Renegades of the Dark Millennium in 2014.
‘All is Dust’, ‘Hand of Dust’, ‘The Dead Oracle’ and ‘Gates of Ruin’ first published as eBooks (2012-2014)
‘The First Prince’ first published as an MP3 audio drama in 2014.
‘Fortune’s Fool’ first published in Ahriman: Exodus in 2015.
This eBook edition published in 2017 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,
Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustrations by Toni Deu and John Michelbach.

Ahriman: The Omnibus © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2017. Ahriman: The Omnibus, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-633-0

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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