Ahriman: Unchanged

by John French

  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.