by John French
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.<
br />
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.
