A Thousand Sons

by Graham McNeill

  Ahriman saw that Skarssen was not a warrior without courage, his aura instinctively rebelling at the challenge in Magnus’ words, but nor was he without the wit to understand that he was a mote in the face of the primarch’s power. He looked to his left and right, seeing the world frozen around him, every banner hanging motionless and every observer save the Thousand Sons like statues lining a triumphal roadway.

  Skarssen lifted his head to expose the corded muscles of his thick neck, and Ahriman recognised the symbolism of the gesture.

  Magnus nodded and the world snapped back into its natural rhythms. The wind blew once more and the silk banners flapped in the haze of dancing salt crystals.

  “Wolf Lord Skarssen,” said Magnus, “I understand your message, but there is much to do on Aghoru before we can fight alongside your father’s Legion.”

  “This world is compliant, is it not?” asked Skarssen, and Ahriman sensed the confusion amongst the Space Wolves at his newly subservient tone.

  “It is,” agreed Magnus.

  “Then what is left to do?” he asked. “There are worlds yet to be brought to heel, and your Legion’s strength is required. Your brothers-in-arms call for you, and it is a warrior’s duty to fight when called.”

  “On your world perhaps,” said Magnus, “but this is not Fenris. Where and when the Thousand Sons fight is for me to decide, not the Wolf King, and certainly not you. Do I make myself clear?”

  “You do, Lord Magnus, but I swore a blood oath not to return without your warriors.”

  “That is none of my concern, and this is not a matter for discussion,” said Magnus, an unmistakeable edge of impatience in his tone.

  “Then we are at an impasse.”

  “I fear that we are,” said Magnus.

  AHRIMAN CONCENTRATED ON the words before him, his quill scratching at the heavy paper as he committed the morning’s events to his grimoire. There would be other records, of course, but none that told of events with a true understanding of what had really happened. His words flowed from him without conscious thought as he rose through the Enumerations and let the natural rhythm of memory and intuition guide him.

  He closed his eyes, freeing his body of light and letting it rise up from his flesh. The currents of the Great Ocean bore him into the darkness, and Ahriman hoped to catch a glimpse of things to come. He quashed the thought. To focus on the desires of the ego in this place of emotion would only diminish the probability of success.

  His connection with the material world faded, and the Great Ocean swelled around him, a maelstrom of non-existent colours, nameless emotions and meaningless dimensions.

  Occasional ripples ushered him onwards, powerful minds, intense emotions and primal urges. The anger of the Space Wolves was a red reef of raw directness, the gasping lust of two remembrancers as they coupled a purple swirl of conflicting desire. The fear of a Legion serf as he rubbed a salve into an infected rash was a splash of vivid green, the scheming of yet another as she plotted how to further her career, a dull ochre yellow.

  They rose around him like temple smoke, though concepts such as up and down had no meaning here. A swirling fog surrounded him, an impenetrable mist of emotion, feeling and possibility. His mere proximity wrought potential existences within the fog, his presence an imprint in the warp and weft of the Great Ocean, shaping and shaped by the immaterial unmatter that made up this alternate dimension.

  This was the very essence of the Primordial Creator, the wellspring from which all things came. Nothing was impossible here, for this was the foundry of creation, the origin of all things, past, present and future.

  Ahriman flew onwards, revelling in the aetheric energies, bathing in them and refreshed by them. When he returned to his body, he would be energised as a mortal would be by a good night’s rest.

  The kaleidoscopic world around him stretched out to infinite realms of possibility. Ahriman let his consciousness be borne along by the currents, hoping to chance upon a rich seam of things yet to pass. He focussed his mind on the teachings of the Corvidae even as he opened his mind to the vast emptiness of thought. Such apparently contradictory states of mind were essential to the reading of the future, difficult for one such as him, near impossible for anyone less gifted.

  He felt the first nibblings of other presences in the Great Ocean, formless creatures of insensate appetite, little more than mewling scraps of energy drawn to his mind as students flock to a great master. They thought to feed on him, but Ahriman dismissed them with a flicker of thought.

  Such whelp creatures were no threat to an Adept Exemptus of his skill, but older, hungrier things swam the depths, malevolent predators that fed on the hot, life-rich energies of mortal travellers. Ahriman was protected, but he was not invulnerable.

  It began softly, a faint hiss, like rain on glass.

  He felt its feather-light pull, and he drifted towards it without apparent interest. Too quick, and he would disturb the fabric of the Great Ocean, overwhelming the skittish trickle of future events with the swells of his eagerness.

  Ahriman controlled his excitement, letting his course and that of the thin stream come together, opening his mind’s eye to the bracing cold of unwritten events.

  He saw a mountain of glass, tall and hollowed out, yet a stripling compared to the Mountain of Aghoru. A great space within was filled with yellow light, a spiking cauldron of conflicting emotions and hurt, a gathering thundercloud, shot through with golden lightning, filled the sky.

  Ahriman knew this was important; visions in the aether were shaped as much by the viewer as they were by the Great Ocean. This mountain and thunderstorm could be a true vision, or could be allegory, each aspect symbolic of something greater. It was the skill of the adept to sort one from the other.

  Hot excitement ghosted through his immaterial form. It had been years since any Corvidae had been able to peel back the skin of the aether to reveal the future. Might this mean the eternal waxing and waning of the tides of power were shifting once more in his cult’s favour?

  The intensity of the thought rippled outwards, disturbing the liquid nothingness enfolding him. The vision fractured, like the surface of a lake in a rainstorm. Ahriman fought for calm, but his tenuous grasp on the stream was slipping. The glass mountain vanished, breaking into millions of pieces and falling like tears. A weeping eye was reflected in every shard, red and raw with pain.

  He fought to hold on to the jagged, painful images, but the aether surged, and it was gone, swept away in the angry swells of his own desire. Like the onset of a sudden storm, the substance of the Great Ocean turned violent. His own frustration was turning against him. Red waves broke against him as his mind was wrenched from thoughts of the future.

  His perception of the immediate returned to him, and he sensed the vibrant hunger of nearby void hunters, rapacious conceptual predators that followed the spoor of travellers’ emotions to devour their bodies of light. Dozens of them circled him like sharks with the scent of blood. He had remained longer than was safe, far longer.

  The first emerged from the blood red mist, all appetite and instinct. It came at him directly, its glittering teeth forming in the instant it took to think of them.

  Ahriman flew out of its path, its crimson form twisting around to follow him as another predator emerged from the mists. His mental analogy of sharks had given them form, and its body was sleek and evolved to be the consummate killer. He forced his mind to empty, discarding all metaphor and vocabulary, for they were the weapons his enemies would use against him.

  He flew from them, but they had his scent now. Half a dozen more followed, their forms blurred and protean, borrowed from those whose bodies of light had been given shape by his careless simile. A void hunter surged towards him, massive and powerful, its jaws opened wide to swallow him whole.

  Ahriman gathered the energy of the aether to him, feeding on the red mists and unleashing a torrent of will at the hunter. Its body exploded into shards of fire, each one snapped up and dev
oured by one of the other predators. Twin heqa staffs appeared in Ahriman’s hands, blazing with aetheric fire. Such weapons were necessary and dangerous at the same time. To burn so brightly would attract other beasts, yet without them he would surely perish here, leaving his mortal body a dead, soulless husk on the floor of his pavilion.

  They circled him, darting in to bite and snap, each time deterred by a sweep of his fiery staffs. Ahriman rose into the eighth Enumeration. He would need the focus of its aggression to stay alive, but it would only inflame the hunger of the beasts. The creatures came at him in a rush. Ahriman had seen their gathering fury, and lashed out with his blazing weapons.

  The closest beast billowed out of existence at his blow, the second with a violent burst of thought that overwhelmed its hunger and dispersed its essence. Another snapped at him. He swayed aside, its immaterial teeth snapping shut an instant from tearing his insubstantial existence apart. He thrust his heqa staff into his head, feeling its primal hunger and rage as its essence was obliterated.

  The pack broke off its attack, wary of him, but unable to halt their pursuit. The instincts of the void hunter were murderously sharp, but they demanded satisfaction. They would attack again, soon.

  They came at him three more times. Each time they retreated to a pack that grew larger with every passing moment, while he grew weaker and bled irresistible morsels of energy into the void.

  He could not long keep up this pace of battle. Combat in the aetheric realms was more draining than battling in the physical. In the material realm, an Astartes could fight for weeks on end without rest, but here such endurance was measured in minutes. A high-ranking warrior of the Thousand Sons could travel the Great Ocean far longer than most, but the strain of this fight was pushing Ahriman to the limits of his endurance.

  A great maw raced up at him from below, a thought-shaped need of monstrous proportions. Its teeth closed on his leg, tearing into his light, and his pain bled out like glittering diamonds, brilliant white and impossible to resist. His staff carved into the beast, and it vanished in its moment of triumph.

  He could not fight them much longer, and it seemed they knew his resistance was almost at an end. Their eagerness for him had them jostling one another, each beast desperate to make the kill and secure the choicest cuts.

  His energy was fading and one of the fiery heqa staffs winked out of existence.

  How galling to die after such a tantalising glimpse of the future.

  Then came a howling cry that split the Great Ocean, a furious sound that scattered the hunters as a wild darkness rose out of the swelling tides and currents. Fangs like swords of ice snapped and bit through the void-hunters. This was form and will honed to a knife-edge, a force streamlined for destruction and utterly without mercy. Yellow eyes, a shaggy pelt of black fur and slavering jaws roiled amid the frenzy.

  Even before Ahriman’s mind formed the image, he saw the phantasmal outline of the wolf, a beast larger and more powerful than any living animal could ever be. It tore through the void-predators, howling as it destroyed them with brutal swipes of thunderous claws and bites that swallowed each enemy whole.

  Within the dark of the wolf’s body, Ahriman caught fleeting glimpses of the furious will that drove it: a distant shadow in dark armour, not black but deep, metallic grey. The wolf howled, and waves of untrammelled fury spread into the Great Ocean with the force of a boulder dropped into a millpond. The predators scattered, cowed by this apex predator.

  And, like fading inkspots on a blotter, they melted into the darkness.

  The wolf turned towards Ahriman, its form turning in on itself and folding like the pieces of an origami puzzle until all that was left was the shadow at its heart, the subtle body of an Astartes in the hard grey of the Space Wolves.

  He drifted towards Ahriman, and it took no special skills to feel the primal, bruising energy that suffused this traveller’s flesh. His sheer vitality was incredible. Ahriman was a controlled reactor, but this warrior was a violent supernova. Both were deadly, both burned as bright, but where Ahriman could pluck a single soul out of a horde of millions, this warrior would destroy a million to kill the one.

  The wolf was gone, but Ahriman saw it tightly leashed within the warrior’s heart.

  “We should go, brother,” said the wolf warrior, with a voice like colliding glaciers. “The longer we tarry, the more our presence will draw fouler beasts.”

  “I saw you,” said Ahriman. “You came with Skarssen.”

  “Lord Skarssen,” corrected the warrior. “But, aye, you speak true, brother. My name is Ohthere Wyrdmake, Rune Priest to Amlodhi Skarssen Skarssensson of the 5th Company of Space Wolves.”

  “Ahzek Ahriman, Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons.”

  “I know well your name, Ahzek Ahriman,” said Wyrdmake, with a feral grin, “for I have long desired to meet you.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Wolves of Fenris/A Meeting of Minds/The Dam Breaks

  THERE ARE NO wolves on Fenris.

  Ahriman had heard that before, a nugget of scandalous rumour passed down from nameless source to nameless source. Such contention was, of course, ridiculous; the evidence padded alongside the Thousand Sons as they marched into the Mountain once again. A score of iron-furred wolves roamed at will along the length of the column of warriors, like herding dogs watching over a flock.

  Six hundred Astartes marched into the Mountain, the Thousand Sons and Space Wolves together. At the head of the column, Magnus the Red led the way, surrounded by Terminators of the Scarab Occult and flanked by his captains. Lord Skarssen and his retinue of Wolf Guard marched alongside the towering primarch. Ohthere Wyrdmake walked at his master’s side, and the Rune Priest inclined his head as he caught Ahriman’s eye.

  They had spoken last night, yet Ahriman still did not know quite what to make of him.

  Land Raiders crunched their way uphill alongside the Astartes, the war footing at the behest of Yatiri.

  The tribal elder had come down from the Mountain with Khalophis prior to the arrival of Lord Skarssen and begged to see the Crimson King. The Space Wolves were en route, and he had been forced to wait until after their arrival. As important as the Aghoru were to the Thousand Sons, mortal business took second place to Astartes business.

  Ahriman had watched as Yatiri was shown into the glittering pyramid of Magnus, seeing the fear in his body language. Like all the masked tribesfolk of the Aghoru, Yadri cast no shadow in the aether, his life-energies somehow hidden from the sight of the Thousand Sons. He came with his fellow elders, and Ahriman saw their anger, no matter that they were masked and unreadable.

  Whatever passed between Yatiri and Magnus had been serious enough for the primarch to order Ahriman to gather warriors from every Fellowship and assemble a battle march.

  Seeing the Thousand Sons preparations, a warrior calling himself Varangr Ragnulf Ragnulfssen, herald of Lord Skarssen, had come to Magnus to request an audience.

  And so the Space Wolves marched with the Thousand Sons.

  They had marched past the deadstones, the rocks streaked with oily black tendrils like rotten veins. Upon seeing the condition of the deadstones, the Aghoru dropped to their knees and wept in fear. Ahriman paused to examine the stones, knowing only one thing that could have had so dramatic an effect on such impervious stone.

  “What do you think?” asked Phosis T’kar.

  “The same as you,” he had replied, and walked on.

  Ahriman watched the warriors of Lord Skarssen as the march continued. They set a brutal pace, and the Thousand Sons matched it. What was a fast walk for the Astartes was a punishing run for the Aghoru. Despite that, the tribesmen kept pace with the armoured warriors, fear lending their limbs strength to endure the exhausting temperature of the day.

  “They don’t feel the heat,” said Phosis T’kar as the march continued.

  “Who?”

  “The beasts Skarssen brought with him,” clarified T’kar. “They come from a world o
f ice and snow, yet they seem untroubled by this heat.”

  Ahriman watched as a wolf that reached to his waist padded by. Its fur was a patchwork of grey and white, thick and shaggy around its forequarters, sleek and smooth at its rear. As though sensing his scrutiny, it swung towards him, baring its fangs and narrowing its yellow eyes in a blatant challenge.

  “I do not know for sure,” said Ahriman, “but all that lives on the surface of Fenris does so because it can adapt to changing circumstances. These wolves are no exception.”

  “Then I wish I could adapt like them. I am sick of this damned heat,” said Phosis T’kar angrily. “My body is gene-wrought to withstand all extremes, but the fire of this sun saps us all of life. Even Hathor Maat struggles with it.”

  “Speak for yourself, T’kar,” retorted Hathor Maat. “I am quite comfortable.”

  Despite his bluster, Maat suffered as the rest of them did. Without the powers of the Pavoni to call on, he was unable to regulate his body as efficiently as would normally be the case. Yet the wolves of Fenris marched as though through a balmy summer’s day, the heat as untroubling to them as the frozen tundra of their home world.

  “It is thanks to their engineering,” said Magnus, joining their conversation. The primarch had said nothing since the march had begun, content to let his captains do the talking.

  “They were engineered?” asked Ahriman. “By whom?”

  “By the first colonists of Fenris,” said Magnus with a smile. “Can’t you see the dance of helices within them? The ballet of genes and the remarkable feats of splicing the earliest scientists achieved?”

  Ahriman shared a glance with his fellow captains, and Magnus laughed.

  “No, of course you do not,” said Magnus, shaking his head. “Uthizzar, you have travelled to Fenris, have you not?”