by John French
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 Ichneumons 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.+
