by John French
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 calm. ‘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 trust me.’ 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 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 should have 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 co
rridor 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 jar, 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 wrap 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 though 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 his 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 l
ifetime 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.
