The Omnibus - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Is it not magnificent?’ said Maroth, the transmission of his voice edged with static. The creature turned its head and fixed its empty eyes on the soothsayer.

  Run. Run now, you fool. The thought screamed in Ahriman’s head. The creature opened its mouth in a grin that went too wide and showed too many teeth. A black tongue ran across the glinting needle-sharp points. It hissed: a noise that should have been impossible in the airless chamber.

  ‘The Space Marine that Karoz killed,’ breathed Ahriman.

  ‘Its name was Cadar, I think. Yes. It was grievously injured, but its final thread of life had not been cut when it came to me. Very strong.’ Maroth nodded as if in approval. ‘The near-dead flesh made a pleasing vessel.’

  Ahriman could see it: the Space Marine’s body was a sleeve of flesh, its spirit scooped out and its form a mask of skin. A daemon coiled in the husk that remained, its essence night-black, oozing hunger and malevolence. It was not intelligent; it was pure instinct and desire. The bindings Maroth had placed on it pinned it in place like an insect to a table. Ahriman had misjudged the soothsayer; he was ignorant and crude, but he had acquired and applied lore Ahriman did not believe him capable of grasping. The fruit of that achievement was an abomination.

  He looked away from the creature and saw that Maroth was watching him.

  ‘It is mine, and answers to me alone,’ said Maroth.

  He wanted me to see this, Ahriman thought, to see the power he commands. It is not enough that he wields it; others must witness it and be awed. He bowed low, knowing it was what was expected. Above him the creature hissed. This will be the weapon he uses to destroy Gzrel and take the Harrowing. Did he bring me here to test its potency? Am I to be its first victim?

  Maroth let Ahriman kneel for a long moment.

  ‘Rise, Horkos.’

  Ahriman stood and looked into Maroth’s red eyes. No, he thought. I am his first ally.

  ‘Now you see,’ said Maroth, and turned to leave. Behind him Ahriman followed, feeling the empty gaze of the creature on the back of his skull.

  Ahriman returned to his new quarters alone. Gzrel had given the space to him, but it was as much a calculated insult as a reward for service. At once vast and cramped, it was not so much a chamber as a void left in the structure of the ship. One wall towered into the darkness above, its surface covered with rivets and weld seams. The other walls met it at different angles and heights. Pipes ran through the space as if hurrying to other more vital areas. Some were as tall as a man, others no thicker than a finger; they snaked in bundles across the floor and spanned the space like vines. Thick, red-edged light oozed from the flames he had lit in bowls of machine oil. The room reeked of warm metal, oil smoke and stagnant air. Grey grease and dust covered the floor in a thick layer, muffling the sounds of his steps as he walked through the circular hatch. He looked up, his eyes reaching into the gloom beyond the tangled canopy of pipes. Air, coolant, fuel, water and waste, all rushing through this forgotten fissure in a ship that stretched to six kilometres and could house thirty thousand souls. He stood at the heart of the ship, yet in a forgotten place. It was supposed to be a mark of his place within the Harrowing, but the isolation was almost pleasing.

  He closed the hatch and turned, the barest hint of fatigue in his movements. His head ached, the presence of the bound creature lingering like a bruise on his mind. He thought for a moment of Astraeos; would he keep his silence?

  If he told Gzrel…

  The lord of the Harrowing would not believe him.

  Perhaps.

  It would have been better to silence him.

  He shook his head again. He needed to think, to reflect, and to remember.

  Quietly he began to speak the formulae, feeling the syllables resonate in his mouth, tasting the subtle shifts in the aether around him. He walked as he whispered, his feet tracing a spiralling pattern with his steps. He had already placed the lamps in the correct positions and left them burning to prepare the way. Anyone looking at them would not have realised their significance. The pattern they formed, the steps he took and the focus of his mind built a structure within the warp that would close the chamber to all observation. The ritual pulled on memories from a place inside him that he had long ago walled off, but he needed privacy.

  The air took on a dense, charged quality; the chamber swam in front of his eyes, and he could hear a sound like sand skittering over dry stone. Then, with a final step and a final word, the chamber snapped back into focus and silence fell.

  He nodded to himself, as if to fix the conviction in place, and turned to a sealed chest that stood in a corner. The smell of dust filled his nose as he opened the pressed metal lid. Within lay skeins of pale fabric layered over bulky objects, their shapes lost beneath the material like buildings under thick winter snow. He pulled the fabric out and looked at what lay beneath.

  It was not much. Anyone looking at them would have thought them battered trinkets taken from a battlefield or burned temple. There was a hook-topped rod, its surface blackened and blistered, its shaft splintered; a carved scarab the size of a human hand, its polished stone chipped and worn; a fragment of polished metal in the shape of an oak leaf. Beside them lay the helmet, the faceplate looking up at Ahriman with blank eyes. It was red. A plate of tarnished bronze extended from above the eyeline to beneath the chin, forming a plough-like muzzle broken by two red crystal eyes. Two flowing lines of black lacquer ran beneath the left eye like tracks of tears. A forked bronze crest rose from the forehead. It was grimy and battered, as if it had been pulled off after battle and left to fade under a layer of dust.

  Ahriman looked down at the face of the helmet for a second, then reached in and lifted it out of the chest. He held it, staring into its dirt-clouded eyes. He had wondered many times why he kept it and the other flotsam of another life. It was a risk; there might be some who remembered the Thousand Sons, who might recognise the helm, the scarab and the broken rod. There might even be some who remembered the name Ahriman. More, they were a reminder to himself of who he had been and what he had done.

  That, of course, was also why he kept them.

  He was an exile many times over, a betrayer and destroyer of everything that had given his existence meaning. The Thousand Sons Legion had broken the decree of the Emperor against the use of psychic powers. They had done so believing they served the Imperium that had created them, and for that transgression their home world had burned. A few had survived, plucked out of the inferno by the will of their primarch, Magnus the Red. But it had been the power of daemons that had saved them, and the world they had fled to was deep in the Eye of Terror. On that world of dust, reality and the power of the warp mingled and blurred. The barrier between wish and truth had vanished. Magnus, having ascended to something beyond flesh, had called their new home the Planet of the Sorcerers. The occult powers of the Thousand Sons had flourished, but so had the mutation and corruption of their flesh.

  The Thousand Sons had begun to devolve into creatures of inhuman form, the instability of their genetic heritage given new potency by the powers of the warp. Armour had become flesh which blinked with lidless eyes. Hands and limbs dissolved into claws or boneless tentacles. Minds of refined thought and purpose became cauldrons of insanity, boiling with storms made of waking dreams. Some had seen it as a blessing, as a gift from the Great Powers which dwelt within the warp, or as a stage in their evolution towards demigodhood. Ahriman had seen the change for what it was: the slow death of everything they had been and the denial of everything they had aspired to be.

  In his flame-lit chambers, Ahriman could see his Legion brothers as if they were standing in front of him. He had tried to save them. He found others that agreed that their Legion was on the brink of destruction. Together they had formed a cabal and began their work hidden from the eye of Magnus. Amongst the conspirators had been the most powerful psykers from a Legion of warlocks. Their end, as was always the way of the Thousand Sons, was to overthrow darkness wit
h knowledge. Under Ahriman’s guidance, they had created a cure for the mutation which was consuming the Legion. They had called it the Rubric.

  The Rubric. He ran the phrase around his mind. A monolith to hubris.

  He had believed it would work, that it would undo the change that was destroying his Legion. Instead he had simply destroyed his brothers with his own hand. Some had survived. The others had become spirit and dust bound inside their armour, little more than automata, echoes remaining to remind him of his own failure. They had become the Rubricae. Magnus had banished Ahriman and his cabal from the Planet of the Sorcerers. From that moment he was no longer a Thousand Son, no longer Ahzek Ahriman. He was nothing, a ghost living out his penance on the margins of hell.

  He had not seen any of his brothers since, though he had heard tales of sorcerers or warlords that could only be Thousand Sons. He knew of only one who might still live, and then only in the loosest sense. He might be the last, the rest fallen to battle or madness, or worse. Looking into the face of the dust-covered helm, Ahriman shuddered. One day he would die, and time would finally bury his existence.

  No. He thought of the daemon speaking his name as it loomed above him. No. I am not free yet. Something remembers that I exist. Something is coming for me after all this time.

  He was not breathing. Inside his armour his skin suddenly prickled with cold. He let the helmet drop from his hand back into the chest and stood. Something was coming. The warp was millpond-still, but he knew. The certainty was like the touch of a hand on his back in the dark. Something had found him, something in the great ocean of the warp. It was coming for him. He thought of the Planet of the Sorcerers, of the light of the ninth sun spilling across his open grimoires, of the presence behind him that should not have been there. The memory formed in his mind. No, not that, he thought, and the thought iced his breath into cold mist. Frost had formed on his fingertips.

  I am fate come round at last. He started, looking round the chamber. His eyes flicked between the twisting pipes and the coiling shadows cast by the oil flames. Nothing.

  ‘Speak.’ His voice was thin, and the space seemed to swallow the word. ‘By the bindings upon this place, I command you to speak.’

  Silence.

  The flames seemed to flutter and dim. The sound of the ship, so like a heart, grew louder in his ears. He took a step back. He was muttering, the phrases coming to his lips from the depths of memory. All thought about the past, penitence and punishment faded. He was in the grip of an instinct more ancient than any legend or lore, the instinct of a man in a forest alone with the darkness and the sound of wolves.

  The wheel handle on the circular entrance hatch began to turn. He could hear something scratching on the metal of the hatch.

  Let me return to dust, he thought. Let me drift to the bottom and fade to nothing. Let that be my fate. But another voice, clear and cynically precise, spoke in his mind: Yet you still cling to life. Have you ever considered why?

  The wheel handle stopped turning. The hatch began to open, grating on unoiled hinges. His hands and body were still, the chained storms of aetheric energy foaming about him, waiting to be unleashed.

  ‘You are the one they call Horkos?’ The voice was female and came from a slot in a cracked mask of red lacquer. Ahriman was silent, watching the figure that stepped through the hatch. She was tall and moved with a precise smoothness that reminded him of a pair of callipers tracing arcs across parchment. A hooded robe of ragged black fabric covered her form, dragging on the floor as she stepped closer. Mechadendrites attached to her back released the hatch’s outer handle and coiled to her back like metal-scaled snakes. Her eyes were glowing green augmetics.

  ‘I have been sent by your master,’ she said, and he could not miss the bitterness in the words. Still he did not move. Shape and form were not binding on those who knew the mysteries of the warp, or the creatures it spawned. ‘He sent me to summon you to his presence.’

  She stepped closer, and now he realised that she wore no mask; the cracked red lacquer was her face. He also saw the collar of beaten iron circling her neck. Jagged runes ran across its surface, their shapes shadowed by the blood that had dried in their recesses. It was a slave collar, sealed around the neck while still hot. The runes were Maroth’s work, crude channels for pain and coercion. Ahriman let his mind brush hers, felt the hard lines of implanted logic and the rage simmering beneath.

  ‘I was sent to bring you,’ she said. There was a note of defiance in her voice. She would be no easy slave for the Harrowing. There was an imperious poise to her, a quality that made him fancy that he could see a glimmer of scorn in her artificial gaze. She was no tech-priest of Mars, though, he could tell that at a glance. She was something else, another outcast or renegade. Fragmented facts assembled in his mind and he realised what she was, at least in part.

  ‘You are the tech-priest, Carmenta. This was your ship, was it not?’ She did not reply. At her back her mechadendrites spasmed briefly, as if responding to a suddenly repressed impulse. ‘You should be careful,’ he said as he bent down to repack and seal the crate. ‘Gzrel does not like defiance that does not serve him. He likes his slaves broken and obedient.’

  ‘I see why you survived so long.’ He almost laughed, but instead shook his head and picked up his black beak-fronted helm. Most humans looked on Space Marines with awe and fear; she showed no such reaction. Amongst creatures like Gzrel and his Harrowing, any other response was dangerous. She would learn, or die before she did.

  ‘Do you know why my lord summons me?’ he asked as he walked to the open hatch.

  ‘Another ship has found us,’ she said. He almost stopped in surprise. If the ship had come from the warp then he should have felt the psychic bow wave as it ripped back into reality. Also there were no alarms, no shaking of the Titan Child as it fired its weapons. When ships met in these regions, the outcome was always written in blood.

  Carmenta filled the silence, as if sensing part of his questions. ‘It is a warship,’ she said.

  Gzrel must be nervous, he thought. The Harrowing were still struggling to wake the Titan Child, even with its former mistress as a slave, and the Blood Crescent was a carrion thief rather than a warrior. Gzrel would not want to risk his prize in a fight he could not be sure of winning.

  ‘The ship has hailed us and requested that they send an emissary to speak with your lord,’ continued Carmenta.

  ‘They wish to treat with us?’

  ‘They say they are seeking something and are willing to give great rewards if aided.’ Ahriman felt suddenly chill, but could not say why.

  ‘He has called us to discuss whether to receive this emissary, then?’ he asked as he stepped through the hatch after Carmenta. She made a low sound that might have been a laugh.

  ‘No. Your lord has agreed. The emissary is already here.’

  For a moment Ahriman thought he heard a chuckle fading in the gloom of his chamber before the hatch clanged shut.

  III

  VISITATION

  They were waiting for Ahriman. Gzrel had decided to meet the emissary in a high vaulted chamber in the Titan Child’s jutting bridge tower. Perhaps it had once been a forum or gathering hall, but the Harrowing had made it a throne room. Candles of human tallow burned at the foot of the walls, dribbling melted pools of fat across the black stone floor. The light they cast was spluttering, smoke-edged, and stank of cooking meat. The dead hung from the ceiling on hooks and rusted chains: dried corpses, their skin shrunk over screaming skulls; fresh heads still thick with clotted blood and flies; pale torsos, their limbs and heads severed by neat cuts. The symbol of a fang-lipped chalice covered the floor, hacked into the stone with heavy blows. At the far end of the chamber sat the throne. Raised on tiers of black iron, it had been the command seat of an Imperial warship, but its systems had been stripped and its metal frame draped with tanned hides of a dozen species. Skulls of those same species lined the plinth it sat on, their yellowed domes spattered with scr
ipt and arcane patterns.

  Ahriman entered from a side door, and Gzrel flicked a bladed finger to indicate a place at the foot of the throne. The lord was nervous and tension hung in the air like the static before the arrival of a storm.

  ‘Come and stand with us, Horkos,’ Gzrel growled, and fumes coughed from his armour. The rest were already there. Xiatsis and Cottadaron stood one step below Gzrel, flanking the approach to their lord. Two champions also stood next to the throne, their chainblades resting point-down at their feet. Maroth stood beside Gzrel, one step down so that he could lean across the massive arm of the throne to whisper in his lord’s ear. Ahriman was the last and the least of Gzrel’s circle and so stood the furthest from the lord.

  Gzrel nodded, satisfaction and impatience gliding over his features. All his vassals were in place, a blunt show of power and majesty to the unknown emissary.

  ‘Be aware of any trickery,’ growled Gzrel. ‘This emissary is a sorcerer.’

  ‘And he knew we were here,’ said Maroth. ‘That concerns me, my lord.’

  ‘Did they come for us, or is it a chance meeting?’ croaked Cottadaron.

  ‘We must learn the answers from this audience,’ said Gzrel, and raised a clawed hand to the two Harrowing that flanked the bronze doors.

  Ahriman was suddenly aware of a presence beyond those doors, a presence that burned in the warp like a bound star. It had a shape and structure, an outline formed by disciplines that were as familiar to him as his own hands.

  The guards were moving to the doors, their movements dream-slow to Ahriman’s eyes. He blinked…