The Omnibus - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  Ignis felt the pressure of the storm release in his mind, and saw it swamp the last of Ahriman’s fleet that they had sacrificed to create this symmetry of destruction. The alignments of number and angle were there, beautiful in their purity. It was done. The pattern was complete, and this moment, this perfect moment of birth was like the touch of sunlight after night. He shivered and turned his awareness back to the world around him. He stood in the high Navigation cupola. At his feet Silvanus Yeshar wept.

  +Turn towards the moon, full power to engines,+ he broadcast, and knew that each of the Thousand Sons ships would obey.

  He heard Silvanus’s despair as he brushed the Navigator’s mind.

  ‘No way out, no way out, no way out…’ said Silvanus, over and over again. Ignis sent a jolt of will into the Navigator.

  +Look,+ he sent.

  The Word of Hermes and its clutch of ships were pointing towards Apollonia now, engines thrusting them towards the black surface of the moon.

  ‘No way out…’ wept Silvanus as he crawled into the Word of Hermes’s navigation cradle.

  +Look,+ Ignis sent again. Silvanus looked, staring out with all three of his eyes. He gasped.

  Ahriman looked up from Cendrion’s broken form. Three paces from him a fissure split wide, stone collapsing into the opening. A sulphur-yellow glow pulsed through the cracks in the walls. He took a breath, and tasted burning hair and copper. The moon was breaking apart. The Athenaeum had been at its heart for so long that it was like a keystone in an arch, but now the Athenaeum was gone and the warp was crushing its hiding place. Sickly light poured through the web of gaping cracks. Grey Knights began to fall or to launch themselves from the crumbling floor.

  He reached out and called the Rubricae. They came, firing as they ran. The Athenaeum floated close to him. He reached out a hand and grasped its armoured collar. His fingers tingled with the contact. It was still speaking, droning on with Sanakht’s mutilated voice. The final step awaited them.

  +Are you there?+ he called. +Ignis?+

  ‘Ahriman!’ The cry made him look around. A gun looked back at him. Izdubar stood before the lightning-lit smoke, pistol aimed. His finger closed on the trigger. The gun spat fire and silver. Ahriman’s mind brushed the round as it came from the barrel. It was cold. His mind slid away from it. The warp creaked around him. He could feel the Grey Knights’ minds linking, energy and will following between them as they came forwards. He watched the round spin on its tail of flame. To his mind it was a hole cut in the warp-saturated universe. It was death if it struck, sure and certain.

  The silver round was a swelling black dot in the eye of his mind.

  +We are here,+ came Ignis’s voice. It sounded distant, like several voices shouting at once above the crash of breaking waves.

  +Guide me, brother.+

  Stillness: as though the entirety of existence had stopped. Sound and colour and shape split into tatters. The walls of the floor and chamber bulged outwards. The silver round struck Ahriman’s armour. The world vanished. Everything was rushing past him, through him, and he knew that all that was holding the storm from tearing him apart was a single thought linking him to the call of his brothers.

  The moon of Apollonia imploded. Cracks spread out from its heart as its substance dissolved into the warp. The dark hole at its heart sucked inwards as the black rock crumbled. The curve of the moon reversed, became a concave pit, and then snapped back. It broke apart. Ghost light fountained up from fissures, sickening auroras looping far out into the dark. Then it seemed to explode backwards, burrowing through the storm like hot water through snow.

  The storm carried Ahriman, rolling him in its fingers. Leering faces swam past him, smiling at him with rotting teeth. Great voices roared and chuckled at him. He let it take him, holding all the while to the distant presence of familiar places and the call of his broher’s voices. The Athenaeum remained with him, the collar of its armour clamped in his hand. He saw geometries etched into reality, each one pulling at him, calling to him like a light guiding a ship to harbour. He focused on them. The curtain of reality parted before him, and he tumbled through into a circle of etched sigils.

  Ignis looked down at him. His orange armour was grey with frost, his eyes gloss red with haemorrhaged blood. He just looked at Ahriman, black pupils swelling and shrinking in his blood-drowned eyes. The patterns of ruin hovered around him, spiralling and iterating into new forms even as Ahriman looked at them.

  +You have it,+ said Ignis, and looked at the Athenaeum still gripped by the collar in Ahriman’s hand. Ahriman nodded and stood.

  +Bind it in a tower for now. Only I may see it.+

  +And what do we say of Sanakht to the others?+ asked Ignis, looking at the motionless body on the ground, its lips moving but its eyes staring blankly at nothing.

  +What we agreed, that he took this burden for the future of the Legion.+

  Ignis looked up at Ahriman, the geometric tattoos spiralling into new patterns across his forehead. Ahriman held Ignis’s gaze for a long second.

  +How many of our Legion brothers are still with us?+ asked Ahriman.

  +All but one ship.+

  +The other vassals?+

  +Fed to the flames.+

  Ahriman nodded once, and turned away.

  +The Imperial fleet still has strength enough to stop us.+

  Ahriman turned back, and reached his mind out to listen to the storm roar of the warp.

  +Do you hear that?+ he asked. Ignis cocked his head, then frowned. Ahriman nodded. +The Wolves howl.+

  The Wolves came from the storm-churned warp. Hel’s Daughter, Storm Wyrm, Crone Hammer and Death’s Laughter crashed into the battle sphere, the bow wave of their exit seeming to shake the stars in their settings. They poured fire ahead of them, splitting the assembled ships like a burning axe blow. Shields shimmered and blew out. Hull armour distorted and ran like fire-touched wax. The storm tide rolled across the barrier of reality, sucking back briefly before crashing down again. The fires of battle blinked from one colour to another. There was no order to the battle now, no lines or formations, just a twirling mess of ships and torn light. Daemons swarmed, whooping as they rode the death waves of ships, cackling even as some were swallowed by the hungry currents.

  Boarding torpedoes ripped from the snouts of the Wolves ships. The Imperial fleet turned its eyes and guns towards the newcomers and greeted them with scattered fire. The torpedoes slammed into hulls and the warriors within were loosed from their harness. Creatures of dented armour and twisted flesh spilled into the bowels of Imperial ships, axes rising and falling, clawed hands ripping into any flesh they found.

  Grimur felt the shudder of the boarding torpedo as it prepared to loose from Hel’s Daughter. At his side Sycld shook and coughed blood onto the deck as the torpedo tensed in its breech.

  ‘The silver craft,’ hissed the Rune Priest between wet gasps. ‘It is the exile. Silver like the snow under a storm sky. Silver of the new moon on water. Silver…’

  Grimur said nothing. In his helm he was staring at the battle fires that greeted him. There were ships already burning, already dying in the storm break, but more remained. All would soon be black bones and carcasses of metal. They had found their prey: the end of the hunt was close, it was a blade swing away.

  Beside him Sycld was shaking in his harness, bones rattling and jumping against his armour.

  ‘The dream is here, it is here. Silver…’ The words were a bared-teeth groan. Grimur could feel muscles bunching inside his armour. He could not stop it. There was blood on his tongue. His teeth were cutting his mouth as they lengthened. He gripped the fragment of red iron armour at his neck.

  ‘Silver are their tears. Pull them down to the red ground, mix their bones with the mud, let the ocean swallow their bones.’ White and blue arcs of storm lightning were running up and down the babbling Rune Priest, and hunger and rage radiated from him like cold from a glacier.

  Part of Grimur thought of calm, of forcing the
wolf within back into the dark. But there was no point, they were running over snow, beneath the moon and the dome of darkness, and the blood of the prey was salt and iron on the air. It was the end of oaths long kept. He let go, and the howl rose through his throat. Around him his brothers howled, and the battle howled back.

  Cendrion was still conscious when the strike forces flashed back into existence on the Sigillite’s Oath. He saw it through the eyes of his brothers, as his true vision faded to smudged red and black. They appeared in the teleport chamber, twenty-eight Grey Knights and four humans. Dirty smoke rose from their armour, as residue from the flash teleport. Izdubar ripped his helmet free. Beside him the crone stood unmoving in her exo-armour. Erionas was waiting for them, his mane of cables locked into ports in the chamber’s walls.

  Izdubar’s face was a pale mask, veins ticking at his jaw and temple.

  ‘We still have strength,’ said the inquisitor lord, biting off the words as though they were pieces of bitter fruit. ‘They cannot break out. Gut every last ship, then we can search the ashes for his corpse.’

  Erionas’s face twitched around, his silver eyes dancing with projected data. A look of panic was spreading across his face.

  ‘Lord Izdubar…’

  ‘That makes no sense,’ said Malkira, acid voice booming from her armour’s external speaker. Izdubar turned to her. ‘If Ahriman has what he came for he should run, try and break out.’

  ‘My lord…’ Erionas’s voice was a high whine.

  She is right, thought Cendrion as he heard the words through the haze of his wounds. But they are missing something. We are all missing something. The warp was roaring in Cendrion’s mind, rattling his fading thoughts with rising fury. His projected awareness began to slip, the image of the inquisitors growing dim as his senses seeped back into the mess of his broken body. He could hear something, a psychic noise which rose over the storm. It was a howl. ‘He would have planned a way out,’ said Malkira.

  ‘Lord!’ shouted Erionas. Silence fell as every eye turned to him. Cendrion felt his grip on consciousness break. Erionas opened his mouth to speak as the first boarding torpedo hit the Sigillite’s Oath.

  A tongue of flame plucked a brother from Grimur’s side. The stink of sorcery was rank in his mouth. He was not seeing the enemy, not really; his mind was dancing with scents: blood, ozone, offal. He roared, fangs wide, and brought the grinning edge of his axe down on the sorcerer’s head. Armour broke beneath the blow, scattering splinters and shards of lightning. The sorcerer’s corpse was falling, but Grimur was already moving, breathing the smell of the blood as it misted the air. Another sorcerer came at him, fast, very fast, blade singing with light. He swayed out of the way without breaking stride, and struck back and down. The head of his axe took the sorcerer’s right leg from beneath him. He looped the axe up and took the falling warrior in the throat. The axe sheared the top of the helm off and another corpse went down to feed the Underverse with its blood. Beside him Sycld was speaking even as he moved between the dead, words broken by the lash of lightning from his staff and the crackle of ice as it spread through the blood of the dead beneath his feet.

  ‘The dream is no more,’ rasped the Rune Priest, pointing forwards, fingers splaying to send a whirl of broken shards and shadow towards a cluster of red-robed humans. His eyes were rolled back into his head, his skin ice white. ‘The moon rides red in the sky, and its tears are silver.’

  Sycld was in the grip of the dreams that had led them here.

  A blow struck him and spun him from his feet. He had not seen it coming, had not seen the warrior that struck it. He fell, seeing a shape in vast Terminator armour loom above him. Sorcerous fire washed from the Terminator, and the great sword in his hand, tinting the silver of his armour the colour of forge fire. He remembered Prospero, and the smell of flesh charring in armour as the Thousand Sons had turned their witchcraft on Grimur and his brothers. The sorcerers had worn crimson then, but now they were creatures of silver that glittered like the flanks of the glass pyramids on that now-dead world.

  The sorcerer’s sword was descending. Grimur sprang up, turning the blow with the flat of his axe and ramming its edge into the sorcerer’s eyepieces. Crystal and silvered ceramite shattered. Blood kissed the axe’s field and cooked into smoke. Grimur let go of the axe with one hand and grabbed the ruined front of the sorcerer’s helm. Claws ripped from the tips of his fingers and tore the helm from the sorcerer’s head. The face beneath was a mask of blood and white exposed bone.

  The sorcerer twisted away, still alive and somehow still able to see. Grimur leaped, his claws closing on the sorcerer’s skull and ripping it from the collar of the armour. He landed on top of the silver giant as it hit the ground. He paused, feeling the race of life in his veins. Around him the pyramids of Prospero burned again in his memory. He raised his clawed hand, looking at the blood drooling from the broken skull. This was victory unfolding around him, victory and release. Ahriman would not survive, for they had run him and his kin down. He wanted to touch that realisation, to know his victory through his dead enemies’ eyes.

  He opened his mouth and let the blood of his enemy touch his tongue. Ice and heat shuddered through him. The sorcerer’s last sensations and thoughts unfurled in blurred tatters in his awareness. He went still, seeming to shrink, breath coming slow and shuddering from his bloody lips. He looked around, blinking, eyes focusing and refocusing. Slowly he stood.

  He turned his eyes to Sycld. The Rune Priest seemed to feel his lord’s gaze, and turned his head at the same moment.

  ‘The path, the red path beneath the moon,’ croaked Sycld. ‘We are there, we are at the dream’s end.’

  Grimur looked at the Rune Priest, at the ghost light crawling over his staff. He looked down at the head of his own axe and the blood thickening on his clawed hands. He thought of all that he had done to reach this point, and all the things that he had allowed or caused to be done.

  We followed dreams. And we never asked who was their master. The prey that runs may run from fear or to draw on the hunters. Revenge, he thought, is an axe with two smiles.

  He looked into Sycld’s blank eyes. The Rune Priest had gone still as though propped up on a stake.

  ‘I…’ he said. ‘I can’t see it any more… the scent, the dream path… I…’ His voice cracked, faltered and became something else.

  ‘Wolf,’ said Sycld’s mouth, but the voice was a hollow rumble. ‘The thread of your fate is yours again. No longer will my dreams guide you. You may live, or you may fall, and I will care not, but I wish you to know one thing. I want you to remember it until your soul goes back into the pit of night.’ Sycld’s mouth twisted into a smile as though pulled by strings. ‘I want you to know that you have served me well this day. That truth is my thanks.’

  Grimur stood, silent, hunched and bloody in his patched and battered armour. Then he brought his axe up. Sycld shuddered and opened his mouth to speak again. The axe fell.

  Silvanus kept his eyes shut, all of them. He pressed his hands over his face, and did not move. It did not help. He could still see. He could see the warp. It shone on the other side of his fingers, lighting his veins and bones. And it was angry. He knew that with a certainty that frightened him because he did not know how he knew.

  +Navigator,+ the voice in his skull called: Ignis. He would not answer. He would not do what they asked. He would not look, he would not.

  +Navigator.+ The thought voice roared in his skull. Bright motes of light burst in his mind.

  ‘No,’ he moaned. ‘No, please.’

  +Navigator, you will heed our will.+

  ‘No,’ he moaned again, and felt bile rise with the words. His teeth felt wrong in his mouth, and the vomit taste was sweet on his tongue. He was suddenly aware of the loose flaps of skin on his face and between his fingers, the red veins bright in the light of the warp. ‘No,’ he whispered.

  +Silvanus.+ The voice was like cool water. Silvanus stopped moaning. He felt the de
fiance in him rise and break. His hands fell from his face. His eyelids were closed, but the folds of skin over his face made it seem as though they were just two shut eyes amongst many.

  He opened his eyes. Vision filled his tri-ocular awareness. The chamber walls were simply a sketch of substance, the ship a ghost, and the souls within it made of light that changed colour with every beat of their hearts. He breathed, focusing and trying to calm the twitching in his face and hands.

  He raised his gaze. The black vortex, which had formed where the moon had vanished into nothing, spun before his eyes. It was like looking into a lightless tunnel. Storm winds ringed it, spiralling down into its core like water draining through a hole. The Word of Hermes was poised on the edge of that vortex, and beside it a clutch of other ships.

  ‘That is where we must go?’ he asked.

  +Yes, we will pass through the storm.+

  ‘And then?’

  He waited, feeling Ahriman’s presence still at the edge of his thoughts.

  +Then we begin the path back to where this began.+ Ahriman’s thought voice paused. +We return to the Planet of the Sorcerers.+

  EPILOGUE

  Leaves of crystal crunched beneath her feet as she crossed the summit of the tower. Ahriman did not look up at her approach, but kept his eyes on the transparent sliver of mirror lying on a plinth of black marble.

  ‘You have rebuilt it,’ she said. ‘Or should it be you have rebuilt yourself?’ He straightened. The cloth of his robes caught the warm wind, and pressed itself against his skin. The shard of mirror winked the deep blue of the sky back at him. ‘This place is different,’ she said.

  ‘Everything changes,’ he said. Carefully he picked the piece of mirror up between thumb and forefinger. He gazed into the still surface for a long moment, and then tossed it up into the air. The shards of crystal on the floor followed it in a cascade of colours. A tree formed in the air, its trunk a rainbow, its branches a swaying pattern of reflected light.