The trio of enemy ships swelled in Silvanus’s view. The silhouettes of gunships, bombers and fighters flickered around them.
‘Merciful–’ he began.
One of the battle-barges fired. A flat sheet of light exploded out from one of the nearby ships. Silvanus did fall, this time, hands spasming as they tried to grip air. The Word of Hermes jolted as the blast wave struck it. Silvanus was on the floor. For an instant he was blind, and then the light of what was coming next poured down into his eyes from the viewport. Somehow he could see, as though his eyes had just shrugged off their second of blindness. Somewhere else, at some other time, he would have wondered how that was possible, and then found all the possibilities terrifying. The terror of what he saw next stole those thoughts.
Small shapes were falling from the battle-barge, tumbling into Prospero’s upper atmosphere. He saw the pinpricks of fire as their thrusters caught their rolling fall and steadied them. He recognised them as soon as he saw them, even though he had never seen them used before. He had always been in his quarters when the ships he had steered to war had done their work. But he did not need to have seen them before to know what they were or what their purpose was. They were breaching pods, and they meant that the Angels of Death were coming.
He raised his hands to cover his eyes, but could not cover them. Pale flames crawled beneath everything, and he could almost hear the dead calling to the living to join them.
‘I don’t want to see,’ he cried, but watched without blinking as the breaching pods tumbled towards the Word of Hermes. Cones of heat enveloped them as they bit into the ship’s shell of air. Munitions detonated around them, tossing them like seed pods in a gale. Silvanus tried to shield his eyes as the lascannon cluster beneath his tower fired. Slashes of white pulsed across his retinas. The bladed sides of the pods dug into the ship’s back. Sparks flew as spinning mouths of diamond teeth and melta torches began to bite into the hull.
Above, the battle-barge and strike cruisers cut their fire. For an instant the view above was still and silent. Even the warp seemed to slide into calm for a second. To Silvanus – lying on the floor of his chamber, in a tower of a ship he never wanted to steer, above a world which was a suppurating wound in the warp – the silence of the ships was the worst thing he had ever felt.
The Wrath of Ages looked down on Prospero. High in its bridge Inquisitor Malkira felt Shipmaster Gylro look up at her. He was an old warrior, even for a Space Marine, and time and battle had sharpened rather than blunted the edges in his soul. She liked him for that.
‘We are in place, honoured inquisitor,’ he growled, the pause and full formality of his address almost endearing. ‘We have a clear firing path to the primary detonation site and are holding steady.’
Malkira nodded slowly without looking at him. She could feel the hundreds of eyes on the command deck watching her, even though they weren’t looking directly at her. The command deck was an amphitheatre of tiered control systems at the heart of a half-kilometre-wide chamber. Human serfs, servitors and tech-priests crowded those tiers, tending the primary controls for the ship. They were all watching her, waiting for her to speak her command. None of them would remember this moment. None of them could be allowed to, not even Gylro. He, and the most valuable serfs and tech-priests, would be mind-wiped. The rest would be disposed of.
‘We still have boarding groups on the ships in ultra-low orbit,’ said Gylro.
‘Why were they launched in the first place?’
‘Captain Umiel’s orders issued before you came aboard. In case the ships tried to escape.’
Malkira raised an eyebrow, but kept from saying what she thought of Umiel’s decision. It did not matter. He and those he had taken with him would pay enough of a price for their mistake. Gylro knew that, and knew that his Chapter was about to lose a tenth of its strength at a stroke. That he had mentioned the boarding parties was understandable, that he was not pressing the point showed control she could only admire.
‘We proceed,’ she said, and Gylro bowed his head without a word.
She had transferred from the Eternal Warrior to the battle-barge Wrath of Ages during the engagement. Her shuttle had skimmed the battle sphere with an escort of a dozen void fighters, dodging splash explosions and evading interceptors. It had been risk beyond the tolerance of several of the fleet’s commanders, but she had simply said that she had decided to look the world she was going to burn in the eye. She had the feeling that Gylro had respected her for both her actions and sentiment. That, and the fact that she held the authority of the Emperor.
‘Show it to us,’ she said.
Gylro gestured, and somewhere in the high tiers the tech-priests saw the gesture and made it so. Plates of armour unfurled on the outside of the hull. Light poured through a vast crystal and bronze ceiling, scattering from the dust and incense smoke. Prospero filled the view, its surface a swirl of storm clouds and angry light.
She looked at it. Her eyes were not the same as those she had looked on it with the last time she was here. Eight centuries, and three sets of fresh eyes, had come and gone since then: eight centuries of war against the warp and the children of Prospero. Dead worlds and lost souls swam briefly in her conscience. Izdubar, dead for seven decades, his face still young even when his heart finally failed. Erionas, gone to the Ghost Stars never to return. Iobel, taken by Ahriman all those centuries ago, surely dead now by any reckoning. Malkira had been old when she met them all, and now here she was, the last of them, standing with her hand on the axe of execution. For so long they had hunted the Thousand Sons, and now here were so many of them, returned to the cradle of their corruption.
‘It is over,’ she said softly to herself, and then flicked her gaze to Gylro. The veteran Space Marine’s expression was stone. She nodded once, and looked back up to Prospero.
Gylro brought his fist to his chest and bowed his head. Malkira kept her eyes on the witch-storm hiding the planet’s surface. The ship’s master turned and spoke to the command crew, his voice a thunderclap even over the clatter and buzz of machines.
‘Cyclonic bombardment ready to commence at your word, inquisitor.’
The ritual phrases of Exterminatus rose in her mind, but when she opened her mouth the words that came were a simple order spoken with a clear voice.
‘Burn it.’
A long minute later she thought she felt the vast ship shudder. The shells cut down through the atmosphere, streaks of heat pulling out behind them, so that they seemed like burning droplets of fire. On the other side of the planet other battle-barges and strike cruisers would be commencing their own bombardments. The deed was done, Prospero would burn for a second and final time. Nothing could stop that now, the shells were falling, they just needed to strike the ground.
The glow of each shell grew as the air thickened around them, and then the storm clouds closed over them.
A shiver passed through the remains of her body. All this time and now she was here. The war would never end, but at this moment she would see an enemy she had fought all her life fall. She had not wept in hundreds of years, another gift of her renewed eyes, but she blinked as the nerves prickled at the edge of her sight.
‘Burn,’ she said.
Ahriman’s mind ascended. The last moment of the ritual was unfolding in the aether around him. Thousands of thoughts in hundreds of minds reached the end of their cycles. Alignments of time and objects snapped together.
Ahriman reached out with his will. Formulae unfolded from the core of consciousness: old words and dead secrets. The ritual spun on as he tried to pull its threads to him. The memory of the daemon, and of Astraeos, yanked his thoughts, even as he shaped them.
The death echoes of Prospero shrieked with full fury. The power of the warp poured across the barrier between worlds. The ground writhed as scraps of bone rose in spirals of dead faces. The flood of power and the ritual which had called it met. Crimson light poured upwards from the ground, staining the underside of the
clouds red. Rubricae and sorcerers stood still, as the slices of seconds flicked past.
The final components of will and thought snapped into place in his mind. The warp froze. The bloated mass of power and emotion rippled, shrank to a sphere, then melted to a hard plain of intent and purpose. Ahriman could feel every part of it. He was every part of it, and all the minds connected to it. Just as he had been before.
He opened his eyes to the real world. Everything was moving with the slowness of a broken pict screen. Around him the Exiles of the Thousand Sons stood in the ruins of Tizca. Above him lights swelled within the storm cloud as the shells fell from the heavens.
He reached up to his chest. The cracked back of a jade scarab found his fingers. His mind was suddenly empty, suddenly still. He felt the stone of the jade scarab. It was warm to his touch, just as it had been before, when Prospero had died under the axes of the Wolves. He knew that perhaps he alone of his brothers had kept that broken memento of their first flight from Prospero. Then it had unified the Legion, as Magnus had given the last of his power to save those who survived.
Now, Ahriman did not need it to draw his brothers together. They were him and he was them. But the scarab mattered. It was not a connection to his brothers. It was a connection to the past, a connection to that first journey across space and time, a connection to the bridge that Magnus had created between Prospero and their refuge in the Eye. A key to opening that way again.
You cannot step in the same river twice, he thought, the ancient words rising unbidden to his mind. Above him tears of flame fell from the frozen sky.
For it is not the same river.
He gripped the scarab and closed his eyes.
And you are not the same man.
The cyclonic torpedoes detonated as they struck the skin of Prospero. The first warhead spilled fire from horizon to horizon faster than the sound of the explosion. The second hit as the fires of the first were dimming to yellow. As the third struck, the flames were already roaring in the air. The ships of the Thousand Sons that were in ultra-low orbit sank beneath the flames and did not rise. Within minutes the planet was a ball of whirling fire too bright to look at with the naked eye.
On the bridge of the Wrath of Ages, Malkira flinched as implanted membranes snapped closed over her eyes. Even then she could see the burning as a glowing whirl on her retinas. She heard several of the crew cry out. Some were in pain. Some shocked. Some so awed that they called for forgiveness.
The judgement of a god, she thought.
The fire burned on. Storm systems of flame danced across the surface as they devoured air and matter. The Imperial ships in close orbit felt the firestorm tingle across their hulls. Black curtains of ash rose in mockery of the aurora lights which had filled the planet’s skies. And then – with the suddenness of a snuffed candle – the fires vanished.
Where Prospero had been, a cinder remained. Fire-scoured rock lay bare under an airless sky. The ruin of the past, the seas, the shards of history, all settled slowly in a blank black layer. And the warp was silent, the voices of past murder fled, the rivers of spite stilled.
A handful of the ships that had stood against the Imperium fled, or began to drift, like fish stunned by a shockwave. The rest broke from battle. The Imperial ships remained for longer. Ten hours after the fire had abated, a gunship took Malkira to the surface. She stood on the cooling ground while a flight of fighters and strike craft circled. She was alone. There was no reason for anyone else to be with her, in fact there were limited practical reasons for her to have descended to the surface at all. She did not need practical reasons, though.
She stood on Prospero, her breath fogging the crystal of her helmet visor as she breathed. The ground was black glass beneath her. The light of the galaxy glinted from slumped ranges of debris.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. As though everything had been swept away into oblivion.
Part of her – a large part – would have liked something tangible to mark this moment. She snorted.
A skull to cap a grave, a head to mark the fate of traitors…
There would be no such thing. Ahriman was gone, and with him whatever purpose had brought him back to his Legion’s world. A host of his corrupt kin had gone with him to the fire. That, she supposed, should feel like victory.
She took one final look around her, and then stalked towards her gunship.
‘Instruct all ships. Set signal beacons at the edge of the system. They are to transmit these words: “Look upon the wages of hubris. The Emperor sees. The Emperor knows.”’ The gunship’s engines kindled. She stepped onto the ramp, nodded and the machine rose up. ‘Burn all remains of enemy ships, and prepare to pull out. I want nothing left to disturb the silence.’ Through the open hatch the ground fell away beneath her. ‘We are done here.’
XVI
LABYRINTH
Astraeos surfaced from the pool of blood. Runnels of pale fire fell from him. Shadows of tattered wings flexed in the air above him. The figures encircling the pool were rising from where they slumped. Some did not, but stayed on the floor, limbs tangled under white robes. Worms of static rolled over every surface, and arched into the air.
Astraeos felt reality judder as it gripped him again. He felt hollow. Ahriman had seen him and heard him, but what had he thought? Had he seen Astraeos and felt guilt? Had he felt dread? He could not know. He had thought it would be different, but it had been nothing, just words spoken at a gauze-thin image.
So, did that meet your expectations? asked the daemon from inside Astraeos’s thoughts.
You spoke to him? thought Astraeos, carefully.
You noticed, said the daemon, and Astraeos heard the bitter amusement in the thought.
Yes, he replied. There had been an instant when he had seen Prospero, when he had been facing away from Ahriman before turning, and he had heard words spoken just beyond comprehension. What did you say to him?
Only what needed saying.
He felt a shiver pass through his body and soul. He had gone so far, running after the promise of revenge, that he had never asked…
Why do you help me?
You ask that now?
You told Ahriman something… something that he understood. I could feel it. You…
I have my reasons for what I have done and what I do, and they are my own. They are my… nature.
Why?
The daemon’s laughter bubbled up through his mind and spilled out of his own lips. Heads twitched towards him as the mortal cattle of the chamber woke.
‘Too late to ask that. Far too late,’ said the daemon aloud. Astraeos clamped his teeth shut to bite the words off, but the daemon was still speaking in his thoughts. The answer does not mean anything. All that matters now is what mattered when you called me to you. The vengeance you crave will be yours. That I promise you.
+Master,+ called Zurcos. The shrouded sorcerer was shivering at the edge of the clotting pool of blood. +Did it…+
The Oathtaker nodded, and Astraeos and the daemon replied with one voice.
+It is done, the way is open, the bond made.+ The Monolith groaned in answer. Plates and girders twisted as the warp reached out and gripped it again. +We go back to the warp. We go to battle.+
The Monolith shuddered around him. Lightning shivered across its bulk, and wound through its bones. The cries of the mutants echoed through its halls. In the chamber, the Oathtaker raised his staff and spoke an ancient word.
Light flowed out, running through the ship like a night running before a rising sun. The warp flooded into the Monolith. Daemons shook free of the shadows, and spun through the hull.
With a last flicker the Monolith plunged back into the Great Ocean of the warp.
Knekku climbed, but the steps he took never led anywhere. New flights of stairs led off at all angles, sometimes up, sometimes at right angles to the flight he was on. No matter which he took the world adjusted around him, up changing to down, down to up. The patterns created by the stairs w
ere never the same, yet he had the inescapable feeling that he had not moved at all, that he was standing still and branches of stairs and stone were just spinning around him.
‘I have made a mistake,’ he muttered.
‘Were you talking to me, or simply failing to maintain your grim silence?’ Avenisi padded at his heels, pausing occasionally to stare into the distance at something he could not see. ‘How consistent the mortal temperament is.’
Knekku blinked, and shook his head without looking at the creature.
‘That was what Magnus said before he vanished.’
‘Oh, I thought it was you reflecting on the choices of your life.’
‘Do you have a use besides mockery?’
‘Yes, but you have seen my better side before.’ It leapt up onto the step in front of him and flicked a glance back at him with five of its nine eyes. ‘It did not seem to be to your taste.’
Knekku stared at it, and then stepped past the creature and continued to climb.
‘These stairs go nowhere,’ he said after a time.
‘They go everywhere, so long as you walk in the right direction.’
‘Then guide me,’ he snarled.
‘I am no Lord of Change,’ said Avenisi, and he could hear the shrug in the words without needing to see it. ‘The ways of the Labyrinth are not for me.’
‘But you walk it with me.’
‘The Labyrinth is for you. I can’t even really see it without you being here. I see it because you see it. You are reaching nowhere because you are going nowhere.’
‘If you will not give me aid, then give me silence.’ The weariness was now clenching in Knekku’s muscles and bones. He wondered if it meant that he was running out of time. Perhaps he was lying on the floor of his tower, the blood flowing from his pierced heart faster than his body could heal. Perhaps out in reality he was dying. He had to reach the end, though; somehow he had to find the Crimson King. Whatever had happened to his liege lord he would find him, and help him. What else should a son do for his father?
The Omnibus - John French Page 88
