The Omnibus - John French
Page 94
Gaumata was spinning forwards. The sorcerer threw his axe. Gaumata heard it scream as it spun end over end. He ignored it, his body a blur, his will splitting over and over into bright petals. The sorcerer was moving too, pistols suddenly in hands, barrels roaring.
Gaumata met the thrown axe head-on, and smacked it from the air. His mind detonated the bolt-rounds in flight. The sorcerer stood his ground. The air tightened and time began to stutter. The other sorcerer was slipping across the ground without moving, his axe back in his hand. A bolt-round struck Gaumata’s shoulder. Pain exploded through his arm an instant before his helmet display washed red. Tendrils of azure fire were writhing through the break in his pauldron. He could feel charring muscle peeling from his shoulder bone.
Anger roared through Gaumata’s thoughts. He yanked a swathe of fire into being and enveloped the sorcerer in its folds. The sorcerer’s mind flared and his focus faltered. The head of Gaumata’s morning star whipped down and crushed the sorcerer’s chest. He fell, and the weapon’s spiked head ripped free in a shower of splinters and charred bone.
Gaumata looked down at the broken sorcerer trying to rise. He wondered who it was behind the faceplate, and if they had ever spoken each other’s names. He whipped the morning star up, and brought it down. Heat exploded outwards. Ceramite shattered. The blood and bone fragments were powdered ash before they could touch the ground. The corpse juddered as the meat and bone cooked within the armour shell. Gaumata was still. The Rubricae that had been firing at him had frozen, their heads turning as though they were struggling to hear a distant voice.
He shivered and looked at his left pauldron. Blue flames still licked at the crater in his left shoulder. He reached his other hand inside the wound. The flames leapt onto his fingers. He crushed them. Radiance began to pool in his ruined flesh. He reached his will out and found the frozen Rubricae who had belonged to the dead sorcerer. They turned, guns rising, and faced the wall of fire. Within it more shadows were moving.
Gaumata stepped back amongst them and readied his mind.
+We are here, Ahriman. The outer points are taken. Let your Rubric speak.+
The Word of Hermes stilled beneath Ignis’s feet.
Guns silent, he thought. Time elapsed since last shot fired, three seconds. Time until impact of shell, fifteen seconds.
He stood on the empty launch deck, the fire- and warp-saturated air tingling on the exposed skin of his face. The deck was bare, the machines gone to scream on the burning gale and add their own fire to it. Behind him Credence stood in silence, while Ignis waited, and counted, and watched. The warp was beautiful. In every direction flowers of destruction were opening with perfect, fractal purity. Even the tide of daemons spilling out in Ctesias’s wake simply soaked into the whole.
It was working. Each second pulled another motif of the whole pattern out into full existence. Pure, perfect change, both directed and wild, expanding in ratios and angles of time and reality. This was war as it always should have been, sacred and eternal. Ignis’s mind floated through it and over it, seeing ancient marks inscribed in folds of smoke and chains of tiny interactions, the keys of the universe written in bullets and scrawled in the screams of the dying. Ahriman would have his Rubric. The foundations were laid, the fuel piled, but this moment before, this rising intersection of will and intellect and mystery, this was what he had come to witness. It was why he had come this far. It was the payment he had been promised, and now he held it in his mind’s eye he knew that the universe would never allow him to have such a gift again.
The electoos on his face stopped moving. The black lines sank beneath his skin, leaving his face bare, his eyes blinking.
It is over, he thought. It just needs to finish.
The wounded daemon engine came out of the smoke and flames. He had a second to take in the sight of a cracked fuselage hanging from a sinuous body which grew as he looked at it. He had enough time to turn his head as it crashed into the deck. Pale blood-lubricant splattered from the daemon engine’s body, and hissed as it began to eat the deck. Ignis hesitated, his mind caught between thought and action.
Part of his brain knew that what he was seeing was one of the carrion machines that had launched from this spot before. Wounded, it had returned to its roost. The daemon engine thrashed, shedding fragments of machinery. It loomed above him, a roiling mass of flesh and scales and wings. Three saurian heads flicked and snapped wildly as it rolled over. Wings beat bloody feathers onto the deck. Something had taken bites out of its flesh. Wild pain flooded from it as it rolled over and over in its own ichor. It hoisted itself up onto rows of clawed legs, and the eyes of all three heads found Ignis. It lurched forwards, blood squelching and hissing in its wake. Ignis shook himself free of shock. Claws snapped over his fists and flared with lightning. The daemon engine reared up, mouths wide with razor grins.
Credence moved before Ignis had taken a step. The automaton fired as it charged. Rounds thumped into the daemon engine. Chunks of scale and bloody flesh scattered from it.
Credence struck. Blunt fists of plasteel rammed into flesh, pistons strained. Ignis was moving forward as he saw the automaton rip a chunk of blubber and steel from the thing’s flank. Acid blood spattered Credence’s carapace. The creature twisted, trying to bite its tormentor. Credence punched both its fists into the wound it had torn, and fired the flamers on its wrists. Liquid heat bored into bloody flesh. The daemon engine lashed around, swelling with pain. Its bulk struck Credence with the force of a battering ram. The automaton skidded backwards, falling, carapace cracking. The daemon engine vomited blood and silver bile from its three mouths, then gave a final high shriek, and began to collapse.
Ignis could not see Credence amongst the juddering bulk of flesh and feathers.
Something moved behind him. Something red and black, and armoured. Something which stepped through an open hatch like a shadow forming as the sun rose. Ignis turned, armour grinding as he yanked his momentum around.
A Space Marine stood nine paces away from him.
Its armour was a hard skin split vertically into night-black and crimson. Golden wings crested its helm, and spread across its chest and shoulder pads. It held a boltgun.
A survivor from one of the Imperial boarding parties, his mind reasoned as the shock began to fade.
For an instant the two gazed at each other, neither moving.
Ignis launched himself across the space, claws and mind extending.
Time slowed. Ignis felt something move in the warp, very close, like a sea predator sending a ripple across the surface of still water. His claws were bright with lightning. The red and black Space Marine shivered back from the blow. Ignis’s claws split empty air. Inside his mind entire sets of calculations broke. His mind was tumbling, reduced in an instant to instinct and uncertainty. He lashed out with a wall of telekinetic power. The Space Marine slammed backwards, its image distorting at the edges. Ignis changed the pattern of his thoughts and pinned it to the deck with invisible force.
Except it was not there. It was standing, flowing up from the floor like a puppet pulled by its strings. Ignis hesitated for an instant. The Space Marine blinked forwards, the afterimage of the last place it had been burning in Ignis’s mind. He could not see where it was, but in his mind a subconscious projection told him where it must be.
His claws sliced into the space beside him just as the Space Marine coalesced. A single claw caught the Space Marine’s shoulder and opened the ceramite with an explosion of lightning. Ignis pulled back, anticipating his enemy, blood scattering from the ruin of the flesh beneath the breached armour.
But the Space Marine had not moved at all. Glowing energy and ichor flowed from the wound in its shell. It slammed forward before Ignis could react, and its hands gripped his arms with impossible force. Ignis’s mind stabbed kinetic force at the Space Marine, and…
…slid into nothing. It brought its helm to his face. Its left eyepiece vanished. Blackness looked out from within.
Ahriman’s mind lifted from his body.
The sky that greeted him was a cauldron of light and noise. There were Rubricae all around him, Rubricae in lines and circles. Beyond them more stood on the fused glass plain, a maze of statues. Machine creatures circled above under the shadow of the warships. The battle was a turning cyclone now, spreading outwards from the kilometres-wide eye in which Ahriman’s forces had arrayed themselves. The lash of its destruction was a background murmur in Ahriman’s awareness.
He was a thought form now, pure will and intent fused with the power of the warp. Mortal eyes could not normally see this aetheric expression of power. But on the Planet of the Sorcerers, on the blurred boundary between the warp and reality, Ahriman’s thought form was a blinding star rising to the heavens.
On the ground, the bodies of the sorcerers stood still. Their armour had locked around their limbs. Ahriman looked down on them with eyes of starlight. Auras flickered around the Rubricae like cloaks caught by a wind. A chorus of rising voices surrounded him as the names of the living and the dead rose from his brothers.
+…Kidath, Misharn, Altpet, Katamat, Sorteth…+
Every name would be spoken. Every name of every warrior who had been a Thousand Son. The litany of names rolled on, becoming louder, becoming a single voice spoken by many, becoming a summons shouted into eternity.
+…Ashtagoth, Tabakis, Za’afarok…+
Ahriman heard more voices join, thousands of names drumming on the taut membrane of the universe.
+…Helio Isidorus, Madaeth…+
The storm cell of battle and sorcery turned faster and faster, its eye growing wider, and Ahriman felt his thought form reach the apex of its ascent.
+…Ahriman…+ His own name roared through him. His thought form shattered, pieces of golden light falling like snow. He was broken. He was a thousand ideas falling from the sky. He was a thousand-thousand words never spoken.
The litany of names sliced on and on.
He was Kiu’s memory of Arcanakt, a brother dead under a wolf’s axe.
He was Mabius Ro, a hollow echo of a life rattling inside a shell of armour.
He was Kiu, guilt and power rubbed together to make strength.
He was…
…all of them. There had only been one moment like this before in his existence.
He spoke, and all his brothers’ voices were his.
And from his soul and mind the first words of his new Rubric slid into being.
Ctesias screamed as the ground blurred beneath the disc at his feet. It had moved without command, directly towards the Titan. Columns of burning rounds stabbed the rubble around him. Fragments of metal and stone struck his armour like hail. His helmet display was a swarm of warnings. The Titan was the sky above, its guns the only sound. Ctesias could feel daemon names pushing up his throat, trying to find his tongue and be spoken. But they had to take the last scream of his life from his lips first. The Titan bellowed. The deluge of explosions rattled Ctesias’s spine as the daemon machine’s shadow fell over him. He was close enough that he could read the script worked into its hull, and see the pale mutant creatures hanging in amber from its cables.
He was beneath it now. The presence of the daemons within it beat against his mind. The blue and silver of its armour plates swirled like a mirage. It turned. Its armour drank the heat from the air as it moved. Witch-ice fell from its shoulders with every step.
The disc pitched beneath Ctesias’s feet as it tried to remain beneath the Titan’s arc of fire. The Athenaeum was silent, its empty eyes blank pools.
The last great daemon names bulged in his mind.
He spoke the first great name. It came up onto his tongue like a tentacle reaching from within. He had not meant to loose them unless he needed to, certainly not all of them.
But there was no point fighting, and he was too tired to try.
The Titan stamped down. Fused glass and stone fountained up from the impact. Its head twisted downwards. Red light glowed in the sockets of its dead bird head. Its beak clanked open. Fire rolled in its metal throat.
The name pulled itself free of Ctesias’s mouth, black smoke and orange light vomiting forth with it. The disc began to spin in sudden panic. The smoke swelled in the air. The orange light split into sharp edges and hard metal. The Titan’s warhorns bellowed in challenge. Wings of wet flesh snapped out from the shape forming from Ctesias’s words. A great head rose from the smoke, its substance congealing as it moved. Scraps of flayed fur and skin hung from its wet muzzle. Black smoke poured between teeth the size of sword blades.
The disc spun away wildly. Ctesias could feel his skin withering as his summoning pulled life from his flesh.
The daemon he had called raised its axe before the Titan and clashed it against its teeth. Ctesias had stolen its name from a scroll of dried skin, and on realising what it was decided to never let it free. But now it was free. Its name – the name that clung to the torn meat of the nightmares that were its history – was Doombreed.
The Changeling brushed its hand across the orange and black Terminator armour. It stood slowly, feeling the full shape of its new face: the final face it would wear in this endeavour. The heap of metal and flesh at its feet still lived even though the Changeling had stolen its face and would wear its name. The mortal’s death was ordained far in its future, and that fate was not for the Changeling to alter.
It walked towards the silent shape of a gunship which lurked at the edge of the hangar deck. It had to move around the mound of flesh and metal which had been the winged daemon engine that had crashed onto the deck from the sky outside – a useful distraction.
The mound of flesh was bubbling, its substance boiling into vapour as reality ate it. Something within it twitched. The Changeling paused. Its senses were already extended across the space around it, and it could sense no spark of life, nor of aetheric force within the daemon engine. There was something, though, a presence like the ticking of a mortal timepiece…
A body of metal ripped itself free from the mound of flesh. Ichor ran from its plating as it stamped through the mire of entrails and blood. The Changeling did not move. It was genuinely puzzled, it had not seen this thing in the path to its objective. It dipped into the life of the face it wore, and found a name and a purpose for the… automaton.
‘Credence,’ it said in Ignis’s voice. The automaton took a step forwards. Its left arm hung stiff, cables and pipes flapping from half-severed joints.
It clacked a stream of machine noise.
‘No,’ said the Changeling. ‘All is as it should be.’ It turned and began to walk towards the gunship.
Credence did not move. The Changeling turned.
The automaton clanked.
The Changeling shook Ignis’s head.
‘Remarkable. You are correct. I am not he.’
The automaton tried to arm its weapons. Mechanisms clanked as they chewed on twisted gears and clogged flesh.
The Changeling charged. Credence lashed out, its one functioning arm a blur of blunt metal.
The Changeling slid under the blow, twisting through the air. Claws snapped over its hands. Green and pink light shivered down their edges in place of lightning.
The automaton gave a clank of confusion.
The Changeling punched both sets of claws up into the armoured casing atop Credence’s torso. The automaton stopped moving. The Changeling pulled the claws free. Credence stood for a second, and then fell to the deck with a crash of dead iron.
The claws withdrew as the Changeling walked from the unmoving machine. The gunship woke to command, and the Changeling swung into its waiting compartment.
‘Take me to the surface,’ it commanded the servitor pilot. ‘To Ahriman.’
Czetherrtihor breathed fire. White heat bleached the smoke-stained air.
&nbs
p; Doombreed pulled an arm out of the flowing dark. A stave of twisted bone rattled in its fist, thousands of skulls calling out in fury. The Titan’s breath broke over the sceptre, and was sucked into the mouths and eyes of the skulls. Ctesias could feel the warp draining into the sceptre, spiralling into a cyclone. Doombreed laughed with the sound of breaking shields and falling walls. It charged, hooves cracking the fused glass beneath its strides. The Titan bellowed in reply and surged forward to meet it. Fire and smoke and the clang of metal boomed out. The broken towers shook.
Doombreed’s axe struck the Titan across the chest. The god-machine lurched back. The roof of a jade tower exploded under its foot. Silver and burning oil poured from a gash in its plating. Doombreed was still growing, smoke becoming red muscle as it fed on the slaughter surrounding it.
The cannon on Czetherrtihor’s left arm broke apart, barrels and machinery stretching like dribbling quicksilver. The weapon shook into a mane of metal tentacles. The Titan lashed Doombreed, parting muscle and fur. Black blood fell to the ground. The tentacles tightened. Doombreed opened its mouth, rammed its bulk forward, and sank its teeth into the Titan’s gut. Czetherrtihor wailed. In the towers on its back, priests and mages shouted in sympathetic pain.
The scene spun above Ctesias, flicking past in smeared snatches, against a streaked backdrop of fire and the cries of lesser daemons staining the air.
Czetherrtihor ripped free of Doombreed’s jaws. Fluid, splinters of armour, and cords of flesh drooled from the rent in the Titan’s chest. Doombreed flicked its head up, like a dog. Its jaws snapped wide and it swallowed the bleeding metal down. The Titan trembled. It flicked its lashes feebly.
Doombreed leapt forwards, wings snapping out. The ground fell away beneath it. It landed on Czetherrtihor’s back. Crystal and gold bastions shattered beneath it. The Titan twisted. The daemon on its back swelled with the promise of victory. The Titan fired its weapons. Wild spears of energy bored through the air. Doombreed clawed forwards, reached down from the Titan’s shoulders, and rammed its bone sceptre into Czetherrtihor’s head. The daemons within the Titan shrieked. Doombreed twisted the impaled head to the side. A neck of flesh and cabling was pulled from the Titan’s shell. Doombreed raised its axe, and brought it down.