The Omnibus - John French

by Warhammer 40K

  Light exploded upwards. Doombreed straightened and raised Czetherrtihor’s severed head to the sky in silent tribute to its bloody god as the Titan collapsed beneath it.

  Ctesias was not looking, though, he was coughing and spluttering as the disc spun away from the manifestation of hate and fury he had brought to this battle.

  The warp was broken, churning, wild.

  ‘Oh, no… please…’ he managed as the panicked disc spun through the ruins and the sounds of daemons and sorcery and machines pulling each other apart. ‘Please…’ But the word of pleading was not enough. Another name was coming to his mouth. He did not know what it was. He should be done; he should be speeding to Ahriman’s side with the Athenaeum. But for some reason he was not there, he was kneeling on a spinning disc of silver and daemon flesh, another name forcing itself from the depths of his soul. And Ahriman was far away.

  And then a thought, cold as the touch of frosted silver.

  Why had he brought the Athenaeum with him? And the questions snapped on, firing like bullets through the stretching moment as a syllable forced itself from within him.

  Why?

  Why?

  Why?

  He saw the image of the Athenaeum in its cage reaching towards him.

  ‘Ctesias, please…’ it said, and its hand reached for him. ‘Free me. Listen to me. Free me.’ And then its lips had moved but he had not remembered what it had said. Lying on the disc as the Planet of the Sorcerers spun in fire around him, he still could not, but he knew that the answer was coming.

  It was clawing up his throat and past his teeth.

  The Rubric began and the battle spun around it. Seen from above the Rubric was a circle of golden light at the centre of a ring of roaring flames. Beyond that fire a band of devastation heaved with lightning as daemons met the armies of the planet pouring inwards. This outer band was a tide line of death and broken reality. Bodies heaped the scorched and molten ruins. Daemons leapt from islands of debris which floated up towards the sky like bubbles rising to the surface of oil. Rivers of ichor wound up the sides of ruins. Things rose from the dead as half-banished daemons congealed with shredded corpses. Witch-acolytes in coloured robes walked amongst herds of beast-headed mutants. Hulking creatures without eyes or ears swung copper bells above their heads. Peals of glowing sound pulled daemons from the skies and broke them on the ground.

  Further out again, amongst the still standing towers, turbolaser blasts met kilometre-wide kine shields as the ships overhead spread their fire wide across the surface. Towers broke from the bedrock and rose like spears towards the warships. Beams of glittering light stabbed from their pinnacles. Daemon engines spun amongst the silver towers like crows.

  And on and on across the planet its denizens woke and marched to war.

  Seen from a distance, the battle was a spreading circle of destruction. Only the heart of that circle was still, like the eye of a storm.

  But that stillness was a lie.

  Ahriman saw the battle he had brought to his father’s domain, and felt his last and greatest spell tear through him.

  It came with words and symbols and flashes of pain. There were words which were the explosion of bolt-rounds, sigils which were the taste of blood in a dying mutant’s mouth, stabs of sensation as a silver tower crashed to the ground and shattered. Everything was there, in finer and finer detail right down to the motion of things too small and strange to give names to. He could see everything.

  He had been here before, but that first time the Rubric had been planned, prepared for and enacted with care. This time the Rubric was a primal roar of power.

  He could do nothing.

  He could do everything.

  The universe was a canvas.

  Time was a thread between his fingers.

  He was the centre of an eye which saw existence, and made it real by seeing.

  He could not feel the individual minds of his brothers, he could not tell the difference between the minds of his allies and enemies. He could not tell the difference between the warp and himself.

  I am not a god, came a thought that felt like a message. I am not so mundane.

  I am will, and sight, and the strength of mortals given immortal power.

  Fear me.

  He felt his being reach out and out and out.

  Hate me.

  He needed them now. The last of his brothers. He needed Ctesias and Ignis and Kiu and Gilgamos and Gaumata. He needed them with him. By his side.

  Pity me.

  The Rubric spread, its halo rising bright beneath the iron shadows of the warships. It had been a creation not of years, not of centuries, nor millennia, but of an existence. He had been casting this spell all his life, and now he was living its end point, its summation.

  Rubric… a word which in ancient lore meant ‘notation of instruction’. An imperative. A command.

  ‘Renew,’ he spoke in silence. And reality heard. And obeyed.

  XXI

  BEGINNINGS

  It took years for Iobel to reach the city. When she finally saw it – rising above her like fingers of coral wound in silver and bronze – she did not believe it was real. She stood swaying under the sun and blue sky.

  Her robes had become rags. The blue of the fabric had faded to grey. Years of walking from mountain caves to desert plains, from lightless dark to bright sun: she had felt every step of her feet and watched every cycle of sun and moon. She had walked without purpose for much of that time, the words of the Crimson King half forgotten. She had stopped and sat on the ground without moving for months, and let night and day wash over her.

  How long had passed for Ahriman since she had passed into the Labyrinth and back? Had her years been his? Had it been days, hours, seconds? Had it been no more than the time taken for him to blink?

  She had thought about dying, but thinking of it had made no difference, neither had trying to drown herself in sand or open her veins. She had neither lungs to fill nor blood to wet the sand. She did not know what she was, but she could not die. Neither the land nor the journey would let her.

  She had kept walking, a pilgrim without end, and the words of the Crimson King had walked with her.

  ‘It begins where all things do…’ called the voice on the wind.

  She had tried to retrace her steps back to the entrance to the Labyrinth. The mountains were there, jagged shadows on the lip of the world, but they never drew closer, no matter how long she walked or how much she stared at them. The city sat on the opposite edge of land and sky. She had tried to walk away from it, but every time she blinked or looked away and then back, it was there.

  ‘It begins with blood and guilt,’ said the memory. ‘It begins within.’

  Within.

  She gave up trying to shake the city from her sight.

  Is it inevitable? Do I have a choice? Why did I listen to the Crimson King?

  She was an inquisitor. She existed to make the choices that others could not, to choose between possibilities which were terrible and those which were worse.

  ‘You are judgement,’ he had said, but if she was judgement then she could not remember of what. She just was, a piece of debris lost in a dream held together by stubbornness and habit as much as will. She did not have to follow the Crimson King’s words. They had the taste of snake venom to her, and the touch of a puzzle box filled with blades. Purposes and possibilities lurked down every path she took, and she was not sure which choice was truly the one she had to take.

  If I have to stop Ahriman, how can I do that from within his mind?

  From within…

  And with that thought the city had moved closer, growing as she watched. She had taken a step closer, keeping her eyes on it as it swelled beyond the nearest dune. It grew as though her one step had been a thousand. She took another step, and another, and another, and another, feet a blur, the sand a cloud in her wake. Towers stabbed higher and higher. Windows and bridges of bronze winked in the sunlight, and she was r
unning without knowing why, the dust stinging her eyes.

  She stopped. A marble step was beneath her bare foot, cool against her skin. The palace of Ahriman’s memory had gone. A city of black glass and polished stone had replaced it. Towers rose and fell like waves crashing against cliffs. Bridges and stonework reconfigured. Doors opened and vanished in walls.

  She hesitated and began to climb the steps. A set of double doors stood open at the top. As she drew closer she saw that they sagged on their hinges, their black wood cracked and weathered. It had the feeling of a once important thing submerged under things of greater weight. She looked upwards as she crossed the threshold. Knowledge, rendered into the shape of stone and buttresses, climbed up to the sun.

  Where did this begin? she thought, and she found the splinter of carved wood was in her hand again. Where does everything begin for Ahriman?

  She stepped over the threshold, and cool shadow took her. She walked through corridors of marble. Light streamed through windows covered by mesh screens. Cracks ran through the paved floor. She passed doors of painted wood, rough iron, and swirled glass. Each one was different, each one unique. She recognised the corridors and their cool dust smell, even if she did not recognise any of the doors. A strange feeling of comfort grew in her as she went further from the entrance. This was somewhere she had been before, somewhere familiar.

  She took turns at random, climbed and descended stairs without thought, but never found the outside of the memory city, just the corridors and the doors, and their smell of time as dust.

  Sounds came from behind the doors, voices, cries, tears. She knew them; she had walked these floors before. She did not look at the splinter of wood that the boy had given her all that time ago, beside a fire in the desert. She knew what it was now. She should have known sooner.

  She found several broken doors, some without frames, some pulled from their hinges, some split in two, as though cleaved by an axe. None were carved with birds or a sun, and she found no whole doors to match the piece held in her fingers.

  In the end it was the black door which found her first. She turned a corner and there it was. It was obsidian, its surface polished to a mirror sheen, without handles or hinges. It drew her to it. She could feel something behind it, something which itched her skin, and blew away thoughts of what she was doing. She found herself stood before it, hand reaching towards its liquid night surface.

  ‘Secrets,’ said a voice from behind her. She spun around. A hole gaped in the opposite wall. Broken and splintered pieces of dark wood ringed the view of a wide balcony and the desert beyond. A small figure with dark hair sat on the edge of the balcony, tossing coloured stones up and catching them again. His eyes were closed. Beyond him she could see a track of shallow footmarks crossing the dunes into the distance.

  ‘Secrets, they are what are behind that door,’ said the boy. He tossed a stone into the air, and it stopped in mid-air just in front of his face. He turned his head towards her and opened his eyes. The stone dropped. He caught it without breaking her gaze. ‘You shouldn’t look at them. That’s why they are secret.’

  She looked at him, and then at the broken door between them. Birds climbed up a broken panel hanging from the remains of the frame. She withdrew the shard from her pocket and held it up between finger and thumb.

  ‘Yours?’

  The boy snorted.

  ‘It’s just part of the door.’

  She stepped through the broken frame, crossing the balcony. The boy was swinging his legs over the side as she sat beside him.

  ‘The beginning of things?’

  The boy nodded, and smiled, but the smile was old on his young face.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the end.’

  He shrugged, and looked out across the desert. She followed his gaze. A dark smudge was swelling in the space between dunes and sky.

  ‘A storm…’ she said, and frowned as lightning flashed in the distance. A warm charge filled her nose.

  ‘I ran in front of that storm,’ said the boy, and tossed and caught a stone again. ‘It’s a large one too, a great monster of a thing.’

  ‘If this room is part of Ahriman’s memory, then what is that storm?’

  The boy shrugged. He was not looking at her but at two small stones rolling across the backs of his fingers, staring at them intently. She noticed that each one was not smooth but carved into the shape of a scarab. The boy’s face twitched, and the frown on his face deepened.

  ‘He is my brother, you know. No matter what else, he is that.’ His eyes were wide when he looked up at her. ‘My brother.’

  ‘You mean it,’ she said, her breath catching, ‘don’t you? You are not the memory of a Legion warrior. You are Ahriman’s true brother, his sibling by…’

  ‘Blood,’ finished the boy. ‘Yes, though I was his Legion brother too, but that was… later. We were born here, in the Archamid Empire of Terra.’ He looked out at the oncoming storm. ‘Our little realm gave its fealty to the Master of Mankind as He made Terra the Throne World of the Imperium. We gave Him our loyalty, and we gave His Great Crusade our children. We became a small part of a greater dream.’ He paused and bit his lip, eyes focusing on something only he could see. ‘We were both given to the Legion. We endured the trials together, and left our humanity behind together. We learned of war, and honour, and the brotherhood of warriors together.’ He stopped and placed the scarab stones on the floor beside him, one blue, one green.

  Iobel frowned at the stones, and shook her head.

  ‘When I was alive I read every record that still existed of the Thousand Sons. There was no mention of a birth-brother to Ahriman. Nor did I find you anywhere else in Ahriman’s memories.’

  The boy laughed, the sound bright and clear.

  ‘The base nature of reality is loss, slow change, and slower decay. Knowledge is not immune to that law. There were ruins on Terra when I lived, strange monoliths out in the sand. No one knew who made them, or how long ago they had been built. They could have been centuries old, or millennia old. No one knew any of the answers. No one knew even where to begin finding the questions.’

  He paused. A fork of lightning flashed across the horizon.

  ‘What is your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Ohrmuzd,’ he replied. ‘My name was Ohrmuzd.’

  Knekku ran through the Labyrinth. Ahead of him Avenisi was a blur of fur and muscle. He could feel the beat of his heart slowing in his chest.

  ‘How much further?’ he called.

  Avenisi did not answer. Crystal walls and stairs flew past. Voices and reflections chased him. He ignored them. The words of Magnus were the pounding of his feet and breath.

  ‘The Rubric cannot be stopped,’ Magnus had said.

  ‘There must be–’

  ‘It cannot be stopped because it has already begun.’ The words had held Knekku still, frozen. ‘In the world, where your body lies with a dagger in one heart and your blood frozen in the air, it began ninety-one seconds ago.’

  The walls of the Labyrinth shrieked and shifted as he ran. Passages split. Doors opened and vanished before him. Floors and ceilings rotated, spaces folded like paper. The only fixed point was Avenisi bounding ahead of him, coat shimmering between colours.

  ‘It can be stopped,’ he had said. ‘We can break the circle, destroy–’

  ‘It will not work,’ Magnus cut him off with a shake of his head. ‘This Rubric has its own momentum now, a momentum that will reach its end one way or another. The warp will not have it any other way.’

  ‘Then there is no point to what you have told me.’

  ‘There is a point,’ said Magnus, and Knekku thought he saw something move across the scar-tissue face, something like sorrow. ‘The Rubric will reach an end, but that end can be… altered.’

  ‘How?’

  Avenisi whipped around a corner in front of him. Knekku skidded after the daemon. A door of branching crystal and silver loomed ahead. He stopped. Blank darkness waited beyon
d. Avenisi bounded forward, fur shimmering between colours of fire. Knekku did not move. The daemon twisted before the portal.

  ‘Come on. Time is running fast.’

  Knekku took a step, but then stopped again.

  ‘This second Rubric is different in many ways,’ Magnus had said, ‘but at the root there is a single change that eclipses all others.’

  Avenisi hissed with impatience, but Knekku did not move.

  ‘The first Rubric was an incantation to change the nature of reality. The second will change things also, but it is not just a ritual. It is a sacrifice.’

  He closed his eyes. He had always been faithful to his father and master. He had seen and done many things to keep that faith, things that had taken every sliver of his mental control to do.

  ‘Ahriman is going to offer something in exchange for what he believes.’

  Knekku did not fill the silence. He could feel the answer without needing to voice the question. Magnus had nodded as though hearing the unspoken thoughts.

  ‘He is going to offer himself. He dies and the Legion lives.’

  Knekku opened his eyes and began to walk towards the door. Two strides and his walk was a run. Avenisi bounded forward with him. The sheet of blackness beyond the silver door flowed over him, and he was falling through nothing.

  ‘He will die?’

  ‘If he does he will bring about the destruction of me, and the Crimson King, and the Legion he wants to save.’

  ‘But if you are right, it is already begun…’

  ‘Yes, it has, but it has not ended,’ Magnus said. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I was real, Iobel,’ said Ohrmuzd. ‘I lived, and bled, and fought for my Emperor, and for ideals which I saw change humanity.’

  Iobel let out a breath, and looked around both the balcony and the broken door into the memory-city beyond.

  ‘Why does he keep the memory of you here, Ohrmuzd?’

  ‘Because I am no longer alive. The Flesh Change came to our Legion while we were still without a primarch to guide us.’ He took a deep breath, and again he was a boy speaking with an old man’s bitterness. ‘It cut our heart out, turning our finest into monsters… We did everything we could to contain it, but we could do nothing to stop it. Until we found Prospero. Until Magnus.’