by John French
‘This is not real. At least not in the sense most would consider it.’ The voice was rich, measured. ‘I thought it would take you longer to realise.’
A man stepped from behind one of the pillars, and her finger tightened on the trigger, but did not fire. Muscles bunched and flowed across his bared chest and shoulders. Silver and gold rings glinted from his scalp. Huge relaxed hands hung beside the handles of sheathed glaives. Half of his face looked like knotted leather, the scars shaped and folded into a tangle of dragons and serpents. He smiled at her with the other half. The sharpened points of his teeth showed in the twisted corner of his mouth.
It was Horeg, her retainer and bodyguard, or at least it looked just like him. But Horeg had no tongue and could not speak. ‘I thought it would take us longer to reach this point,’ said the man who was not Horeg.
Iobel squeezed the trigger of the meltagun. Nothing. She pulled it again, and still nothing. She felt a shiver whip through her. The man who was not Horeg stepped closer. He had blue eyes, bright blue eyes, the colour of a sea under sunlight. She tried to rise, but the pain in her leg suddenly grew. She could feel bone cutting into flesh. She gasped.
‘As I said, this is not real.’ He squatted down opposite her, muscles bunching in his haunches. ‘But there are ways of making it feel that way.’
‘Daemon,’ she hissed, but even as she said it she was not sure. This felt different, like something that had already happened.
‘No, and besides you, I alone am real.’
She felt suddenly very cold.
‘What is your name?’ she said carefully.
‘A good question – names have power, do they not? You want to see if I will answer, and if I do, and if I tell true, then you have the beginning of a weapon to cut your way out.’ He smiled Horeg’s twisted smile again. ‘That is what you were intending, was it not? Resourceful, never yielding, always looking for a path to victory even when all is uncertain – you are a remarkable person, Selandra Iobel. Your mind is very strong, stronger than I would have thought possible for one still mortal.’
‘Your name?’ she growled, fighting down the pain, shutting out the panic and questions. This was a trick, one of the greater illusions of the daemons that infested the warp. It might not be real, but that did not mean that she had to submit to its lie.
He just smiled again, and shook his head. A line of silver rings rattled in the pierced flesh of Horeg’s eyebrows.
‘My name is Ahzek Ahriman,’ he said. She froze, hair prickling across her arms as though touched by an icy wind. Her tongue was still in her mouth. Her eyes fixed on the bright blue points of his eyes, and suddenly she knew that she was not the Inquisitor Iobel who had purged the Prophets of Carsona, or at least she was not any more. Carsona had been a century and a half ago. She had not known the name Prospero then, had never heard of the Legion it had birthed, and had not known the name Ahzek Ahriman. He was right, this was the start. This moment, in the basement of a broken hab, had been the beginning of her journey from ignorance to enlightenment: the journey that would lead to Apollonia…
She shut the thought down as it formed, thrusting it away from her consciousness and burying it deep within her. That was what he was after, why he had come for her, why he was standing in the ruin of her past wearing the face of a loyal friend.
Ahriman nodded, and stood.
‘This memory is close to the surface of your mind. The last things you would have remembered before this would have been the conclave, and the examination of my lieutenant. Your mind would have been fixated on me, and what I intended, but this memory is the first your mind comes to now. Why?’ Ahriman looked at her. His gaze hit her like a physical blow. ‘Because this is the start of the path that would bring you to me.’
Iobel suddenly felt as though a sliver of cold iron had slipped into her chest. Her mind flicked back through what Ahriman had said, through what seemed to be happening. This was happening in her mind, in her memories. There was a reason she was here, in this exact memory. This was not an interrogation, it was a breach into her memories, a hole bored into the outer layer of her mind. She closed her mouth, pulling her thoughts back, hardening her will.
Apollonia, he has come because of Apollonia…
She forced the thought deeper, burying it down, clamping layers of trained will over it. Numbness spread through portions of her consciousness, sections of her past suddenly becoming cold and dead. Names and facts she had carried for decades vanished from sight, swallowed down within her core.
It will not be enough, she thought, even as the walls grew and the memory blocks formed in her mind. Not against the likes of him. Escape or death are the only ways to keep it from him. I must find a way to escape, or a way to die.
‘You can hide what I seek, inquisitor, but I will reach it.’
She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came. The image of the hab basement was coming apart, bleeding into blackness like wet paint dribbling from a canvas. Only the blue eyes remained fixed, glittering as they pierced into her, glowing like cruel stars.
‘Is that enough? Can he hear us?’
The voice came from above him. There was light too, sunlight perhaps, falling through a grey fog. He was not sure how far away the light was, though. The voice had sounded familiar, but he was not sure where he had heard it before.
‘Probability of normal cognition and sensory awareness is high.’ The second voice was a clatter of machinery. ‘Adeptus Astartes physiology yields uncertainty quotient of–’
‘He can hear us,’ cut in the first voice. He heard the speaker lick his lips. ‘Can’t you?’
He did not reply. No, in fact he did not know how to reply. Could he make words like those he heard? He listened instead. He could hear a low hiss and wheeze, and a buzzing pulse almost below the level of hearing.
Active augmetics, said a voice within his head. He knew it was right but he did not know why. Yes, active augmetics, and… weaponry… no… yes, but something else as well… something low like the purr of power armour. And then the smells came. The thick reek of machine oil, and contraseptic, and wires running hot close to dead flesh. Breath, heavy and wet with the smells of polluted lungs, and spiced food, and burned caffeine, and–
‘Can you get him to see?’ asked another voice, a different voice. Female, further back from the other two. He could hear her withered chest in the bite of her words. He had heard that voice as well, but he could not remember where. Did it matter that he could not remember?
The fog and hazed sun vanished. The world that replaced them was pale blue. He could see a group of figures in a pool of light. Beyond the light everything was shadow, blurring to darkness that extended to an undefined distance. At the centre of the pool of light sat an object. At first he thought it was a machine, but then he saw the flesh under the mass of tubes. It was a body, clamped to a metal table, its skin and meat punctured by needle-tipped tubes, its breath the slow sucking of fluid through glass flasks. Its head was an eyeless mask of metal, haloed by cables, and with a black slot for a mouth. Two figures stood close by; the nearest had no legs, but floated a metre from the floor. Two sets of glittering limbs hung from within the shadow of its robe, and three green eyes rotated slowly beneath its hood. The second figure was a human with a thin hard face and plain black robes. Further away a shrunken old woman in a gleaming exoskeleton stood beside a man with shining crystal eyes. Three hooded attendants stood behind the crystal-eyed man, linked to his spine and skull by thick cables. They were all looking at the figure bound into the machines at the room’s centre.
He recognised them all, but was not sure why. None of them seemed to have reacted to him suddenly appearing on the opposite side of the chamber to them. He looked at each of them again, tried to blink but without success.
The floating four-armed figure turned to look at him. Its tri-lens eye rotated faster, then clicked to stillness.
‘Subject can see us now.’ The voice was the same machine cl
atter as before. They all turned to look at him then. The man with the thin face frowned, and raised a crooked finger.
‘Closer.’
He floated forwards, passing over the figure buried under the snake swarm of sucking tubes. As he did so he saw a reflection glide across the glass of one of the fluid-filled vials: a polished skull without a lower jaw, a cluster of lenses filling its left eye socket. He kept on moving forwards, his mind suddenly tumbling. A servo-skull: he recognised it, and felt the shock roll through his narrow awareness.
The thin man’s face was now level with his vision.
‘Tell me, can you speak?’
No, of course he could not speak. The word echoed through him in mute frustration. He could not…
A sound gurgled up from the figure on the table.
‘N… No.’
‘Good,’ said the thin-faced man, then gave a narrow smile that was not a smile.
He understood then, and knew why he was seeing through a servo-skull, knew why no one had looked at him when he first saw the chamber. He was the figure on the table. The injured flesh was his. The mouth speaking through the slot in the metal mask was his. And he had no eyes.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘I,’ said the thin-faced man carefully, ‘am of no concern. You however, you are very much the focus of things.’ He glanced at the hovering tech-priest. ‘Though I understand your cognition is impeded at present, we will help you recover it.’ He nodded carefully. ‘We will help you remember.’
‘Remember?’
‘Yes, and let me start by giving you something. We will need more of you, much more, but you will need to lead us there, and for that we need somewhere for you to start. Your name.’ The thin-faced man paused. ‘Your name is Astraeos.’
Astraeos. The name rolled through him, like an echo of a shout carrying through fog. Yes… Yes. That was… that is my name.
‘Why am I here?’ asked Astraeos.
The thin-faced man folded his arms, a long finger resting on his jaw.
‘A very good question,’ he said.
IX
Storm Calm
The fleet waited in unquiet calm. Two dozen ships lay in the dark, their engines silent. Distant starlight lapped against their hulls, sketching their shapes in silver. Time ticked on and the millions who lived in the ships waited. On the bridges of the warships, in close cramped sub-decks, and in lightless bilges they waited. Most did not know why, but they felt it all the same, a tautness that stretched between heartbeats like a drum skin waiting for the first strike to fall.
In the steam-filled gorges between the Sycorax’s shield stacks, the mech-scavengers folded their brass wings over their bodies and hooted into the quiet. The Cyrabor gathered in their forge-fanes, clicking at each other in their half-machine tongue. In the domed library of the cruiser Metatron Gilgamos watched the stars beyond the viewports. At his side three Rubricae stood, statue still, the light in their eyes dim.
In his quarters Hemellion sat, his legs curled under him, staring at the wick of a candle burning lower. He thought of the faces of those he had known, of the sun falling through mist on a cold morning. He thought of the son he had sent away from the capital so that he would learn of the world he would one day rule. For an instant he wondered where his son would be now, then he remembered that he knew. Tears rolled down his cheeks in silence, and he stared at the candle flame and waited.
Silvanus could not sleep. The drugs had stopped working, and would not work again, no matter how many he took. He sat on the hard floor of his oculary, looking at the circle of mirrored glass in his hands. He did not want to look into the reflection; he did not want the answer it would give. But even the hands that held the mirror gave an answer – they were changing. The bones were longer, the skin thinner, the nails finer and sharper. He raised the mirror, and looked at his face. The flesh was sagging under his eyes, and the pupil in his left eye had swollen to swallow the iris. The features of his face were disappearing, melting back into smooth flat skin. Slowly he lowered the glass.
How long? he wondered. How long do I have before I cannot recognise myself?
Carmenta drifted between wakefulness and the slumbering dreams of the Sycorax. Every now and then she could hear the Cyrabor talking as they stood around her throne. They were talking about her, their half-machine voices clicking and purring like oiled cogs. They thought she could not understand them. They were saying that she would not last much longer, that the ship would take her soon, that the portents all said that her end was coming.
But I am the mistress. The slow, cold embrace of her ship folded over her. I am Titan Child. I am Sycorax. I am a goddess of the void. How can I die?
No answer came, just the whispers of the Cyrabor fading into the restless quiet.
And on and on through the fleet time drew taut, and the whispers passed between lips both high and low: What now? When would the waiting end? Where would the answer lead them?
The chainblade roared to life in Kadin’s hands. Sparks rose from where the teeth caught the decking at his feet. After a second he stopped the blade’s motor, and listened to the teeth slow to stillness. The corridor was quiet again.
Kadin watched the stillness of the corridor. The cracked glow-globes cast ragged pools of light over the metal gratings of the floor. At his back the door of the chamber through which Ahriman had passed days before remained shut. Kadin had heard sounds, sand blowing across metal, calls like the cries of birds, laughter even. Frost had leaked from the door seals and spiralled down the walls of the corridor. The door had glowed deep red then cooled with a tinkle of contracting metal. But even those moments had not broken the feeling that the whole ship and fleet had settled into a dreamless night.
Kadin turned his head and looked into the blackness at the other end of the corridor. He kept watching until it melted away from his eyes, and he could see the dot of the distant bulkhead in grey monochrome. He looked back down. He would have closed his eyes, but his eyelids would not stay shut any more, and his eyes saw regardless of how deep the darkness. He had grown in the dark, learned to fight in the dark, killed his first man in the dark. So many memories were gone, but he could still remember the warmth of the blood as it washed over his knife arm. The dark had been mother and father; the dark had been fear and the racing heart of the hunt.
What remains?
He triggered the resting chainblade. It rattled to life and noise filled the corridor, tumbling down the long space. He gunned it louder, felt it shake the metal of his grasp. He cut the motor, listening to the sound drain back to nothing.
A few memories of a child in the dark, afraid and hungry – that is what remains.
He gunned the chainblade again, and listened to the silence vanish as the metal teeth sang.
Maroth knelt. Above him, the daemon stirred, and its silver chains clinked. He raised the blind eyes of his helm. The daemon looked back, its own eyes like pools of mirror-black water. The host body had changed again. Maroth could see the red muscles beneath the stretched skin. Horns grew from beneath the temples of its head, reaching up like bare, twisted branches. Its lips had pulled back from its teeth, and it grinned with a cage of translucent needles. He could hear it breathing, the air sucking wetly, even though its chest was still.
Nothing here is as it seems, thought Maroth. The silence is not silence, and the quiet is a storm waiting to break. I am not the broken husk of a sorcerer, and Ahriman is not my master.
‘Sire,’ said Maroth, his voice strong and clear in the blue light of the burning lamps.
‘Now,’ said the daemon, its voice crackling like fire spreading through a forest. ‘It begins now.’
‘Yes, sire,’ said Maroth.
Ignis watched the warlords arrive. He had chosen one of the main hangar decks for the meeting, partly because it was as far as he was willing to let the warlords onto his ship, and partly because he had every intention of just opening the blast doors to the void if all went as wron
g as it might. Night filled the vast chamber, broken only by the pilot lights guiding the gunships to their stands on the deck. Credence stood just behind him. The automaton buzzed at him every few seconds.
‘No,’ Ignis muttered in reply. ‘That course of action is unnecessary at this point.’
Credence gave a short clatter of binaric.
‘In this case your threat assessment is in error,’ said Ignis.
Another pause, another blurt.
Ignis glanced up at the automaton’s sensor sockets. ‘Yes, I am sure.’
He turned back to watching the warlords and their entourages cross the deck. They walked with the blunt arrogance of those trying not to show that they were unsure of why they were there. It almost made Ignis smile. All of them commanded ships and warbands in Ahriman’s fleet. Most of them had been part of one Legion or another during the Great Crusade and subsequent rebellion against the Emperor. All of them had fought in the wars in and around the Eye of Terror, some for hundreds of years, some for much longer. And all of them held to no higher ideal than their own thirst for power. They came one by one, each flanked by a clutch of warriors that fumed violence like smoke from a fresh fire.
First came Hzakatris, so called Master of the Hellforged, clad in armour which looked like cancerous bone. He brought three of his blooded warriors with him, each one of them clad in Terminator plate looted from battlefields across the Eye. They clanked with poor repair as they moved. Behind him was Mavahedron, alone apart from his thrall-hounds, the beasts snarling at the ends of taut bronze chains. Sulipicis was last, face shrouded, his black and gold armour half hidden by tattered grey robes. A crescent of blank-helmed and black-armoured warriors flanked him. Each bore a two-handed sword before them. Ignis thought they looked like a mourning guard marching beside a corpse.
Ignis felt the muscles in his jaw tense as the three warlords halted in a ragged arc before him. His eyes lingered on each of them, his second sight picking up their shifting auras: anticipation, caution, distrust, spite, and hunger. He had a sudden urge to tell Credence to open fire. This was the third of these parlays he had arranged, and by now he was feeling a sense of inevitability about the outcome of each.
