Ahriman: Unchanged Page 3

  ‘Another statement rather than a question?’ sighed Ctesias.

  ‘Correct.’ Ignis glanced at Ctesias. His face remained impassive but the patterns of his tattoos realigned. ‘You look like there is something that has disturbed you. That is not like you, Ctesias. Is your shrivelled soul unsettled by something?’

  Ctesias gave a single shake of his head.

  ‘I have no soul.’

  ‘That I can believe,’ said Ignis, and glanced up at the cage and the voice of the Athenaeum. He looked like he was about to say something, but Ctesias cut him off.

  ‘I was surprised that he did it,’ said Ctesias. ‘Sanakht was always loyal to Ahriman, but he also followed Amon against him. For him to then give himself, for him to become this conduit so that Ahriman could take Magnus’s secrets… That is a contradiction, don’t you think?’

  Ignis shrugged.

  ‘He did just that, though. That is answer enough.’ He looked back to Ctesias. ‘Things change. People change.’

  ‘Yes, they do,’ said Ctesias, then shivered and turned his back on the cage. ‘How long until we translate back into the storm?’

  ‘A day, two at the most. The Navigator needs rest.’

  ‘That almost sounded compassionate.’

  ‘The Navigator asked for rest, and Ahriman agreed.’

  ‘I knew it could not be from your kindness,’ said Ctesias, a cold grin forming on his face. Ignis did not smile back. Ctesias reflected that he would have been more worried if the Master of Ruin had returned the gesture.

  The silence returned and stretched. Ctesias kept his gaze on the caged figure.

  ‘Why does Ahriman keep the Athenaeum? He spent months listening to and questioning it, but now does not even talk about it. If he has taken what he needs from it then why keep it… alive?’

  ‘Knowledge,’ replied Ignis. ‘Knowledge pulled from the mind of our father Magnus without him knowing. You expect Ahriman to cast that aside?’

  ‘No… but perhaps he should.’

  ‘For you to say such a thing…’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ctesias, nodding but not looking at his brother. ‘There is something out of place, something Ahriman is not telling us about what he has done, and what he intends.’

  ‘You speak manifest truths like they are mysteries,’ said Ignis. ‘He is Ahriman. The experiences of your mutual history must have taught you poorly.’

  ‘No.’ Ctesias shook his head. He was still looking at the Athenaeum, remembering it speaking with Sanakht’s voice. ‘No, I think I have learned the past’s lessons well enough.’

  ‘Then be satisfied.’

  ‘Why are you here, Ignis?’ he asked, rolling his shoulders to release the stiffness which clung to his half-withered muscles. ‘Not to fulfil some new-found need for companionship, I am sure.’

  Ignis shrugged as though the answer was obvious.

  ‘I am here to summon you. Ahriman has called a gathering. It begins.’

  I failed.+ Ahriman’s words shivered through the chamber.

  Ignis felt the minds of the living flicker in surprise. Silence strangled every movement and breath. It was not just the quieting of sound, but the stilling of thoughts, and the muting of mental noise. Ahriman turned to look at the warriors standing on tiers above and around him. Every sorcerer brother serving Ahriman stood in the chamber, and with them their Rubricae entourages. They were few, when measured against the Legions of old, but these living sorcerers alone were a force enough to drive a world to its knees. Every eye and mind in the chamber was totally focused on Ahriman. The pressure of that focus shimmered above the assembly in a heat haze. Ignis watched. Even for him to hear Ahriman say those words was like a knife blow. Behind his shoulder, Credence’s hum of flexing servos had faded to nothing.

  You have all walked paths that I would not have chosen for you,+ Ahriman resumed. +You walked them because of me, because of the future that I convinced you of. You believed. You followed me, and that first dream failed. And we have all paid for that error. Even those who stand elsewhere, far away from this place, on other worlds and following other fates, all of us, all we Thousand Sons suffered for a failing. For my failing.+

  Ahriman looked up, as though looking through the roof of the chamber and the layers of decks above to some distant point of light.

  Ignis watched and counted the seconds, noting the metre and timing of Ahriman’s every gesture and word: perfect. Impossibly perfect. Ignis had been the Master of Ruin of the Thousand Sons, in a time when such titles meant more than pride and a failure to let go of the past. The numer­ology of destruction was his obsession, and the configuration and meaning of all things was his craft. In the universe he saw, every detail mattered.

  We are the exiled ones,+ sent Ahriman, looking down again. +We are the sons cast from Magnus’s side and who have borne punishment for daring to defy fate, a broken circle at the edge of existence, fugitives, outcasts, proof of what awaits those who deny the whims of gods. We believed in our own vision. We reached high. We were cast down.+

  He brought his Black Staff down on the platform top.

  But fate is still a lie!+

  A shockwave rang through the warp. The living staggered, and the Rubricae twitched where they stood.

  Nothing is inevitable! Nothing is certain! Nothing is written! If the path to salvation lies through the halls of purgatory, then so be it!+

  The words faded slowly. Ahriman looked around the chamber at the thousands of dead and living eyes looking back at him. In spite of himself, Ignis felt his twin hearts pause between beats. Emotion was not a part of his universe. But in that moment, under Ahriman’s gaze, he felt something that he struggled to understand.

  Ahriman nodded.

  We have suffered but still we stand. We are warriors against fate, my brothers, and now we are going to war one last time. We are returning to the land from which we were banished. We will stand on the Planet of the Sorcerers. There we will enact a second Rubric. The dream of the past will be made anew. We will see it done, you and I.+

  In the warp, Ignis watched as the cloud of thoughts and emotions rose from the assembled sorcerers like a fractal haze of shock and hope. He watched it bloom outwards. His flesh was crawling with heat. He looked at Ahriman standing still and silent in the paused instant he had created. Time was sliding. Ignis could almost feel the momentum of events begin to turn and roll, like a great stone beginning its journey down a mountainside. He shivered once without being able to stop it.

  But, he thought to himself, you still have not said how we will return, Ahriman.

  Behind him, he heard Credence shift with a clatter of gears. Ignis nodded without looking at his guardian.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I am not sure I want to know how either.’

  III

  By Your Will

  Knekku had not seen his father, the king, for eighty-one years when the Tower of the Cyclops returned to the horizon of the Planet of the Sorcerers. He had frozen when he had first seen it from the window of his tower.

  ‘Sire?’ he had whispered, and then stared as emotion and thoughts buzzed through him. Instinct had said run, but control – the core of his mental architecture – made him collapse the ritual he had been preparing, and only then begin walking through the city, towards Magnus the Red’s tower.

  Will we get answers? he wondered as he walked. Will you tell us where you have been? Will you tell us why? The thoughts held no hope. He knew better than to hope, but still could not help asking the questions. Magnus had always been a creature of secrets, even before he ascended, but for decades Knekku had seen no sign of his master. That worried him. He could not help it. It was one of the prices of loyalty.

  The city had changed since Knekku had last crossed it. The paths that he had walked only a day before had vanished. He recognised nothing he had seen previously. Even the air
smelled different, the breeze edged with smoke and ice. Only the Tower of the Cyclops remained unchanged. It was always there, on the horizon. Sometimes it appeared so close that its shadow fell across him, but when he looked up again it would be so distant that he could hardly see it. Knekku never lost sight of it, though. He could not, even if he had wanted to. It would always be there, waiting until he reached it. Its presence was a summons.

  The city changed as he passed through it. He did not see it, but he did not need to. The Planet of the Sorcerers was change, after all. Like the Crimson King, whose realm it was, its faces and purposes were a choice rather than a necessity. It existed in both the realm of the real, and the vast sea of possibility which was the warp. Mundane planets had the rules of gravity and the chains of psychics to govern them. On the Planet of the Sorcerers, gravity and natural laws were servants of the Crimson King.

  Thinking of this, Knekku reflected that trying to understand Magnus was like trying to swallow a moon. That had not stopped him, though. Others had come and gone, had betrayed the Crimson King or simply left his service to serve themselves. Many who remained did so only to serve their own ends. But not Knekku. He had been nothing before Magnus had called him to the brother­hood of the Thousand Sons, and he remained to serve his lord king.

  He walked on. The haft of his spear tapped the stone road with each step he took. The wind stirred the white silk of his robes against his armour. He wore his helm, its high crest the same deep blue and burnished gold as the rest of his battleplate. The dust in the air caught on the ridges of the ram’s skull worked into the helm’s faceplate. Behind its red eyes he looked out at the world through a curtain of projected sigils and geometric lines.

  It began to rain. Silver drops fell from the blue sky, and exploded on the dusty stones beneath his feet. Around and above him other towers reached for the clouds in forests of twisted silver, sapphire and jade. Lights shone in their high windows, and the wind carried snatches of voices down to him.

  ‘…what is sought cannot be unsought once found…’

  ‘…the fifth, crossed with the Aleph of the first…’

  ‘…it is a form of wisdom, though it is imperfect…’

  ‘…rest and then make the attempt again…’

  ‘…the heart should be sufficient. The blood is unnecessary…’

  He recognised some of the voices. Many he did not. Some he knew were the voices of people who had been dead for centuries. He did not let his mind dwell on them. Like the changing city, the voices were as much a feature of his own mind as they were of the world that he walked through. That did not mean they were not real. Nothing on the Planet of the Sorcerers was so simple.

  A movement caught his eye. He looked up to see a flock of winged creatures take flight, weaving between bridges of spun glass connecting some towers. He thought he saw a figure on one of those high walkways, hunched under a tattered red robe, face hidden. He had seen no one else since he had left his tower, though the city was far from deserted. Its silence and emptiness were for him alone, the planet mirroring the isolation in his mind. But he had seen the figure in the red robes twice out of the corner of his eye since he had begun to walk towards the Tower of the Cyclops.

  ‘You may show yourself,’ he called up to where he had seen the red figure. His voice came back to him in echoed fragments.

  ‘Show yourself…’

  ‘…Show yourself…’

  ‘…Yourself…’

  ‘…Self…’

  ‘…Self…’

  ‘…Self.’

  He blinked and the red-robed figure vanished from the high bridge, leaving Knekku only the feeling of being watched.

  He turned around, and…

  The Tower of the Cyclops stood in front of him, rising up and up, seeming to grow as Knekku looked at it. Its base stretched to either side beyond his sight, as though the tower’s roots were a range of mountains. Carved patterns stretched across the black glass. Whirls, droplets, and serrations blended with balconies, and stairs, and platforms. Lights burned in high windows. It seemed as though it had always been there, as though there was no other way for reality to be. There was no door at its base, and no stair leading to the ground.

  Knekku stilled his mind, closed his eyes and walked towards the base of the tower. After seven hundred and twenty-nine blind paces he opened his eyes again.

  The wall of the tower was beneath his feet. The summit was now a sharp point jutting into the sky ahead of him like a headland into a sea. Behind him the ground was a cliff, the towers of the city a wall of silver needles. He walked around windows, and climbed over buttresses and secondary towers which pointed in every direction. He never had to look at his feet; the steps and paths and bridges he needed were always there even when his eyes told him they were not. It was a game, and a lesson, and Knekku knew both how to play and that he had not mastered all it had to teach.

  Time passed in days, and then in seconds and then in hours, each taking no longer than a single step up the tower.

  When he reached the top he stepped off the edge, and stepped on the tower. The world righted itself without him being able to notice how. He knelt immediately, setting his spear down as he touched the stone floor with his head. Inside his helm his eyes were closed again.

  Only then did he realise he was not alone. Eight other presences knelt beside him on the tower top. The mind of each of them was a shaped star of power and will. They were his brothers, the most powerful of the living Thousand Sons on the planet at that moment. Each of them had powers that could make reality a dream, and draw dreams into being. But each of them was nothing beside the presence that loomed above them. Knekku could see it even with his eyes closed.

  A figure of white-hot fire sat on a throne at the centre of the tower top. Blazing light sketched the shape of bare limbs and smooth muscle. Its left hand held a sceptre of black iron capped with a globe which swirled with blackness and starlight. A single blood-red eye sat at the centre of its face beneath a crown of curled horns. It was a vision of the divine and the terrible, and it was a lie. Knekku knew that each of the sorcerers kneeling with him would be seeing a different vision, and that none of them were true.

  Magnus the Red, Crimson King of the Thousand Sons, and Most High Sorcerer of Sorcerers looked down at them.

  How may I serve? The words were halfway between thought and speech when Magnus spoke.

  The Exiles are returning,+ said the Crimson King.

  The words filled Knekku’s head, and he felt sweat bead his skin. The shock came an instant later. The calm pool at the centre of his mind churned.

  It cannot be true. It cannot. How can it be?

  Magnus’s thought voice came again, rumbling like high thunder.

  He is returning, and war is coming with him.+

  It was an impossibility. A lie. Something that could not be. Ahriman’s exile was not simply a statement, it was a ban that transcended meaning. He could have tried to return already, but he would never have succeeded. Exile was a wall in existence, not just a word. But the Crimson King had said Ahriman was returning, and that truth expanded outwards like a silent bomb blast.

  It was Sar’iq who broke the silence. Sar’iq, Favoured of the Fire, Magister Exalted of the Thousand Sons, and Magnus’s chosen aide in war.

  He lives then, sire? Ahriman lives?+

  Magnus turned his eye. The fire of the Crimson King’s form flickered to furnace red for an instant. Then he turned his gaze to Knekku. The touch of his stare was ice. At Knekku’s side, his spear vibrated against the stone floor.

  Rise, my sons.+ Magnus’s command pulled the nine sorcerers to their feet. Knekku stood smoothly, grasping his spear. He felt the others’ eyes on him. The shock thinned, draining away to leave questions in its wake.

  He has found a way to defy your banishment, sire?+

  Magnus seemed to be l
ooking directly at Knekku. He wondered if all of the others had the same impression.

  He is drawing closer.+

  But the banishment. He cannot return. It is ordained.+

  And then Magnus did something that sent a second shudder of surprise through Knekku. The Crimson King’s gaze dipped and he looked away, shaking his head slowly.

  He will find a way. Of that I have no doubt.+

  For an instant Knekku thought that he felt a tinge of pride in Magnus’s voice.

  How can even he–+ began Knekku.

  You must be ready,+ sent Magnus, still staring at a point out of sight. +You will prepare us, Sar’iq.+ Knekku felt power pass from the Crimson King to his brother in a breath of cold light. +I give you the words of control over my realm. You will be my hand and voice as we make ready to meet what is coming.+

  Will you not be with us, sire? Knekku wanted to say, but he knew that Magnus would have heard the words even though they were not spoken. The Crimson King remained silent, and Knekku bowed his head.

  It will be done, sire, by your will,+ sent Sar’iq, and then Knekku and the others echoed the last words with a single voice of thought.

  By your will.+

  Astraeos was never alone.

  There is no way back. You must act soon. Your vengeance will be lost if you hesitate.

  Voices whispered inside his skull as he walked through the temple. On and on they whispered.

  The future is dead. Hope is a lie. There is no redemption.

  Sometimes they were the voices of his dead brothers, Thidias, Kadin, and a thousand more.

  Hope is the worst poison. Trust only buys betrayal. Nothing lasts.

  Sometimes they were the voices of Ahriman, and Carmenta, and Silvanus.

  Vengeance is the only truth.

  But no matter the voice, he knew that the thoughts were not his own.

  Eyes were averted as he passed through the warriors who remained within the pillared chamber. None spoke to him, and none raised their eyes to watch him pass. Once his brothers had bowed and greeted him from respect, but they were gone, and now fear cowed his slaves. He did not care. Fear, or weakness, or thirst for power bound them to his will, and so long as the chains were strong, the metal they were forged from was immaterial.