Hounds of Wrath - John French

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  Hounds of Wrath – John French

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  HOUNDS OF WRATH

  by John French

  ‘Do not ask which creature screams in the night.

  Do not question who waits for you in the shadow.

  It is my cry that wakes you in the night,

  And my body that crouches in the shadow.’

  – Karazantor the Vile, the Traitor of Xian

  Know this, the daemon is a lie.

  The daemon claims supreme dominion. It claims that in time all will be its slaves, that reality will lie broken, and that it shall rule the realm of mortals for eternity. It says that it is destiny. It says, in the paradox time of the warp, that this has already happened. These claims, like every part of its nature, are false.

  The daemon’s existence is a dream. Its power is the stolen strength of mortal minds. Its shape is an image painted onto existence so that we may look on it and know that our sins have returned for us. Though it has power, it is a power which eats itself. The high daemons, which some call gods, squabble of souls and dominion, betraying each other and themselves. They are not predators. They are carrion.

  Yet, for all its falsity, the daemon has the ability to twist the mind of the living, to make flesh a mockery, to defy death, and bring ruin on the works of mortals. When the warp waxes, and the neverborn walk through the veil, they have the strength to break armies and cast down heroes. They are always there, watching from the edge of thought and the corner of sight.

  The daemon is a lie, but it is a lie that can unmake reality.

  I say this because I have made my life in the calling and controlling of these creatures. I am Ctesias, and I above all know the price for believing in the power of the gods and their children.

  Arrogance is the mark of the sorcerer, and those of the Thousand Sons more than any. We make the mistake of thinking that because we are not slaves that we cannot be prey. This is a tale of how I made that mistake, and the price that I paid.

  The Fall of Ignorance spun in the fires of its death. Its hull had split from prow to beneath the bridge. Its stern hung from broken bones of girder. Standing upon the bridge, I watched as a splinter of iron and stone the size of a hab-stack tumbled slowly through the void.

  +Geller field failure.+

  I looked up. Astraeos knelt on the deck.

  I shook my head and looked away without replying. The bridge was a cave of twisted metal open to the vacuum. Spheres of machine oil and blood drifted past me. Corpses, or rather parts of corpses, spun in lazy arcs. Portions of servitors hung from tangles of tubes and cables, still tethered to their systems. My eyes found pieces of power armour amongst the debris: a silver gauntlet set with a spiral of blue stones, a peg of severed bone projecting from within.

  I sniffed. Inside my helm I could taste burnt meat and bitter ash.

  +No,+ I sent. +It was not the Geller field.+

  I reached out with my staff and sent a severed hand spinning with a gentle tap. Its fingers twitched at the psy-active contact.

  +You seem very sure,+ sent Sanakht. He was standing on a crumpled wall section above me, feet mag-clamped to the metal. The swordsman looked bored, his hands resting on the pommels of his paired blades. He was ready, but this was a place of the dead and there was nothing to threaten him.

  +Seeming does not come into it,+ I replied. +I am sure.+

  +The neverborn were here.+ Astraeos stood, his fingers dark with half frozen blood from the deck.

  +A crushingly obvious fact,+ I sent, and I could not keep the weariness from my words. I closed my eyes for an instant. They stung with tiredness.

  We had translated from the warp only four hours before, and the passage preceding it had not been kind. We had passed outwards from the central volume of the Eye of Terror. Storms had battered our fleet and minds.

  I took a long slow breath inside my helm and felt my hand twitch with the instinct to pinch my forehead with my fingers. Bright motes of red light were dancing on the edge of my sight.

  +There were neverborn here,+ I sent, +but that does not mean that the Geller field failed.+

  +Then what did happen?+ sent Sanakht, his thought voice not hiding his impatience with both Astraeos and myself. I bit back a retort, and instead gave the most accurate reply I could.

  +Something else,+ I sent.

  +What?+ Astraeos asked, his eyes fixed on me, contempt bleeding off his aura in grey coils.

  +I am…+ I began, then paused. The Fall of Ignorance had arrived an hour after the rest of the fleet, cast back into reality, still burning, the echoes of its death trailing after it in tatters of red warp skin. That in itself was a puzzle, a worrying puzzle. How had the daemons got within the ship if the Geller field had not failed?

  +I am not certain,+ I finished.

  Sanakht gave a cough of laughter across the vox. I was about to reply when another voice filled our minds.

  +He is right.+

  We all turned as one as Ahriman entered. He did not walk, but floated, guiding himself with threads of telekinetic force. Wreckage spun past him, sometimes so close that I was certain it would hit him, but it did not, and he did not change his speed or direction. A film of ice sparked on the high horns of his helm, and in the weave of his silk robes. A squad of Rubricae followed him, their feet locked to the deck as they marched in dull unity. He stopped in front of us, and we bowed our heads. The ache in my skull was still bright.

  +Ctesias is right,+ sent Ahriman. +The shields did not fail. When the crew died they were fleeing from something that came from within. Their doom was with them when they passed into the aether.+

  +The damage…+ began Astraeos.

  +One of the command crew overloaded the plasma couplings. Courage, or madness, it cannot be known.+ Ahriman paused, pivoting in the space above the burnt and twisted deck. +I can hear the screams still – they cling to the hull. But it is a storm without order, only the colour and texture of terror. And amongst it…+

  His sending trailed away, and that hesitation sent ice across my skin.

  +Master?+ sent Sanakht into the empty moment.

  Ahriman shook his head, and turned his gaze on me.

  +Discover what happened here, Ctesias. We make passage to Samatis in two cycles. You have until then.+

  A protest began in my thoughts, but it died before forming fully. I could feel the skin of my face prickle inside my helm as Ahriman’s gaze held steady on me. I knew without testing the feeling that this was not a command I could refuse. Of his Circle, I was the one who knew most of the ways of daemons. I was most suited to getting him an answer. Our kind does not like mysteries; they damage our pretensions of infallibility.

  +As you will it,+ I replied, bowing my head.

  Ahriman nodded and gestured to Sanakht.

  +Sanakht will watch over you, and keep you alive should there be need.+

  I could tell from the swordsman’s posture and silence that he had already received the command from Ahriman by thought, and liked it less than I did. I nodded at him, once. He turned away.

  +Two cycles, Ctesias,+ sent Ahriman, as he floated towards a ragged hole in the bridge wall. The firefly lights of circling gunships moved against the night beyond. I saw one craft change course and begin to close on our position. +Two cycles and then you will have an answer to what happened here.+

  I worked through a sunless cycle of day and night. Sanakht watched over me, his half broken soul filling the edge of my senses with itches of impatience. I moved through the dead ship brushing its every wall and rivet with my mind.

  Em
otions are the currents of the warp. Strong emotions send ripples through it, and leave a mark on the place they occurred. Most marks are shallow, and fade quickly. The strongest emotions leave more permanent impressions. The Fall of Ignorance was a tattered wound, a confusing blur of impressions, so thick that it took hours to tease out shadows of what had happened on board.

  Ahriman was right, of course; the ship had died within the warp, and its Geller field had not failed. The daemons that had destroyed it had come from within, and its explosive death had come at the hands of its own, panicked crew. But amongst the wash of terror and the dark splashes of death, there was something else.

  The Fall of Ignorance had been the ship of a warband ruled by a priesthood of psykers, who worshipped a selection of poorly chosen daemons and aspects of the Changer of Ways. Like many of the warbands that had been drawn to serve Amon and had then transferred their loyalty to Ahriman, they were not Thousand Sons, but opportunist and mercenaries drawn to power and the possibility of more of it.

  Rather like myself, in fact.

  Even their most potent sorcerers were weaklings and children compared to Ahriman and the rest of the Circle, but their powers were still considerable. And in all the churned mess of death, fear, rage and desperation I could find no trace of their arts. The wounds left by conjured lightning and the imprint of infernal fire were absent. They had died without raising the most potent weapon in their defence.

  That worried me.

  I kept moving, trying not to linger on possibilities.

  A pattern emerged as I walked and floated through the wreckage. At first it was faint, but the deeper Sanakht and I went the clearer it became. The destruction and terror on the ship radiated from a single central point, like the blast imprint of a bomb detonation. At the centre of the pattern was a corridor. A bare strip of walls, floor and ceiling in an area of the ship which had been inhabited by higher orders of human crew: skilled serfs, favoured attendants, and thralls. It looked like nothing, just an empty corridor, with sticky splatters of blood adhered to the walls. It was the start though, the central point, and if I was to give Ahriman answers then it was the place I needed to truly begin my work. There I would call back the past to witness for us.

  I breathed out the last word of my conjuration, and it formed a glowing cloud in the airless void. The cloud solidified, squirming over itself like a snake. I watched it. Static fizzed across my helmet display. My inner eye saw it grow, the coils of light thickening until it was a fat knot in the dark. I could see other shapes within it now, hands and faces stretched into ropes of grainy light.

  +Do you take pride in what you have become?+ Sanakht asked as he watched me.

  ‘Pride?’ I replied in my mundane voice. ’A strange question to ask.’

  +A fair one, given what you are.+ His sending nudged my thoughts. The conjured image before me flickered. Angry black cracks formed across its edges.

  ‘Please stop that. I realise that your capacities are even more limited than they were, but this is both delicate and difficult, and prone to unpleasant results if it goes wrong.’

  I spoke a string of silent sounds, and the shadows in the corridor flickered and thinned.

  ‘Given what I am…’ I repeated his words carefully, aware that I should just ignore him, but let my annoyance override prudence. ‘I take it you know what I am then?’

  ‘You are an agent of your own desires – a creature without honour, who has sold himself over and over again. A failure.’

  ‘Failure?’

  ‘You have bartered away all that you had for petty power. Nothing exists in your universe that you would not sell to take another breath. You are the greatest of failures. You are a shell where a warrior once stood.’

  ‘Strong words, brother.’ I let the last word slide from my lips like a slug. ‘You are of course a warrior of ideals, without weakness or failing. I can see that in those you gave your loyalty. Tell me, did Magnus lack something greater and more worthy? Was that why you decided to defy him? Were Ahriman’s high motives so fleeting in your soul that, when Amon came and offered a future of oblivion, you took to it without pause? And when he fell to Ahriman, did the new dream take the place of the old before or after Amon’s corpse hit the floor?’

  His swords were a blur in his hands before I realised he had drawn them. I pulled a fragment of my will away from the construct, and slammed it into him. It was not much, but it was enough to rock him backwards for an instant. The sphere of energy bulged and flickered. Frost flicked up the walls, and I felt sores open on my skin as I fought to keep my mind aligned.

  ‘Careful,’ I said, softly. ‘Remember, this is not something either of us wants to be close to if my concentration slips.’ He looked at me, the edges of his swords sparking in the pale light. He shook his head, and sheathed the blades. To be honest I do not think he intended to kill me. If he had, then this tale might have been very different in the telling.

  ‘Am I proud? That was the question wasn’t it?’ I asked. The psych-construct before me rippled. ‘Proud of my skill? Proud that, against the odds, I still survive while living in the underworld of a universe that is populated only with enemies?’

  I turned my head towards him, and the knot of pale light unravelled. Tendrils of ghost energy whipped through the dark and struck the walls, floor and ceiling. Growths of shape and shadow spread outwards, churning with blurred shape and movement. Whispers and broken voices began to babble in my ears. Sanakht flinched as the backwash from the manifestation hit his mind.

  I smiled.

  ‘Proud? Yes, I suppose I am.’

  He turned to reply, but then the past filled the corridor before us, and stole what he was going to say from his tongue.

  A human made of shredded light rose from the dark. The ghosts of robes and limbs blurred at his edges. The vision was not real, of course. It was an imprint left by what had happened here, pulled from the warp and cast into being like an image projected onto a wall. I could see a face, but it was not the face that he had worn in life. Pit-black eyes bulged above a billowing slit of a mouth. It was the face of his soul. The face of a human psyker, not powerful, but one of those kept by some of Ahriman’s followers as thralls. And he was running for his life.

  I watched as he turned and looked behind him, the image exploding in splinters of light as his mind shattered with fear. I heard the ghost of his scream, faint and distant, as though it was coming from far away. I looked behind us, at where he had looked.

  In that moment, just as the image of a dead man looked behind him, I saw a shadow blot out the darkness.

  And I heard a howl.

  +What was that?+ sent Sanakht. The ghost images were draining away into the airless dark. I was shivering, my fingers rattling inside my gauntlets. Cold danced on my spine. +Ctesias, did you hear that?+ In my head the sound of the howl rose again and again. +Ctesias?+

  I was breathing hard, the blood a rising drum beat in my skull. Sanakht’s swords were drawn and he was turning his head as though trying to catch a sound.

  +I hear wolves,+ he sent.

  +No.+

  I reached for the bolt pistol at my waist. I carry it because I have always carried it, but I seldom use it. My mind is the only weapon I need. Ice was still coiling my spine. It had all become very clear just what had happened to the Fall of Ignorance and, as ever, the truth once known is never comforting.

  +Not wolves, brother,+ I sent. +That was the call of a hound.+

  And, as I sent the word, two eyes opened in the dark-like holes cut into a furnace, and the hound howled as it bounded into reality.

  Everything in the universe is balance, or so Magnus once said. For every sorrow there is a joy. For every light a darkness. And for everything that clings to life there is a predator. It is the oldest of balances and the oldest source of fears. The growl from the dark beyond the firelight, the ring of teeth rising silent from dark water, the wings of the raptor circling against the sky. We of the Thousand Sons
imagine ourselves transcendent amongst mortals, our powers akin to those of gods. So they are; our arrogance is not unfounded, but we are not separate from the herd of mortality. There are creatures that hunt us, ever hungering for our souls. Of these, the hounds of the Lord of Skulls are perhaps to be most feared.

  The hound formed as it leapt. Its head was a cave of flame, its teeth the tips of broken swords. Blood-caked fur and molten scales skinned its red muscle. Its presence filled the passage with the reek of hacked meat and hot iron.

  Sanakht reacted before I could form a thought. His swords lit as he cut, bright streaks of lighting and fire. I saw the blows hit, saw the power and beauty as his force sword stabbed into the hound’s muzzle, and the perfect timing as the power sword’s edge opened its flank. I saw the hound land, molten-brass blood spreading in spheres in the dark as it crumpled. Except it did not happen.

  The tip of the force sword rammed forward, and the fire in the cutting edge guttered like a blown candle. The power flowing through the blade vanished. The hound dipped its head in midair and met the dead metal tip with its forehead. The blow sheered into empty air. I could smell burning sugar and meat. A collar of barbed brass circled its neck, glowing with forge heat and hatred. I saw it and wanted to scream. The warp was draining into it, fleeing my mind and leaving me naked before the hungering void. The hound was a hole in my mind’s eye, a stretched shape of shadow.

  Iron claws shrieked on plasteel as the hound pounced. Sanakht spun to turn the momentum of his blows back, but his feet were mag-locked to the floor, his movement slowed. The hound arched its head back. Sanakht flinched back as its jaws snapped shut where his neck had been. He released the mag-clamps in his feet and spun into the space above.

  I fired my bolt pistol. The hound leapt up the wall, claws gouging into metal plates as it shed the pretensions of gravity. My bolt shells exploded in its wake. Sanakht’s feet hit the ceiling, and clamped to the plating. The hound bounded off the wall, muscle flowing like pistons. Sanakht twisted and slammed the dead metal of his force sword into its muzzle. The blow twitched the head aside, and the jaws snapped shut a hair’s span from Sanakht’s face. If it had been anyone else, I would have thought it a second lucky escape, but while Sanakht was many things, I would never deny that with a sword he was closer to divinity than mortal.