The Dead Oracle - John French Read online

  +Yes, it has some of you, doesn’t it. I see that now. Tell me, how much of your soul did it take? Please tell me you know the answer.+ I said.

  His hand moved to the sword at his waist. His mind burst its bonds with a thunderous roar. I staggered. He came forwards, his will flooding the edge of his blade with fire. I admit that I was surprised – his mind was strong, stronger than I had guessed, and its power was an avalanche fall of fury.

  The idea of a kine shield formed in my mind, and became real, but slowly – much, much too slowly. I am a warrior of knowledge, most particularly knowledge of the creatures that swim the depths of the warp, creatures that most call daemon. Their calling, binding and bidding are my tools. I can destroy entire civilisations, given time. Astraeos was a killer of less sophistication, but a hammer blow will not accept its own bluntness as a reason to not kill you.

  The sword touched the edge of my kine shield, and I felt the barrier shredded before I could even change the pattern of my thoughts.

  +Brothers!+

  Ahriman’s thought-voice was almost a physical touch in the warp-thickened atmosphere. Rebuke, entreaty and regret rode in that one word. It was enough to drain my focus and send me back a step.

  Astraeos stopped dead, his halo of power vanishing like a doused fire. He stepped back, his sword flickering cold.

  Ahriman walked towards us across the deck of the hangar bay. The Rubricae followed him, two lines of blue and gold armour, their movements locked into a single pattern.

  +Ahriman,+ I sent, with a tilt of my head. As I have said, weakness only invites slavery or treachery, and excessive deference is the surest way of showing weakness.

  Ahriman did not acknowledge my greeting. He did not acknowledge me at all. He is many things, but never weak.

  Astraeos sent something that I felt but did not hear. I was looking at the other figure who walked at Ahriman’s side.

  Sanakht returned my look. His movements were relaxed, yet precise. His face was hidden by the silver-fronted helm that he had worn since the fall of Prospero. His twin swords hung close to his hands, the hilt of one the head of a jackal, the other that of a hawk. Besides Ahriman himself there was only one other of our brothers that I would have been less pleased to find still breathing.

  He said nothing. And for that, at least, I was grateful.

  +This is all that you are taking with us?+ I asked.

  +This is all that is needed,+ replied Ahriman.

  +You are lying, brother,+ I sent to him alone. +The aether here is bloated. It is ready to tear. Your tamed renegade is right. Something has waited here for you to return. You cannot be blind to that.+

  He did not reply, but I could feel his thoughts turning over. He had received my words. +You are not blind to it, are you?+

  We boarded the gunship in silence, and the world became the thrum of its engines and the red-stained light of alert lamps. Ahriman was a still statue, his face hidden beneath the high horned helm, his thoughts behind hard walls of will.

  +It is not all that is needed, is it?+ I needled at him, my own thoughts turning in my head as my fingers tapped the silver half of my staff. +You do not want anyone else to see, do you? You want what we are here to do to remain a secret.+

  Ahriman turned his head to me. Beside him Astraeos and Sanakht stirred, and the gunship shivered on through the void.

  He did not answer.

  The silence followed us through the moon. A tunnel threaded its substance, leading ever deeper, though with every turn we had felt as though we were travelling further from the centre. We walked from the gunship, mist coiling around us, swallowing the passage beyond and hiding what waited. The eyes of the Rubricae glowed with green halos, and voices seeped from them, whispering just beyond hearing. Ahriman remained quiet, and Astraeos followed his example. Sanakht alone had reacted to the deadness of the place. He had drawn his swords, and walked with them held loosely at his sides.

  +Was it like this before?+ I asked, and my thought-voice echoed as sound in the mist.

  …like this before?

  …before?

  Ahriman half turned his head.

  ‘No,’ he said with his true voice, the sound of it flat and dead in the still air. ‘It was not like this.’

  ‘That does not give you pause?’ I halted in my stride. Ahriman did not stop or deign to answer. After a second I followed, my staff clicking dully on the passage floor.

  ‘Well that is reassuring,’ I muttered to myself.

  It was not the nature of the moon that troubled me. I am a creature who has lived many lives of mortals in a realm saturated by the stuff of manifest insanity. I have walked between worlds with a single step, and seen cities raised from nothing with a gesture. The warp is a place of horror, make no mistake, but it holds no terror of strangeness for me. But within that dead-glass moon my instincts were screaming to turn back, pact with Ahriman or no.

  The warp was there – it lapped through the air and the polished glass of the walls. The substance of the place itself buzzed with the stuff of impossibility. What worried me was that it was quiet, calm, and as featureless as the surface of a deep, stagnant pool. The warp is life. It is change eternal, and the power of unbounded possibility, but here it hung over everything like a lank shroud.

  And as I followed Ahriman, the Rubricae walking in lockstep behind us, the worse thing was that I was beginning to recognise its texture.

  I was opening my mouth to speak when we reached the Oracle.

  One moment we were walking through the mist-filled tunnels, and the next we were standing in a spherical chamber of polished stone. No door broke the sphere’s inner surface. We had simply arrived without need of an entrance.

  The Oracle hung at the sphere’s centre, arms spread wide. I recognised the shape of power armour, but the warp had woven its mystery over its form. It glinted with a mirror polish, and its helm was featureless, without eyes or mouth.

  The Eyeless Oracle, I thought, and it echoed through the space as though I had shouted aloud.

  The Oracle’s true name was Menkaura, and once he had marched to war with the rest of the Thousand Sons. He had changed much since then, though. We all had.

  He had left his name and Legion in the past, and grown to become what now hung above us. Eyes orbited his blind body, like planets around a parent star. I had heard of him, of course, and long known that he was one of my gene-brothers, but I had never come to his temple. I had never felt the need to know the future.

  The Oracle did not move as we walked to the centre of the chamber.

  ‘Menkaura,’ said Ahriman, his voice neither raised nor whispered. ‘I have returned, brother.’ He paused. Beside him, Sanakht and Astraeos shifted. ‘I have questions.’

  Still Menkaura did not move.

  Prickles rose on my skin. Something shifted at the corner of my eye, and I turned my head to look at the curved wall. A distorted image of myself gazed back at me. I licked my lips carefully, tasting the slight tinge of acid in my spit. I wanted to extend my will into the aether. I wanted to pull at the stilled mirror of this place, to stir it, to send it churning. But I did none of these things. Even though everything was telling me that we had walked into the heart of something that we had not anticipated, I restrained myself. Instead I began to prepare for the deed that I had been brought there to perform.

  Menkaura. I spoke his name in a chamber of my thoughts.

  Men-kau-ra. The syllables spilt and echoed within separate compartments of thought.

  Men.

  Kau.

  Ra.

  Each sound became a separate box, labelled and sealed, like a body sliced and portioned into grave jars. My mind spun over each fragment of name, preparing mental ciphers and patterns that would snap shut when I willed it. Names are more than titles. They pin our existence in place. Unname something, break its title, undo its calling, and you pull it apart. Ahriman did not want to talk to the Oracle – he wanted to chain him, and he had brought me to forge
the links.

  Binding a daemon is not a simple matter. It is creating a prison for a creature whose being is corrosive to existence. It requires subtly, brutality, and knowledge. One misstep, one faltering instant or error, and you do not die; you become the toy of torment for a creature of infinite spite and imagination. Many fail and are enslaved by the beings that they seek to master. So when I say that binding the soul of a living creature is of another order of difficulty, you should know what I mean. Life fights to be free of the tyranny of others. Even life twisted by and shackled to lies will claw, and thrash, and shriek before it allows another being to put a collar around its neck.

  Vile.

  That was what Astraeos had called what I was preparing to do. He was right. It was vile.

  The formulae spread through my mind like snares set in the long grass to wait for a lion’s tread, like razors set out beside a dissection table. Silently, unseen, held ready but not brought into being, it took seconds to make the bindings ready, and all the while I looked up at the unmoving, unspeaking shape of the Oracle, and knew that I was about to break what remained of its soul.

  ‘I come to you now twice, brother’ said Ahriman, and the Oracle turned to face him. ‘As I did before, I demand the truth that is owed to all who enter this place. I submit to the ordinances of this temple, and will not pass from its doors without truth received and payment given.’

  +You should not have come, Ahriman.+ The psychic voice was thin, as if forced out between dry, cracked lips.

  ‘I need answers, Menkaura. We are at a new beginning. I need to find a path into what will be. My sight is clouded, storms hide the way ahead. I need your eyes. I need you to see for us.’

  +You…+ The Oracle trembled where it hung.

  At the edge of the chamber, something moved, just on the edge of sight. I ignored it.

  +You… need…+ hissed the Oracle.

  The shape in the corner of my eye was growing, bloating like paper soaking up black ink, like a tick feeding on blood. My skin suddenly felt very warm. I could not help it. I turned and looked.

  +You need to run…+ said the Oracle.

  My eyes touched the thing that I had not seen, and I saw it then. I beheld it.

  And the curtain of the world shredded.

  Blood-threaded pus poured from the walls. The mirrored surface crazed. Dozens of tiny hands were scrabbling at the cracks, pulling them wider. Trees of rotting iron rose from the mire forming under our feet, shaking crowns of flayed-skin leaves. Broken backed figures stood amongst the trunks, weeping blades gripped in shivering hands.

  The whole tableau unfolded with delicate slowness, but no time passed. It had been there from before we had set foot upon the moon. Everything our minds had seen had been the dried skin of a corpse left as a mask over a skull. The power to blind us was staggering. It implied something greater and deeper than the manipulations of daemons. It spoke of the hand of a god.

  Time returned, and we began to fight for our souls.

  Ahriman was the first to move. He turned from the Oracle, his aura the flare of a new sun. He became flame. A lance of white heat split the air. Daemon flesh burned with vapour. The leaves of the rusting trees ignited.

  Sanakht was the next to react, fire and lightning running down his blades as he sliced through tentacles writhing from the cracked walls. Tiny figures shaped from infected fat dropped from the ceiling, cackling as they fell. Astraeos had his own sword in his hand, the air about him blurring with storm pressure. A tentacle whipped down towards Ahriman, but Sanakht’s swords stuck it three times before my eyes had seen him move. Daemon blood began to fall, fizzing to smoke as Ahriman panned the torrent of flame across the chamber.

  No, I thought, this cannot be right. They could never hope to destroy us like this. But it was as though my mind was watching from behind a thickening fog. Everything was all happening with a poured syrup slowness.

  The Rubricae began to fire into the figures advancing beneath the growing trees. Bolts exploded in flesh. Cyan and rose flames spiralled around blackening bones. The warp was a clotting mass of despair, tar-thick and oozing. More famine-wasted figures were rising from the swamp, their limbs forming from the charred soup of their burned kin. They stepped towards us over sizzling heaps of fat and flesh.

  Astraeos extended his hand and a line of force razored through the air. Bloated bodies split into a shower of jellied filth and entrails.

  And still I had not moved. My thoughts were stuck, like the cogs of a broken clock.

  +Ctesias.+

  The voice was so weak that it was just a whisper crushed by the noise of battle. +Ctesias,+ it spoke again. I looked up. The Oracle hung still in the air. Black corrosion had spread across its silver armour, while foul fluids leaked and bubbled from the helm. The eyes that orbited him still turned, but cataracts now clouded them, and black webs of clotted veins spidered their surfaces. +It is… This is not the…+

  It could not find the strength for the next words, but it did not need to. I understood the warning, even as I cursed myself for not having understood it before. Menkaura was powerful, god-blessed and warp-favoured. The power which had laid this trap for us had overwhelmed him and taken this place into its domain, but it had not been able to overwhelm Menkaura utterly. Something of him still remained even as he was consumed, inch by inch, and that part of him was fighting to warn us that the true trap had yet to close about us.

  He began to shudder. His armour split. Black fluid drizzled both downwards and upwards from the cracks.

  +Ahriman!+ I called, but he was a pillar of brightness, his physical form a soot shadow at the core of the inferno. The daemons were falling back, and Sanakht blurred beside him, swords weaving in arcs of ghost and storm light. Bolt-rounds lashed dead flesh in a deluge as the Rubricae fired and fired. As my gaze passed over the scene I saw a bloated daemon, with the body of an insect, fly at Astraeos. The renegade turned and cut in a single movement. The daemon split in two, its momentum driving it onto the killing edge. It fell, wings buzzing as the two halves tried to lift themselves back into the air. Astreaos stamped down, mashing chitin and blubber beneath his boot.

  +Ahriman!+ I called again, and I saw him turn, as he sensed at last what I had seen.

  He was just in time to see existence turn itself inside out.

  The Oracle’s body ripped down its centre. The sound sawed through the warp. Blood sprayed from the split corpse, each drop a liquid black hole, a splatter of negative space falling through reality. The whole chamber shimmered, and stretched upwards. The ranks of daemons became silhouettes of smudged colour, their mouths holes into another darkness beyond.

  We were no longer straddling the barrier between the real and unreal – we were within a garden of decay. We were within the warp.

  A psyker is a creature whose mind is a doorway to the aether, a conduit for paradox. We touch the ineffable, but we are still flesh, still made of the dirty clay of base reality. When daemons step into the real world they begin to die, just as a fish pulled from the sea will drown in the air we breathe.

  But when we, base creatures that we are, dive into the Sea of Souls, we do not drown.

  We burn.

  The inferno around Ahriman spread out in every direction. His shape blurred, dissolving into bright particles at the edges. Sanakht fell, convulsing, arms and neck snapping out as though a lightning bolt had passed through him. Astraeos froze, his limbs locking even as he fought to move. Screaming haloes surrounded the Rubricae, howling with faces formed from splintered light and billowing dust. I do not know how I appeared in that moment, I only know how it felt – it was as if every thought I had held in mind was being pulled by hooks, drawn out of me, and spread across a gulf which grew wider and wider. Everything that made me was a thin sheet of ideas, and memories and will. The daemons were no longer creatures of rotting bone and skin. They were the mirrors of my despair and hope, thin-faced nightmares pulled from every regret I had ever had.

  Int
o this garden of decay slid the being that had been waiting for us. Its shape and form began as a slick bulb of pale slime. Fat and muscles bloated into being, and it swelled, taking on shape and texture like the stuttering image of a plant growing and flowering, then compressed into a few seconds. Its body was a huge mound of moist and torn flesh, its head a mass of broken horns. I could taste burning, the thick, heavy stink of rendered fat and bone soot. The power radiating from it was suffocating. The other daemons fell back, sliding beneath the surface of my sight. It was all I could do not to let my soul spin away into the vast creature’s orbit.

  I knew it.

  I know of many daemons. Some I have bound, others I have glimpsed, many more I have only heard of. Lesser creatures often spin names and titles for themselves, cloaking their weakness in false infamy, as a beggar who imagines himself a prince will wear a coat of bright feathers and silk. Others have no need of such adornment – their existence resounds through the warp. Titles gather to them like flies over a midden, and their power is second only to the Dark Gods that spawned them. This was one such creature.

  Maggot Lord, Lord of the Plague Pit, The Seventh Leech of Sorrow, The Crow Worm – I had heard heralds weep its glory in the depths of the Eye, and seen its shadow in death of billions.

  It looked at me. Not at Ahriman, not at the others.

  Just at me.

  It had blisters for eyes.

  It spoke, the words shaking the cloud of my mind.

  ‘Do you hope to bind me, little witchling?’ It smiled. A thick bead of blood-marbled pus oozed from its lips. Maggots squirmed in the roots of its teeth. Its tongue was a mass of dried skin and hair.

  I simply shook, fighting to gather my thoughts back into myself, to hold on to what made me.

  The Maggot Lord chuckled, and patches of its skin split as its body rippled. It turned its great head to the others. The fire had fled from around Ahriman. No other sorcerer I have ever met could truly rival him, but even he does not challenge the most exalted of daemonkind unless there is no other way. Watching him, I knew that he would be searching for a way out even as the beast loomed above us.