The Omnibus - John French Read online

  The human’s face was pale, her skin the colour of snowfall. Orange and black armour encased her slender form. He could see the silver-headed pins holding the red blaze of her hair above her head. She was looking at him, directly at him. Her eyes were blue. He felt an echo in that gaze, a spark of something that cut through the numbing fog of the seraphs. Recognition, fear, triumph, a tumbling of half-formed memories that flared from her mind. She raised a boltgun and his eyes met its dead gaze.

  The third seraph leapt.

  The gate held open at his back crumpled.

  Three paces away Kadin came to his feet, roaring, the head of a seraph in his hand.

  The human woman fired.

  Ahriman saw the gun flare, felt his mind slide off the shell as it flew through the air.

  Kadin’s shoulder hit him in the chest.

  Ahriman fell, and did not hit the ground.

  XV

  SECRETS

  Voices came out of the night. Ahriman thought he recognised some of them, but were they voices or were they thoughts? Were they his thoughts?

  ‘We are taking fire…’

  +Oh God-Emperor, oh holy God–+

  ‘He is bleeding.’

  Why did she know me? How could she recognise me? What did she recognise?

  +Turn by three-quarters. Grid 657 through 754, accelerate.+

  ‘Oh God-Emperor.’

  ‘Be silent.’

  Fate has come for you, Ahriman.

  +I am going to die. Oh Throne, oh Throne, oh Throne…+

  ‘Mistress Carmenta?’

  I fell to my own pride.

  ‘He is not conscious.’

  +Route power through conduit alpha 101721.+

  ‘That was a hit. They are coming after us.’

  +Shield failure… cannot recharge… shield failure...+

  It was a mistake. I am sorry. We should never have begun. I am sorry, brother.

  ‘… conscious…’

  +…there is no way out from this…+

  ‘Jump to the warp.’

  Apollonia. Because of Apollonia.

  ‘There are fragments inside the wound.’

  No, it is one of the nine. One of the Fifteenth. A son of Magnus. The dreams of enslaved worlds scream his name.

  ‘If you do not guide us we all die here.’

  +Throne, I want to live–+

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Jump to warp. Do it now.’

  …going to die… jump… collate…. blood loss… god… mistress… end it now… jump–

  White. Bright white; the white of sunlight on unwritten paper.

  Everything was still. He looked down at his hand. It was bare. He flexed his fingers. They moved, but he felt nothing. Everything was quiet; the whisper of thoughts on the edge of perception, the shifting surge of the warp in his mind, the noise of sensation, all of it was gone.

  I am cut off, he realised. I am trapped somewhere inside myself. Something has made parts of my brain and body shut down.

  There had been a gunshot. He remembered the muzzle flash, and the feeling of falling backwards through the collapsing warp tunnel.

  Yes, he realised. The shell hit me. It had found the weak armour under his arm and punched into his torso. An instant later Kadin had pitched him backwards into the warp tunnel.

  There had been no pain, just a sudden numbness as his body shut down. Then there had been a second feeling, a feeling of being wrapped in deaf oblivion. Something was in his blood, in his body, surging around his veins with every heartbeat. It had cut his connection to the warp. The voices, they had been the last vanishing calls out of the dark as night fell. He knew all this with detached certainty.

  He looked around. The whiteness had been complete, but now a checked stone floor extended away to the horizon. He turned his head again. A long corridor met his eyes. He could see sunlight streaming in through arched windows.

  This is my memory palace, he realised. My mind is retreating to the one thing that exists wholly within itself.

  Slowly he stood, and took a step down the corridor. There were no doors, just blank smooth stone. He kept walking.

  You may be dying, he thought. Do you even know how long you have been here?

  The corridor extended without ending. He turned and started to walk the other way, and stopped.

  Two doors stood on opposite sides of the corridor. He recognised only one of them. The door on his right was small, wooden and carved with a flock of birds rising towards the sun. It was an old door, one of the first he had placed in his memory palace, and he had not opened it since. He took a step towards it then hesitated, and looked over his shoulder.

  The second door was obsidian, polished to a mirror surface, without handle or hinges. He had never seen it before.

  What is beyond here?

  He stepped closer and saw his reflection slide across the oil-black surface. His hand rose almost without his realising it, his fingers extending to touch the black stone. He froze. The reflection had gone. In its place he saw the flash of a gunshot again, and the echo of light in the armoured woman’s eyes. His mind had leapt outwards as the shell had left the gun, like a hand scrabbling for dry land before sinking beneath the waves. Her mind had been open, the terror and triumph of the moment leaving her unshielded. He had touched her thoughts as the bolt shell hit him, and seen something of the secrets she kept.

  This is a door of secrets. His hand moved forwards, then paused again. He looked down the corridor in both directions. There were no other doors except the obsidian door and the small door of carved wood.

  He paused for a long moment. Then he pushed open the black door, and saw what the inquisitors had found in the Eye of Terror.

  Ahriman’s pupils went wide in his eyes. He gasped. A fresh wash of blood gushed over his lips. Carmenta froze, her mechadendrites poised over the open wound.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said, and saw his eyes focus on her. He stopped moving. She tried to relax, to focus on the movement of the blades and callipers inside the wound. There were pieces of shrapnel still inside his chest. She had been teasing them out of the torn flesh for hours. Slowly she withdrew a mechadendrite, a sharp sliver of blood-slick silver held between its pincers. Ahriman’s eyes focused on the fragment.

  ‘Where are we?’ he croaked.

  ‘Holding steady in realspace,’ said Astraeos from behind her. She saw Ahriman’s eyes refocus. He nodded, and his eyes pinched shut as if at sudden pain. His skin was clammy and its colour had bled away to a cold grey.

  He is dying, she thought. She turned and dropped the fragment into a glass cylinder. A dozen scraps of silver lay at the bottom. And perhaps that is best, came another voice in her head. He has led us to the edge of ruin again and again. Sooner or later he will lead us too far and we will fall.

  ‘I will see the Navigator,’ said Ahriman, and began to push himself off the polished metal slab. Tubes that had been sucking the blood from his open wound came loose and began to splutter red droplets over his bare skin. Ahriman winced, then his face hardened. ‘My armour,’ he said, his mouth barely opening. ‘Bring it to me.’

  ‘There are still fragments in the wound,’ said Carmenta. Ahriman slowly turned his eyes on her.

  ‘I am aware of that.’ A bead of blood formed at the corner of his lips. ‘I can feel them. They are like needles in my mind. You won’t be able to remove them all. Two of them are hooked into the flesh next to my heart.’ He breathed hard. ‘Seal the wound.’

  ‘If I don’t get them out…’ she began.

  ‘They may kill me, but not for a while, and I need that time.’ He glanced from Astraeos to Carmenta. ‘Seal it, and then bring me my armour and the Navigator. We have much to prepare.’

  After a long moment, she nodded and began to cauterise the wound. The smell of charring flesh caught in her throat as it rose from her tools.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, as she stapled the lips of the wound closed.

  ‘Where we
have always been going: to my brother. To Amon.’

  Ahriman’s eyes were suddenly bright, and Carmenta felt more terrified than she had in all her years of flight. Astraeos did not move, but she could feel him waiting.

  ‘After all that has…’ began Astraeos.

  ‘The ship we took the Navigator from was no wandering pilgrim. It had gone into the Eye, looking for secrets. Their mystics had read portents of a power rising in the Eye, gathering forces to it.’ Ahriman paused and Carmenta could see something briefly replace the pain in his eyes.

  ‘How can you know this?’ said Carmenta before she could stop herself.

  ‘I saw it in the mind of the one that shot me.’ Ahriman moved his right hand to touch the lips of the wound in his side. His fingers came up red. He stared at his own blood.

  ‘What did they find?’ asked Astraeos quietly.

  ‘They found the ashes of a war.’

  Astraeos frowned.

  ‘There is always war within the Eye. You have told me this yourself: eternal war for power, for resources.’

  ‘This was not that type of war, it was a war of annihilation.’ Ahriman looked back up, his eyes unfocused. ‘Scars cut deep into the warp itself. Vortices of destruction that scream the names of those who created them. Daemons scavenging the remains of hell worlds cracked open like soft fruit. All just the by-blows of one battle.’

  ‘What battle?’

  Ahriman’s face looked like a mask of dead grey skin.

  ‘The fall of the Planet of the Sorcerers. The final death of my Legion.’

  ‘This has happened?’ asked Astraeos carefully.

  ‘Not yet,’ Ahriman shook his head. ‘Time is not a single river in which we all float towards one end. It flows in many streams. Some flow fast, some slow. If you stand within your own stream you see only your own time, but within the warp, you can move between them. A ship may enter the warp and return before it left, or emerge after centuries that the crew have experienced as hours. Such things have happened. Within the Eye, the streams of time are broken and tangled: moments of futures and pasts crammed together in an unravelling knot.’

  ‘So it will happen,’ said Astraeos.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘How could it not, if it has already happened in the future?’

  ‘Knowledge is power, knowledge changes everything. I know, and so that can change what happens now.’ Ahriman gave a smile that was as cold as snow. ‘I have never believed in fate.’

  ‘Amon,’ said Astraeos after a long pause. ‘This is the answer that you looked for. This is what Amon gathers for: to prepare for this war.’

  Ahriman said nothing.

  There is something he is not saying, thought Carmenta. Another secret he is holding close.

  ‘Prophecy,’ said Ahriman, his voice suddenly heavy with resignation. ‘All glimpses of the future are flawed. Believe them to mean one thing, and you are falling into a trap. Ignore them and they pull you back in. Prophecy has followed me since I could dream, and all of it has led to ruin.’

  ‘There are wars that we must run from,’ said Astraeos.

  Ahriman shook his head. He looked older and more tired than Carmenta had ever seen him.

  ‘No. I will not bow to fate.’

  Even if it kills you, thought Carmenta. Even if it brings ruin to all of us. Ahriman looked at her, and she wondered if he had heard her thoughts.

  ‘You cannot do this.’

  The words hung in the air. For a second, Carmenta thought she had spoken without realising, but then Astraeos spoke again.

  ‘You cannot do this, Ahriman,’ he said. Carmenta looked at him. His face was as blank and fixed as stone. He shook his head and his armour purred as it followed the small movement.

  Ahriman did not reply, but pulled himself to his feet. His eyes closed for a second and he swayed where he stood, then he steadied to complete stillness. To Carmenta, he suddenly looked like a bronzed statue, washed with drying blood. Slowly his eyes opened.

  ‘I must do this,’ said Ahriman softly. Astraeos walked away without another word. All Carmenta could look at was the blood slowly dripping from the edge of the metal slab.

  The precise gap between loyalty to the Imperium and betrayal was not something Silvanus had considered before. He knew about the warp, of course; he knew about it as few others born in the Imperium ever would. The warp was his reason for existing, it gave him purpose and meaning. Without it, he was just a mutant with a third eye in the middle of his forehead. He knew how the warp could corrupt, about daemons and their thirst for the weakness of mortals. He had seen the reality behind the secrets as he gazed directly into the churning ocean of the warp’s heart. He had been tested by the Inquisition, and they had found what he already knew: that he had a mind that was unconventional, highly resilient, and difficult to tempt. What they had not considered was that Silvanus, while reckless, was not suicidal. Risks were calculations, gambles with at least a chance of coming out the other side. Faced with the certainty of death, he would rather stay alive. As he bowed before his new master, he reflected that this last quality was the breaking point of his loyalty to the Imperium.

  ‘Rise.’ The voice was deep and resonant. Silvanus obeyed and stood, trying not to grit his teeth as the bruises from his abduction sent sharp complaints up his nerves. The figure who stood above him was a Space Marine. Silvanus’s eyes skittered over the blue armour, noting the imperfections and battle damage hidden under the lacquer. He looked up and met blue eyes. He flinched. It happened before he could stop himself. They were bright blue, like sapphires catching sunlight. It was not the colour that surprised him, but their utter stillness.

  ‘I am Ahriman.’

  Silvanus bowed his head again, in part so he could look away from those still eyes.

  ‘Silvanus…’ he began, but a low resonant chuckle spread through the small chamber.

  ‘I know you.’

  Silvanus thought Ahriman was about to embellish the statement, but only silence followed. He had a sudden urge to shiver.

  ‘Lord…’

  ‘I am not a lord. Once perhaps, but not now.’

  Another silence lengthened. Silvanus swallowed, and glanced at the floor. Sweat was prickling across his back, and the dusty robes they had given him suddenly felt unbearably itchy against his skin. He had the feeling that if he were to look up he would find that Ahriman’s blue eyes would not have moved.

  ‘I wish you to navigate this ship.’

  ‘I have already–’

  ‘I wish you to navigate it to a particular location.’

  Silvanus waited, and then chanced a glance up. Ahriman had tilted his head to one side, his eyes still fixed, waiting. Silvanus noticed a small spot of dried blood at the corner of Ahriman’s mouth.

  He bit his lip. This was the moment; if he would not do what Ahriman wished then he was of no use, and he had no doubt that once he was of no use he would die. A quickly silenced part of him found that this choice made him very angry. He smiled, realised it was a grimace, smiled wider and then realised that smiling at a Traitor Space Marine was like grinning at a feral beast.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ nodded Silvanus. ‘Do you have navigational data for the location? Charts, rutters, puzzle cyphers?’

  Ahriman slowly shook his head.

  ‘Then how, my lor…’ Silvanus coughed to mask the slip. ‘How can I navigate there?’

  ‘I have a path for you to follow,’ said Ahriman, and raised a hand. Silvanus flinched at the feeling of the armoured fingers on his scalp. An electrical prickle skittered over his skin. He suddenly felt that something very unpleasant was about to happen. He opened his mouth to speak, but at that moment the world vanished around him as the path poured into his mind.

  It came in a cascade of light and sound. He heard music, and saw patterns form from golden threads of light. He smelt burning sugar, and heard whispers of voices fading in and out of hearing. It was like a nonsense song made out of every sensation. H
e felt it drag through his consciousness, pieces of imagery snagging like threads on thorns.

  It lasted for a second. It lasted for an eternity. At some point he screamed.

  Then it was done, and he found himself curled on the floor of his chamber, trembling. Above him Ahriman stared down, his eyes star-points of blue.

  ‘You see the path. You will take us there,’ said Ahriman.

  Silvanus tried to speak, to say that he understood, but all he could do was nod.

  XVI

  GATHERING

  From a distance, the gathering looked like a scattering of gems glinting on a velvet field. Only as the distance closed – slowly, ever so slowly – did the stars become the teardrop fires of plasma engines. There were dozens of craft, perhaps hundreds, all rotating around a single point. It was like watching the lights of a city from the night sky; but here, each building was a ship.

  As they moved closer, light began to catch the edges of towers and turrets. At the centre was a ship larger than all the rest. Its hull was red iron and narrowed to a point like a spearhead. Minarets and crystalline domes hung from its belly, while a city of silver towers rose into the void from its back. It had known other names, but to Ahriman it would only ever be the Sycorax.

  ‘A lot of ships for a dead Legion,’ grunted Astraeos. Ahriman turned his eyes from the images. He was only half concentrating; the rest of his mind was revolving through a sequence of thought patterns, pushing power into the arrangement of circles and lines scratched by Carmenta’s servitors into every floor and wall of the ship. That, and shutting out the dull ache from the wound in his side.

  ‘I thought only a few of your gene-kin survived?’ said Astraeos with a shrug that radiated disgust burning just beneath the surface. It reminded Ahriman of Kadin.

  ‘Only a few of us did,’ said Ahriman carefully and turned his eyes back to the images floating across the pict screens. ‘Many remain at my father’s side.’ He saw the grainy image of a trident-like vessel, its hull glimmering as if encrusted in jewels, then flicked to another: a grand cruiser with a broad nose of battered iron, its hull the blue of midnight. ‘These are not all true kin of the Thousand Sons. Others have answered Amon’s call. Renegades and fragments of other Legions and Chapters.’