Ahriman: Sorcerer (20 page)

‘Why does Ahriman summon me now? We have not even gone into the warp.’

‘He has not summoned you,’ said Sanakht softly. Kadin went still, the feeling of unease still in his head, growing stronger now, pushing into his awareness. The pistons in his arms hissed, and his slab fingers twitched shut. Sanakht was speaking again, his voice still low, as though he was confiding, or confessing. ‘We were once alike, you and I, at least in one respect. The warp once wanted me too. It had its fingers in the dreams of my mind, and in the shape of my flesh. My eyes changed first. They became like stars, and where I looked I could see the truth of things, all laid out in front of me. It was beautiful for a time. I stopped thinking about why I could not take off my armour. I stopped wondering why I didn’t breathe.’

Kadin felt his machine hands twitch again. The feeling in his head was a building pressure now. His eyes flicked to the pommels of Sanakht’s swords: the alabaster hawk head and jet jackal rested under the blue fingertips. He thought of the weapon on his back, the distance to Sanakht. He shook his head, and made as though to turn away.

‘We share nothing, cripple,’ he spat.

Sanakht seemed to tense, and then shook his head, relaxing again.

‘No, no,’ he said, carefully turning and taking his hands from the pommels of his swords. ‘You are right. We are nothing alike and any similarities we might share, are skin deep.’ Kadin was sure the swordsman was smiling with the last words. ‘But even so I wanted to talk to you.’

‘Why?’ managed Kadin. The sensation in his skull made him feel as though it was about to explode.

‘We once called it honour.’

Move!
The thought exploded inside Kadin’s head. He twisted.

Sanakht’s sword cut and activated in a single movement. Kadin had not even seen it leave the sheath. The edge scored across Kadin’s chest. Pain and fire spread from the wound. He smelt the ozone as the blade’s field met the air. The second sword was already in Sanakht’s left hand, slicing out from the scabbard, edge crawling with green flames. Kadin punched out. The force sword was burning a line across his vision. His fist slammed home. Sanakht hit the passage wall with a crack of shattering ceramite. Kadin stepped forwards, his hand pulling the chainsword free from his back in a snarl of spinning teeth. He cut down.

Sanakht’s swords came up together, force and powerblades shrieking as their energies clashed. Kadin’s blow hit the crossed swords in an explosion of light and spinning metal. The chainsword’s motor kept churning teeth into the air. Kadin tried to pull back, but Sanakht was already moving, turning as he scissored the chainsword in two. Light flashed through the steam-thickened air. Half-molten chain teeth smacked into the flesh of Kadin’s face. He stumbled, half falling, blood streaming into his eyes, hand still gripping the squealing stump of his chainsword.

The fall saved his life. A blade hissed above his head, trailing golden sparks. His shoulder crashed into the wall, and he rebounded with a shout rising from his throat, metal fist lashing out.

He could feel something scrabbling at his mind, clawing to get in, mewling as it slid off the tatters of his psyche. The world slowed, the edges blurred, the uncoiling momentum of his body a paused instant.

You are going to die here,
said a voice at the back of his thoughts.

His lead foot hit the decking. Sanakht was sliding back, both swords low, green eyes glittering in his silver helm.

He is faster than you are, faster than you ever can be.
For an instant he did not place the voice, then he recognised the low tones of Thidias: his lord, his Chapter Master, his comrade in exile. Thidias, long dead in the cold dark.

You die here, brother.

Kadin’s hand descended towards Sanakht’s face, metal fingers wide.

‘No,’ hissed Kadin. ‘Not yet.’

Sanakht whipped his power sword up. The lightning-wrapped edge met the palm of Kadin’s hand. The power field buzzed as it kissed the metal. The fingers snapped shut. Light exploded through the corridor. Steam flashed to white sheets. Kadin’s hand and arm vanished, molecules tearing apart as the power field splintered. Sword fragments rang against his armour and he staggered, the stump of his arm drooling black blood and piston oil.

Sanakht was spinning back, his shattered sword still held in his right hand.

Pain,
thought Kadin, the revelation as sudden and shocking as the sensation itself.
I feel pain.
And something within him, a memory, a last seed of what he had been, broke open. Rage hammered through him, clear and bright. It felt like cold water and ice. It felt like fire, like waking to the sun’s light.

Sanakht spun back, his sword a spike of rainbow flame. Kadin stood tall, pistons hissing. Sanakht lunged. Kadin’s kick snapped out. Clawed toes hit the join between chest and torso plates and punched through. The sound of shattering ceramite cracked through the damp air like a bell breaking as it tolled.

Sanakht fell, blood spraying in his wake, the fire of his sword guttering. Kadin watched him hit the wall, and tumble to the deck. Kadin smiled, feeling the sensation spread across his twisted face. The world was suddenly bright again, living. Part of him wondered why now, but he pushed the thought away.

Sanakht was trying to rise, wet breath hissing from his speaker grille as he scrabbled at the wall. Blood was pumping from the crack in his armour. Kadin listened to the sound for a heartbeat, and watched as the swordsman pulled himself up a few centimetres.

The stump of Kadin’s right arm was still bleeding, but more slowly now, as though machine and flesh were closing off the wound. He raised his foot and placed it on Sanakht’s chest just above the cracked torso plate. He pressed down, slowly, feeling his pistons moving in the place of muscle.

‘Do you wish me to talk to you before you die?’ said Kadin. ‘Or does honour not demand that now?’

Edges of broken ceramite ground over each other as he pressed harder. Sanakht looked up. Kadin saw something move in the swordsman’s eye-lenses, a reflection of something behind him. He began to turn.

The power blade activated the instant before it punched through the right side of Kadin’s chest. Inside his ribs he felt his lung and left heart explode. The blade sawed out of the front of his chest with a hiss of atomising flesh and bone. The world was suddenly slow again, slow and grey-edged and tasting of blood. He tried to bring his arm up, but it was just a stump now. Sanakht was rising, steadying himself on the wall with one bloody hand, force sword gripped in the other. Kadin tried to take a step, but his legs would not move. The power blade stabbed in from behind again, up and through the backplates on his right, and into his remaining heart. He turned his head, feeling the muscles in his neck losing strength even as he moved.

Maroth tilted his blind hound helm as he pulled the power blade free.

‘Trusted…’ rasped Kadin. His lungs were bags of blood. The beat of his pulse in his ears went silent. He no longer had hearts to beat.

‘Exactly,’ hissed Maroth.

Kadin felt Sanakht’s force sword punch through his chest.

It felt like being cut by ice. He had time to think of his brothers, to think of Thidias, of Cadar, and Astraeos, all dead, all grinning at him out of faded memory. Their faces were skulls, and then they were laughing, and then the laughter was all there was.

XIV

Claws

Hel’s Daughter
was the first to kindle her engines. Behind her the
Storm Wyrm
and
Crone Hammer
followed, sliding into position behind the lead ship.
Death’s Laughter
and
Blood Howl
came with them, holding station between the larger vessels. All of the ships were scarred black, their colours lost beneath the touch of flames and storms. Damage marked their hulls: jagged gorges ran like smiles across their bellies and backs, rippled craters pocked their prows, and the mouths of their guns shimmered with heat scarring. There were other marks too, twists in the metal and stone of their hulls, as though their substance had run like molten wax and then hardened. Around them, howling storms of light rose against the star field. The faces of beasts seemed to shimmer there briefly. Drifts of vapour the size of continents reached to brush the five warships. This was the edge of the Eye of Terror, but even here the warp storms spilled into the real, lapping against the channel of calm which led to Cadia. Beyond that the Imperium waited.

The Wolves’ ships had sat in the folds of the storm, the clouds of ethereal energy gusting against their shields, thrusters holding them steady beside their sisters. They had sat, waiting, as patient as the turning of seasons, watching for what they needed. It had come at last: a scattering of ships, tumbling towards the light of Cadia’s star. First there had been just one, its engines spluttering red, its hull bleeding gas and energy, rolling on its course like a drunkard. Then another had followed, its weapons firing at nothing, scattering fury and light in every direction. Then another, bloated and black, its hull weeping ectoplasm. Then ten, then ten more, then a hundred: all of them tumbling towards Cadia like a herd driven into a stampede. It was not a true fleet, it had no central command and little drove it towards Cadia besides the blind instinct of a starving predator drawn to light. The storms howled in its wake, and the Wolves waited. Only once the fleet had passed did Grimur give the order to follow.

The ships accelerated forwards, firetrails lingering in the warp’s tainted void. On the bridge of the
Hel’s Daughter
Grimur listened to the burble of the servitors in the red-stained light. The ship was shaking, the scream of its spirit rising as the reactors poured fury into the engines. An Iron Priest in a plough-fronted helm glanced up at him. Grimur nodded. The ship began to sing in pain as its engines strained.

Beyond the hull the five ships of Grimur’s pack were streaking towards a distant point of light. If the calculations of the Iron Priests, and the augurs of the runes had told true, they would reach Cadia just after the ragged fleet they followed. By that point they would have been accelerating for days, their reactors close to rupturing, engines on the edge of failing, and going fast enough that they would hit the Cadian Gate like an arrow shot from the nether world.

Fire ringed the light of Cadia. Ribbons of explosions lit the void as mines and deadfall torpedoes detonated amongst the first wave of ships emerging from the Eye. Warp-twisted hulls became burning shards and scatters of melting slag.

Within the outer ring of mines the Imperial fleet waited. Hundreds of Imperial cruisers, destroyers and frigates marshalled beside battleships like knights holding station beside their kings. All were commanded by men and women who had earned the right with blood and victory; and as the Eye-ward hemisphere of Cadia filled with fire, they waited.

The rest of the incursion fleet came on, accelerating through the death fires of their kin. Cadia’s defence platforms began to fire, tracing nets of light across millions of kilometres. Chaos-wrought ships burned, exploded, twisted, died and screamed into the silence as they bled. And still they came on.

The Cadian fleet began to move. Battle groups spread into position, squadrons folding out into webs of overlapping fire arcs. Eyes and minds across the fleet had seen the pattern of the threat and measured the response. This was not an attack, at least not one that was likely to succeed despite its size; it was an outpouring, the Eye vomiting out some of the damned held in its guts. It was violent yet predictable, a charge of unfocused fury. It would cost blood but the line would hold and cut the incursion down before it began.

Clouds of bombers dropped from launch bays and began to spiral outwards from their carriers. Wave after wave of torpedoes struck the warp-touched ships in an unforgiving drumbeat of explosions. Hulls became kilometre long shards, fuming flames and metal as they spun. The Imperial bombers fell on the remains, melta rockets and seismic bombs reducing wreckage to crumbs and molten spray.

Dozens of warp-touched ships died in the first rolling firestorm of the engagement, but not all. Some had changed in the Eye, the substance of their hulls bloating, becoming like a living thing, becoming like cancer grown from nightmare. These behemoths came on, heedless as parts of their hulls sheared away and burned, screaming with the voices of the dead. Across the system vox-relays blew out, and people woke from dreams with voices still wailing at the edge of hearing. Behind the sheet of flame formed by the ballet of destruction the warp storms coiled, reaching deeper into reality to caress the bloodshed.

The Cadian fleet met the surviving invaders with sheets of intersecting fire. Battle groups already in place fired on the enemy vessels’ engines as their momentum drove them past. Fast frigates and gunboats cut closer, firing into already open wounds. The first of the great ships died under the guns of the battleship
Imperatrix
; already bleeding and wailing its pain into the warp, it exploded, the fire and gas of its death shimmering to blood and tatters of oily matter. But the rest of the corrupted vessels were not without teeth, and they did not die easily. Some fired back, roaring tainted plasma at their attackers, swallowing squadrons with sweeps of macro cannon fire. The invaders and defenders locked together, raking and cutting at each other even as they died. And all around them the blackness became an inferno.

Grimur’s ships hit the sphere of Cadia as the battle reached its zenith. Their course had been calculated long before, washed through the half-machine brains of slaved lexmechanics until it was like a line cut by a razor through skin. The ships of the damned had struck the Cadian system in a wild rush, but they were still predictable. In the long weeks of waiting the Space Wolves had guessed how the defenders of Cadia would respond to such an attack. They might not know the precise shape of the forces defending Cadia, but how they would respond to a predictable enemy was itself predictable. The Wolves had picked a path that would slide past the defenders like a stone skimming over water. They had waited for the Eye to lash out at Cadia, lit their engines and begun to accelerate down their chosen path towards the cool darkness waiting on the other side of the system. Now, as defenders and invaders met, and burned together, the Wolves sliced through the edge of the battle sphere.

On the bridge of
Hel’s Daughter
Grimur listened to his ship sing as the warp storms clawed at it and the fires of battle kissed its prow. He swayed as the ship creaked, his eyes closed, feeling the seconds flick past and finding that they were all still breathing. In his mind he was remembering ships cutting waves like long knives, the wind hissing as it cracked the sails taut, the spray flicking across the bow as the waves met its cutting edge. ‘Running the claws of the storm’, they had called it, dancing across a sea of white-crested mountains with thunderheads spread from horizon to horizon at their backs. And in that moment, his mind living in the past while the present trembled all around him, he knew joy for the first time in a thousand years. It was the joy of skill tested against chance, of running at a shieldwall and knowing that you were rolling the bones of fate and hoping for favour.

‘Entering outer system sphere,’ called a servitor in a dull monotone.

Well now.
He felt his lips split over his teeth.
Let’s run the storm’s claws, and see if we are still sons of Fenris
.

The hull shook, and shook. Alerts and sirens began to ring through the cavern of the bridge. Servitors were calling out in their iron voices. Beside him his brothers stood, weapons held loose in their hands, red warning lights glittering in the coldness of their eyes. The ship shook again. The note of the engines rose and rose. Grimur tilted his head back, his grin splitting wide.

The song of the ship and the scream of the storm were one note, rising up to the sky like the call of the hunt.

Grimur howled. Death’s blade was resting on the threads of fate. Beside him the other Wolves joined their cries to his.

Out in the void the arrowhead of ships cut through the system edge. Weapon fire reached after them. The Wolves’ ships danced and spiralled, kissing the edge of explosions. The pursuing ships began to fall behind, their engines already burning to their white-hot limit. But two did not.

‘They are still coming.’ Halvar’s voice reached through the howls. Grimur went silent, the joy draining from him as he looked at Halvar bent over an auspex readout. One by one the howls of the other Wolves faded. Just the snarl of the ship remained, rolling about them like thunder. Grimur looked at Halvar, his expression question enough. ‘Two ships,’ said Halvar. ‘Very fast. They have stopped firing weapons.’

Grimur nodded. Fire power traded for speed: that was why the two ships were not firing. They had guessed that Grimur’s ships had made the same trade-off, and so would be unlikely to fire back as the distance closed. They were racing to get close, and that meant they intended to use weapons that needed no power; they intended to board the Wolves’ ships.

‘What are they?’ he asked, although he thought he knew the answer already.

‘The mark of Ultramar is in their lines,’ said Halvar, nodding grimly. ‘They are Legion kin, jarl. They are Space Marines.’

Grimur took a breath, let it out, and shifted his grip on his axe, feeling the familiar sensation of its weight in his fingers.

‘Make ready for battle,’ he said.

The Space Wolves ships ran and their hunters came after them. There were two, their engines gouging wounds of flame across the void towards
Hel’s Daughter
and her sisters. The
Lament of Calth
was a notched spear blade, the
Rubicon
a blunt hammer head. Both had once served the Ultramarines, but for two millennia they had borne new colours and oaths. The White Consuls aboard the two ships had served in the shadow of the Eye for a decade and blood had often hidden the white of their armour. They knew their trade, had been bred for it and honed by genetic mysteries.

As the distance to the target ships closed Lepidus, sergeant of the Fifth Squad of the Fourth Company, waited in the boarding torpedo’s dark insides. Around him his brothers sat still, the white of their armour lost in the dark. They waited as the silence stretched, and the torpedoes shook around them. Phrases rolled through his thoughts, canticles and teachings worn smooth by repetition. Under the words his mind worked, flicking through dozens of conditioned possibilities and responses with every double beat of his hearts. Calm, total and complete, filled him. He had seen human warriors tremble before battle, their fear oozing out of them in nervous laughter and hands shaking on weapons. He had heard that Space Marines of other breeds relished the moments before battle, as adrenaline surged in their blood. Both were unfathomable to him. Battle was focus, uncluttered by feelings or thoughts that did not serve the moment. There was a time for fury, a time to take lives like a reaper wading through corn, but they were moments to be chosen and put aside like any other tool of war. That was what the Codex taught.

He blinked, and an image of the space outside the ship opened in his helmet display. The engines of the
Lament of Calth
and
Rubicon
burned brighter. Each of them would need weeks to recover from the damage they were doing to themselves by pushing their engines, but they had no choice. Their quarry was almost at the system edge, almost free and clear into the waiting black beyond.

The boarding torpedo rang as mag clamps disengaged. Lepidus felt the vibration through his armour. He kept his eye on the image of the fleeing ships. He wondered what manner of corrupted creatures they held. He dismissed the thought. It was irrelevant. He would see the enemy soon enough, and speculation could cloud judgement.

Red light pulsed through the torpedo. A siren sang in Lepidus’s ear and alerts pulsed at the edge of his sight. The torpedo felt tense, an arrow held nocked and drawn, waiting for flight.

The White Consuls ships waited until their reactors were screaming, until they could go no faster or further, until the quarry were as close as possible.

Lepidus felt the launch as a blow. Amber alerts washed his eyes. His flesh pressed against the skin of his armour.

The torpedoes hit the void and ran clean to their targets.

Grimur felt his fingers twitch on his axe haft as he ran through the
Hel’s Daughter
. At his back his brothers followed, boots ringing on the floor, strings of claws and teeth rattling against their armour.

‘Mid section, lower arterial corridor. Incursion confirmed.’ The dull drone of the bridge servitor filled his ear.

‘Number of impacts?’ he growled.

‘Uncertain. Two probable.
Storm Wyrm
and
Blood Howl
report incursions in progress.’ Grimur gave a silent curse. The boarding torpedoes had struck true and now most of his ships were compromised.

‘Lower arterial corridor. Internal bulkheads breached, sections one hundred and five through thirty. Moving aft.’

Blood of Fenris, they are quick,
Grimur thought. Whoever the Space Marines who had boarded the
Hel’s Daughter
were, they were cutting their way through the ship with ruthless directness. They would be making for the reactors and engines. If they could damage them, the
Hel’s Daughter
would drift on powerless, easy prey for the rest of the defenders to destroy once they caught up. It was an old tactic, as old as the first time a man had cut the ties of a sail to leave a ship as prey for the waves.