The Prophets were rogue psykers. They offered glimpses of the future to Carsona’s burgeoning underclass. In a sense she supposed they offered hope, a chance to make better choices, and the desperate had paid in coins, in favours, or in whatever they had. The Prophets were slaves themselves. Others held the rogue psykers’ chains, and took payment. Those hidden masters were the true criminals, reckless and greedy. A rogue psyker, even one who could just mewl out a few warp-addled prophecies, was a bomb just waiting to explode. And there had been a lot of Prophets in the city, all ticking down to doomsday, and all for wealth.
It was the pettiness that made her most angry.
She had found them though, and even though the city might have to be put to the flame, the other possibilities could have been far, far worse. The only question remaining was the big one – who had begun the whole thing? Somewhere behind the coin-takers and the mutant families, there had been a first mover in this heresy. Now that the Prophets themselves were done with, she would find out where this had begun.
Something hit her on the back and fell to the ground. She looked down. A fragment of rockcrete the size of a finger lay at her feet.
‘Oh, Throne of Terra,’ she muttered.
She felt another impact, harder this time. Then another and another, and suddenly she was covering her head, her cracked armour ringing as debris streamed past her as though drawn into the centre of a cyclone. A hooting bellow echoed through the fog. Her head snapped up as the sound rolled around her. Worms of mauve light were forming in the air. Screams were coming from the dust cloud. In her mind she could taste desperation and panic. The flavour of metal and rotting fruit itched at her teeth. She had misjudged, and misjudged badly – this was all about to become something much worse. Somewhere close by another uncontrolled psyker was awakening.
A chunk of girder whipped her legs from beneath her, and suddenly she was falling. She never hit the ground. Invisible ropes lashed around her, pulling her up and through the air. She could smell burning silk, and hear the rattle of insects in the rising wind. Ghost voices called to her, promising her infinity. She hardened her will, focusing in the way that had kept her alive on the Black Ships. She was stronger than the voices on the wind, stronger than the whispers which were telling her to submit, to leave her own mind open to the storm of possibility that was just a wish away.
A pillar of shattered stone came out of the mist and slammed into her. She heard a crack of breaking bone, and her left leg filled with fire. She did not scream. The invisible ropes vanished. She hit the ground, and tumbled across it. Black spots bloomed at the edge of her sight. She lay still. The pain was her world now, its edges defined by the walls of her will. Dust and debris streamed past her.
She was in the remains of a hab-block. Its broken structural pillars rose around her like snapped fingers. She flexed her left hand and found it still held the meltagun. She spat, and watched the blood-thickened phlegm whirl away on the wind. The psyker was close. She could feel its presence fizzing in her awareness like a fire made of munitions. She looked up, and saw the entrance to the broken hab’s basement. Debris flew through the low door, and she could see light crackling in the darkness beyond.
She tried to move, and felt the pain shiver up her side as she shifted her left leg. She closed her eyes and found the threads of pain pulling through her mind, red and jagged. She began to ravel them together into a place which was separate from her, a place where she could ignore them. It was not a psychic ability, just a consequence of training and willpower.
It took her almost a minute before she could stand. Her bones crunched and ground in the sheath of her muscle as she limped towards the doorway down into the basement.
There were more mutants here, but most were already dead or dying. Splinters of rockcrete and metal riddled most of them. Those that still lived croaked at her as she passed. Quills had sprouted from their skin, and milk-white eyes had opened across their flesh. Tatters of overalls hung from them like the half-shed skins of snakes.
It was quiet in the basement. Above, the aetheric wind roared and the city pulled itself apart, but here everything was still. A man sat in the centre of the space. Detritus had gathered around him, small drifts of scorched paper, and ashes forming a spiral that covered the floor. Blue flames clung to the ceiling, silently rolling across the rockcrete without sound or smoke. The man looked up as Iobel entered. He was not old, but Iobel could tell that toil had stolen the best of his years. The flesh of his face sagged beneath the chequered pattern of his labour-glyph. Bloodshot eyes met Iobel’s, and the pupils contracted to dots. Something rippled under his skin.
‘What…’ he rasped, his jaw chewing the air. ‘What do I do?’ Iobel took a step closer. ‘I don’t know what to do.’ The man trembled. He was crying, she saw. ‘I just want it to stop. Please. Is this a dream? I think it might be a dream. I just want it to stop.’ He was shaking now. His cheeks were bright with tears. Iobel’s finger tightened on the meltagun’s trigger. The gun armed with a low whine.
He looked up sharply, his skin rippling. ‘The Sons of Prospero,’ he said, and his voice was a hollow rasp. ‘I see Prospero’s cities now cast down. Its sons call to me. As they are its sons we are theirs. We are their vengeance.’ The last word echoed through the basement, rolling louder and louder. Dust and rock fragments rose from the floor. His face bulged. Iobel had an impression of fingers pressing against the taut skin.
She pulled the meltagun’s trigger. The ray of heat hit the man in the centre of his chest. The fat and meat of his body vaporised an instant before his distorting skeleton exploded. A chattering scream split the air, rising like a flock of carrion. The blue fire surged across the ceiling, flames reaching like hands. Then it vanished, and Iobel was left in half darkness. A second later the debris began to hit the ground outside. It sounded like hail.
Iobel let out a breath, then collapsed to the floor.
Prospero.
The word muttered through her thoughts, while a headache screamed behind her eyes. What had that meant? She had heard the ranting of madmen and demagogues, had taken the truth from thousands of heretics, and in all that time, she had learnt that there was rarely real truth in their words, and if there was it was best forgotten. But the dead psyker’s last words rang in her thoughts, like a sound caught in an echo chamber.
The Sons of Prospero…
‘So that is how it began.’ The voice came out of the dark. She twisted and brought the meltagun up. Darkness flashed to daylight as she fired. There was nothing there. Just the rockcrete support pillars, and the briefly distorted shadows. She twisted where she lay on the floor, extending her mind again, smelling the warp, feeling its wounded flesh as though it were her own skin. She stopped.
It was not there. The warp was gone. Beyond the skin of sensations inside her mind there was just a void.
‘This is not real. At least not in the sense most would consider it.’ The voice was rich, measured. ‘I thought it would take you longer to realise.’
A man stepped from behind one of the pillars, and her finger tightened on the trigger, but did not fire. Muscles bunched and flowed across his bared chest and shoulders. Silver and gold rings glinted from his scalp. Huge relaxed hands hung beside the handles of sheathed glaives. Half of his face looked like knotted leather, the scars shaped and folded into a tangle of dragons and serpents. He smiled at her with the other half. The sharpened points of his teeth showed in the twisted corner of his mouth.
It was Horeg, her retainer and bodyguard, or at least it looked just like him. But Horeg had no tongue and could not speak. ‘I thought it would take us longer to reach this point,’ said the man who was not Horeg.
Iobel squeezed the trigger of the meltagun. Nothing. She pulled it again, and still nothing. She felt a shiver whip through her. The man who was not Horeg stepped closer. He had blue eyes, bright blue eyes, the colour of a sea under sunlight. She tried to rise, but the pain in her leg suddenly grew. She could feel bone cutting into flesh. She gasped.
‘As I said, this is not real.’ He squatted down opposite her, muscles bunching in his haunches. ‘But there are ways of making it feel that way.’
‘Daemon,’ she hissed, but even as she said it she was not sure. This felt different, like something that had already happened.
‘No, and besides you, I alone am real.’
She felt suddenly very cold.
‘What is your name?’ she said carefully.
‘A good question – names have power, do they not? You want to see if I will answer, and if I do, and if I tell true, then you have the beginning of a weapon to cut your way out.’ He smiled Horeg’s twisted smile again. ‘That is what you were intending, was it not? Resourceful, never yielding, always looking for a path to victory even when all is uncertain – you are a remarkable person, Selandra Iobel. Your mind is very strong, stronger than I would have thought possible for one still mortal.’
‘Your name?’ she growled, fighting down the pain, shutting out the panic and questions. This was a trick, one of the greater illusions of the daemons that infested the warp. It might not be real, but that did not mean that she had to submit to its lie.
He just smiled again, and shook his head. A line of silver rings rattled in the pierced flesh of Horeg’s eyebrows.
‘My name is Ahzek Ahriman,’ he said. She froze, hair prickling across her arms as though touched by an icy wind. Her tongue was still in her mouth. Her eyes fixed on the bright blue points of his eyes, and suddenly she knew that she was not the Inquisitor Iobel who had purged the Prophets of Carsona, or at least she was not any more. Carsona had been a century and a half ago. She had not known the name Prospero then, had never heard of the Legion it had birthed, and had not known the name Ahzek Ahriman. He was right, this was the start. This moment, in the basement of a broken hab, had been the beginning of her journey from ignorance to enlightenment: the journey that would lead to Apollonia…
She shut the thought down as it formed, thrusting it away from her consciousness and burying it deep within her. That was what he was after, why he had come for her, why he was standing in the ruin of her past wearing the face of a loyal friend.
Ahriman nodded, and stood.
‘This memory is close to the surface of your mind. The last things you would have remembered before this would have been the conclave, and the examination of my lieutenant. Your mind would have been fixated on me, and what I intended, but this memory is the first your mind comes to now. Why?’ Ahriman looked at her. His gaze hit her like a physical blow. ‘Because this is the start of the path that would bring you to me.’
Iobel suddenly felt as though a sliver of cold iron had slipped into her chest. Her mind flicked back through what Ahriman had said, through what seemed to be happening. This was happening in her mind, in her memories. There was a reason she was here, in this exact memory. This was not an interrogation, it was a breach into her memories, a hole bored into the outer layer of her mind. She closed her mouth, pulling her thoughts back, hardening her will.
Apollonia, he has come because of Apollonia…
She forced the thought deeper, burying it down, clamping layers of trained will over it. Numbness spread through portions of her consciousness, sections of her past suddenly becoming cold and dead. Names and facts she had carried for decades vanished from sight, swallowed down within her core.
It will not be enough,
she thought, even as the walls grew and the memory blocks formed in her mind.
Not against the likes of him. Escape or death are the only ways to keep it from him. I must find a way to escape, or a way to die.
‘You can hide what I seek, inquisitor, but I will reach it.’
She opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came. The image of the hab basement was coming apart, bleeding into blackness like wet paint dribbling from a canvas. Only the blue eyes remained fixed, glittering as they pierced into her, glowing like cruel stars.
‘Is that enough? Can he hear us?’
The voice came from above him. There was light too, sunlight perhaps, falling through a grey fog. He was not sure how far away the light was, though. The voice had sounded familiar, but he was not sure where he had heard it before.
‘Probability of normal cognition and sensory awareness is high.’ The second voice was a clatter of machinery. ‘Adeptus Astartes physiology yields uncertainty quotient of–’
‘He can hear us,’ cut in the first voice. He heard the speaker lick his lips. ‘Can’t you?’
He did not reply. No, in fact he did not know how to reply. Could he make words like those he heard? He listened instead. He could hear a low hiss and wheeze, and a buzzing pulse almost below the level of hearing.
Active augmetics,
said a voice within his head. He knew it was right but he did not know why. Yes, active augmetics, and… weaponry… no… yes, but something else as well… something low like the purr of power armour. And then the smells came. The thick reek of machine oil, and contraseptic, and wires running hot close to dead flesh. Breath, heavy and wet with the smells of polluted lungs, and spiced food, and burned caffeine, and–
‘Can you get him to see?’ asked another voice, a different voice. Female, further back from the other two. He could hear her withered chest in the bite of her words. He had heard that voice as well, but he could not remember where. Did it matter that he could not remember?
The fog and hazed sun vanished. The world that replaced them was pale blue. He could see a group of figures in a pool of light. Beyond the light everything was shadow, blurring to darkness that extended to an undefined distance. At the centre of the pool of light sat an object. At first he thought it was a machine, but then he saw the flesh under the mass of tubes. It was a body, clamped to a metal table, its skin and meat punctured by needle-tipped tubes, its breath the slow sucking of fluid through glass flasks. Its head was an eyeless mask of metal, haloed by cables, and with a black slot for a mouth. Two figures stood close by; the nearest had no legs, but floated a metre from the floor. Two sets of glittering limbs hung from within the shadow of its robe, and three green eyes rotated slowly beneath its hood. The second figure was a human with a thin hard face and plain black robes. Further away a shrunken old woman in a gleaming exoskeleton stood beside a man with shining crystal eyes. Three hooded attendants stood behind the crystal-eyed man, linked to his spine and skull by thick cables. They were all looking at the figure bound into the machines at the room’s centre.