A dozen other boys ran the mountains, but only two others were between Ahriman and Ohrmuzd. He drew deep on his reserves of strength and pulled level with the first runner.
Ahriman jinked to the side, easily avoiding a clumsy attempt to barge him from the path, remembering now how, at the time, he had just known which way the other boys would move. The other runner was just as predictable, and Ahriman ducked his outstretched leg to draw level with Ohrmuzd. The joy in his brother’s face was infectious. They laughed together, legs pumping as the end of the race came in sight. They were twins, best friends and recruits to the XV Legion, but still there was brotherly competition to win.
A waterfall dropped to an icy lake with only a few areas where a boy might break through, many more that were thick and hard as plascrete. This was their destination, a last threshold to cross before they passed from childhood to manhood.
They ran to the edge of the waterfall and, hand in hand, leapt from the edge of the cliff. They fell together, laughing hysterically as the ice rose up to meet them, with no way to tell if it were thin or hard as steel.
But Ahriman knew the answer this time. He had already lived this moment.
Ahriman and Ohrmuzd landed together, smashing through thin sheets of ice into glacial ice-melt.
But instead of plunging deep into the blackness of the water as Ahriman remembered, he found himself in the heart of a battle. Mass-reactives screamed past him. Blitzing hails of las-fire blistered the paintwork of the following tanks, and the sky was criss-crossed with missile contrails, flak explosions and spinning wrecks.
Fire rose ahead of him in a burning escarpment as the ruler of this world sought to deny the XV Legion entry to his last fortress.
Ahriman halted, unwilling to take even a single step onwards, as he recognised this moment and the horror that followed.
A gauntleted hand slammed him on the shoulder.
‘Get a move on, brother,’ said Ohrmuzd, his rich, cultured tones unmistakable, even through the vox of a battle helm. Ahriman’s brother exemplified everything a Space Marine legionary ought to be: tall and broad shouldered, monstrously imposing, yet also regal and filled with authority. Lightning crackled at his right fist, bathing the red of his war-plate in flickering traceries of aether-light.
‘No,’ whispered Ahriman, as Ohrmuzd turned away without waiting for an answer. ‘Ohrmuzd, please. Your powers. No…’
Ohrmuzd did not answer, and plunged into the fires.
Ahriman shook his head, paralysed with grief.
He didn’t want to go on, didn’t want to take another step.
But his body betrayed him, following Ohrmuzd through the bright fires as he had on that fateful day. He lost vision as the auto-senses of his armour flared in response. For a fraction of a second only, but it was enough for the world to change forever.
Ahriman’s visor cleared and the breath caught in his throat.
Ohrmuzd stood with his arms upraised, body spasming in pain and terror.
Arcing traceries of lightning enveloped him. Aether power out of control, the Great Ocean pouring into him. Plate splitting as the flesh beneath underwent sudden, rampant and irreversible growth.
‘Help… me…’
The same plea for aid he had only recently heard from Sobek.
Ahriman reached for his brother, knowing he could not save him, and his heart broke anew. Ohrmuzd’s helm cracked down its centre, pushed apart from within. The right eye-lens shattered, revealing a wide, terrified blue eye rapidly filling with blood.
‘Help me,’ repeated Ohrmuzd, his body contorting as bones fused, split and expanded. His flesh was exploring every avenue of growth, no matter how deleterious. But the blue eye never wavered in its cry for help.
Ahriman could only watch as other Space Marines rushed to Ohrmuzd’s side. Pavoni adepts doing their best to slow his explosive rate of hyper-evolution. Raptora warriors compressing the buckled plate of armour to his body.
None of it would work.
None of it would stop the flesh change.
Ahriman closed his eyes, but the image of Ohrmuzd’s last moments were seared into his memory. Tears spilled down his cheeks and his chest heaved with the soul-deep loss of his twin brother. No wound had ever cut so keenly, not even the death of his parents in a nano-phage outbreak in the Achaemenid Reconstruction Zone – news that had come indirectly via an Imperial communique.
Eventually the curse of the Thousand Sons would manifest in Ahriman’s flesh, churning within him even as he stood at the Emperor’s side and first met his sire.
His recall of the time following that reunion was fractured and broken – memories of agonising pain and weeping, of grief and moments of strange lucidity where it seemed he was attended by four figures, each of whom offered a different boon to save him.
But they were boons offered at a price.
One that his gene-sire would be forced to pay.
By the time he emerged from stasis, renewed like a butterfly departing its chrysalis, Ohrmuzd was dead.
He had known, of course; the bond between twins knew the least of things. The other’s death was a trauma that could not pass unfelt. Ahriman recalled Magnus’ words to him when he had brought him the news of how the flesh change had killed Ohrmuzd.
‘That’s the thing about betrayal. It always comes from within.’
Ahriman sank to his knees, his head bowed in sorrow.
Darkness engulfed him, endless and absolute.
No, not absolute, for a gleam of silver shone before him, a light that shimmered like a star on a moonless night.
He focused all his attention upon it.
The light grew stronger, like a mercury-bright hole in the night. Ahriman reached for it and closed his fist around the light. He turned his hand, opening his fingers, already suspecting what he would see.
A shimmering silver coin nestled in his callused palm, uneven around its pressed edges and stamped with an oak-leaf cluster that was fractionally off-centre. He flipped the coin over with his thumb, revealing the profile of a noble king with aquiline cheekbones, hawk-like nose and piercing eyes.
‘Dhul-Qarnayn,’ said Ahriman, and with the great king named, his surroundings changed once again.
The rushing waters of a cold river flowed before him, its far distant shore obscured by infinite darkness. Ahriman could see no boundaries to the space, only the fast-flowing river, but from whence it flowed was a mystery. The Reckoner stood at the water’s edge, an expectant look in the smouldering coals of his eyes.
The others who had come to the Seven Sleepers surrounded Ahriman in various states of disarray. Tolbek paced like a snarling attack dog, hurling bolts of phosphor-bright fire out over the ink-black waters of the river. Hathor Maat stared at his hands, weeping like an orphaned child, slamming his fists into the ground as though to purge his pain with further pain. Sanakht held a trembling blade to his own neck, as if contemplating slicing it deep into the meat of his throat.
Ahriman did not know what sorrows they had relived and offered, but knew they would at least be the equal of his.
Aforgomon alone stood unmoved, the daemon within the yokai’s body unfazed by notions of regret, pain or sorrow. The neverborn could not know such things. Yet another reason to hate them.
Ahriman looked down at the silver coin, the mirror of the one he wore around his neck. His mother had given one to each of her twin boys on the eve of their journey to the Legion trials before the walls of Susa.
‘Ohrmuzd,’ he said. ‘You are my price…’
Ahriman rose to his feet and strode towards the Reckoner. His eyes were wet with tears, his heart pierced by loss.
And this was but one of his sorrows.
Others vied for primacy in his mind: the faded memory of a doomed world named for the brightest star that heralds the dawn, the destruction of Prospero, the loss of so m
any brothers to the flesh change…
All painful, all part of the ever-growing tapestry of sorrows woven about him and which informed every facet of his personality. Each a grand tragedy to fill the world with tears, but none so personal as the loss represented by the coin nestled in his palm.
He held out his hand, offering it to the Reckoner.
‘If I give you this, will I still remember him?’ he asked.
‘You will,’ said the Reckoner, lifting the coin from Ahriman’s hand with long, tapered fingers that ended in curling nails encrusted with grave-dirt. ‘Why would I remove your pain? That would negate you suffering it.’
Ahriman nodded as the Reckoner slipped the coin within his robes. Pleasure rippled the creature’s form and Ahriman would have given anything to unleash his powers against the vampiric neverborn.
‘You have our sorrows,’ he said. ‘Now let us pass. Deliver what has been promised.’
‘Very well,’ said the Reckoner, moving between the Thousand Sons and taking some trinket or artefact from each of them, but ignoring Aforgomon. When he had taken his price from them all, he stood aside and gestured to the rushing waters of the icy river.
‘The way is open to you,’ said the Reckoner. ‘The river awaits.’
‘How do we cross it?’ demanded Tolbek, his grief replaced by anger.
‘You do not,’ said the Reckoner, stirring the water’s edge with the base of his staff. Ahriman had the gut-wrenching sensation of awful and terrible change being worked on the world by that seemingly mundane action.
‘Stop that,’ he said. ‘Now.’
The Reckoner’s eyes pulsed with dark amusement, but he did not stop his churning.
‘When the waters rose in the darkness in the wake of the endless flood, they flowed into your memory. They flowed into your blood. You feel that, do you not?’
‘We do,’ agreed Ahriman. ‘Now stop it or I will kill you.’
The Reckoner laughed. ‘No, Ahzek Ahriman, you will not. For there is a space on the walls above for your name, and it is entirely in my hands whether to etch it now or at your appointed time.’
‘I do not believe you,’ said Ahriman.
The Reckoner lifted his staff from the water and said, ‘Then try to kill me and see what happens.’
‘Not today, but I will return here and kill you.’
‘Maybe so. But no man ever steps in the river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.’
‘You would quote the Weeping Philosopher?’ said Ahriman, moving his mind into the fifth enumeration. ‘If that is the limit of your wisdom, then you are not so clever as you believe.’
‘Then walk out into the water and let its current guide you, and we will see how clever you truly are.’
Hathor Maat pushed past Ahriman and said, ‘Come on. Why are we even bothering to talk to this thing? Let’s get this over and done with.’
Tolbek and Sanakht joined the Pavoni adept at the water’s edge. They looked back at Ahriman expectantly and waded into the river, pushing down thoughts of wreaking harm upon the Reckoner.
Its waters flowed around him, and he could feel its bone-deep chill even through his boots. The river looked like water, but that was a lie. This was the essence of the Great Ocean, rendered in a manner comprehensible to mortal minds.
He looked back over his shoulder to ask the Reckoner one last question: ‘How do we return to you?’
‘When you have what you seek, the past will spit you back out,’ said the Reckoner.
‘And if we fail?’
‘Then you will die, for the past is obdurate and finds ways to rid itself of things that do not belong.’
Ahriman nodded. What else had he expected save more cryptic answers and doom-laden pronouncements?
He turned and said, ‘Move out,’ before leading them into the blackness of the water. The currents buffeted him as the water came to his thighs, then his midriff. Rogue currents and unseen riptides snatched at him, seeking to pull him this way and that, but he kept true to his path.
His steps slowed as the water reached his chest, then lapped over his shoulder guards. The cold grew more intense with every step he took. He heard the sharp hikes of breath made by his companions.
Water broke against his helmet, and flickering lights spun and danced like reflected firelight in his eyes. He kept going, even as the water flowed around and over him.
Sounds became deadened, vision contracted. All he could hear was the roaring of the water. All he could see was a frothing silt enfolding him. He tasted ashes and the reek of burning promethium. Scorched steel and molten flesh. His every breath was laced with fire, such that it felt as if his lungs were burning from the inside.
Ahriman felt the first stirring of fear in his breast, a feeling so alien, so unremembered, that for a moment he did not recognise it for what it was.
The power of the water was growing exponentially and every step became harder and harder to take. Though he had entered the river perpendicular to the water’s flow, it felt as though he was walking directly against an angry tide.
He leaned in to the deep current, forcing a defiant path onwards. Spiteful undertow battered him and tried to spin him around. Surge tides snatched his limbs, pulling him off balance, but Ahriman kept going.
He heard distorted voices in his helm, panicked and questioning, but indistinct over the rushing of the water. He felt his armour protest at what was being asked of it, servos hissing and joints locking as he fought the inexorable strength of the river.
Eventually, he could go no farther.
A slamming body-blow of current knocked him from his feet, and without that anchor to hold him in place, Ahriman was swept up by the water and borne away at the mercy of the Reckoner’s river of souls.
Sixteen
Out of the fire
A singular hatred
A fogged mirror
Amon broke the surface of an ocean and drew in a great breath of night air. His chest heaved as his lungs expanded and the swirling fireflies of light before his eyes began to recede. He took another breath as the greyness faded from his vision, the diminishing tunnel of light he had been drifting towards falling away from him.
His breathing coming at more regular intervals, Amon sought to find his bearings.
Where was he?
His last memory was of seeing his father’s face through the water as he was drawn inexorably into the depths. Spectral hands dragging him deeper underwater, lungs crying for air and the cold of the grave spreading through him.
He’d fought the things seeking to drown him until eventually they released him.
Had he overcome them or had they simply tired of him?
Putting aside such thoughts as irrelevant, Amon turned around in the water in search of a shore or landmark.
He found neither.
He was adrift upon a dark ocean, its waters rising and falling with powerful swells.
The Great Ocean? Was this its true face?
No, this was something else, something imagined only in dreams and now made real – a place where the only limits were those souls placed upon themselves.
Overhead a star-filled vault of night stretched from horizon to horizon, but none of the celestial arrangements were familiar to him.
Treading water in his heavy armour and sweeping his arms around to keep afloat, Amon felt the first stirrings of unease. War-plate could survive the hard vacuum of space, so it could easily survive immersion in water, but not when it was cracked and split open.
He could feel his weight increasing by the second. The spaces within his greaves were already heavy with water, and he felt every void within his armour gurgling as it filled.
Water spilled into his mouth and he spat it out.
It was fresh, without salt.
Not a conventi
onal ocean, then.
Amon blinked away a sudden onslaught of imagery flashing through the forefront of his mind in quick succession. These were no Corvidae visions of potential futures, but living recollections of things he had already experienced.
He relived fighting the Wolves on Prospero, experienced the joy of seeing the Emperor at Nikaea, before that joy turned to dismay. His chest swelled as he remembered marching at the forefront of the Great Crusade, and exploring ever more intricate and beautiful expressions of knowledge. He laughed as he remembered volumes he had not read in a century, music he had listened to as a boy and art he had wept upon seeing in an alien gallery.
‘The water is… memory.’
His efforts to stay afloat faltered and his head went under the surface. The ocean was not, as he had first supposed, water in the truest sense of the word. Liquid, yes, but so much more than water. Its substance was so fine it was silken and made up of so many infinitesimal particulates that every molecule within every droplet was a limitless repository of gathered wisdom. Lights swam in the depths, darting things that moved in pairs like mating birds rolling and diving in the air.
What were they?
He felt the essence of myriad lives and experiences unlived, the infinite complexity of the intersections between souls, and knew he swam in an ocean of ever-expanding knowledge.
I will swim this dream sea, he thought. I will hear every secret it has to show me.
Amon went under the water and, piece by piece, tore off his armour. Each plate sank into the darkness, and he sensed the ocean’s hunger to learn from it. The darting lights were drawn to it, seeking to know what alien suns had warmed it, what impacts had blistered its paint and what tales it could tell of the being who once wore it.
Freed from his armour, Amon revelled in his new-found lightness of being. He picked a direction and set off, his body energised and no longer pained by the terrible hurts it had endured.
Amon had no notion of how long he swam, each stroke and spray of water imparting fresh understandings and differing perspectives. He rolled onto his back, staring up at the unmoving stars, and only the expanding horizons within his mind gave Amon any clue as to the passage of time.