Lemuel looked up in horror.

“Sweet Inkosazana, Lady of Heaven save me,” he said.

Ahriman forgave the heathen imprecation as Lemuel took several deep breaths and wiped his mouth clean. He spat and said, “That’s… horrible, I mean to say, incredible… How… how did he know those soldiers were going to move at that moment?”

“Because across the street is an Athanaean captain named Uthizzar,” said Ahriman, indicating a warrior crouched in the cover of another fallen column. “He read the thoughts of their commander and told Hastar when they were going to move.”

“Incredible,” repeated Lemuel. “Simply incredible.”

Ahriman smiled, pleased that his Neophyte had so quickly accepted the fundamental powers of the Thousand Sons. The new Imperium’s unseemly rush to embrace secularism and reason had encouraged many of its subjects to abandon their sense of wonder. The new creed denied knowledge of the esoteric, condemning those who pursued such science as unclean sorcerers instead of embracing their work as simply a new form of understanding.

“You are a fast study, Lemuel,” said Ahriman, standing and rallying his warriors with a raised fist. “Now read the auras and tell me what you feel.”

Three hundred warriors, primarily Ahriman’s Sekhmet Terminators and veterans of the Scarab Occult, formed up alongside Uthizzar’s plate-armoured warriors.

“Pride,” said Lemuel, closing his eyes, “fierce pride in their abilities.”

“You can do better than that,” said Ahriman. “A child could tell me that of warriors. Reach out further.”

Lemuel’s breathing deepened, and Ahriman read the change in his aura as he forced himself into the lowest of the Enumerations. It was clumsily done and awkward, but it was more than most mortals could do.

How easy it was to forget that Ahriman had once not known how to rise through his states of consciousness. Teaching someone a task he found as natural as breathing made it easy to forget where the difficulties lay.

“Let it come naturally,” said Ahriman. “Be borne upon its waves and it will guide you to what you seek.”

Lemuel’s face eased as he caught the city’s emotional pulse, the fearful black of its populace, the angry crimson of its soldiers and the underlying golden pride that beat in every heart.

Ahriman sensed the violent spike of psychic energy a second before it hit.

It swept over them, a sudden, shocking blast of psychic noise that overwhelmed the senses with its sheer violence. Uthizzar cried out and dropped his weapon. Lemuel doubled over in pain, convulsing in spastic fits.

“What in the name of the Great Ocean was that?” cried Sobek. “A weapon?”

“A psychic shockwave,” gasped Uthizzar. “One of immense proportions.”

Ahriman forced the pain away and knelt beside Lemuel. The remembrancer’s face was a mask of blood. It wept from his eyes and poured in a steady stream from his nose.

“So strong?” asked Ahriman, still blinking away hazy afterimages. “Are you sure?”

Uthizzar nodded.

“I am,” he said. “It is a howl of pure rage, cold, jagged and merciless.”

Ahriman trusted Uthizzar’s judgement, tasting icy metal and feeling the rage of a hunter’s fury denied.

“Such a force of psychic might is too powerful for any normal mind,” said Uthizzar, reliving a painful memory. “I have felt this before.”

Ahriman read Uthizzar’s aura and knew.

“Leman Russ,” he said.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Library/Flesh Change/The Peacemaker

THEY PUSHED HIGHER into the Phoenix Crag. Ahriman’s First Fellowship linked with Hathor Maat’s 3rd in a gorge of artisans’ workshops, and scout elements of the Prospero Spireguard joined them in a region of hollowed out silo peaks. Drop-troops of the Ouranti Draks, with their scale cloaks and reptilian helmets, had seized the districts above Ahriman’s position, and parted to allow the purposeful Astartes past.

Reports of the fighting came in a haphazard jumble: a close range firefight in the south-western subsids, a swirling melee involving six thousand soldiers across the lower slopes of a manufacturing region in the mountain’s rumpled skirts, artillery duels on the northern residential flanks, dizzying aerial jousts fought between the disc-skimmers of the Thousand Sons and the last of the shrike-riders.

The reports intersected and cut across each other in blurted outbursts. Ahriman was barely able to sift meaning from the chaos. Through all the reports of impending victory and the destruction of enemy forces, two facts were abundantly clear.

The Word Bearers were advancing slowly, much slower than he would have expected.

The same could not be said of the Space Wolves.

Leman Russ and his First Great Company had dropped directly onto the silver mountain’s highest peak, extinguishing its eternal flame and toppling the symbols of rulership. The hearthguard of the Phoenix Court valiantly opposed the surging, unstoppable force of the Space Wolves, but they had been torn to scraps and hurled from the mountaintop.

The defeated kings offered terms of surrender, but Leman Russ was deaf to such pleas. He had sworn words of doom upon the Grand Annulus, and the Wolf King would never break an oath for something as trivial as mercy. The Space Wolves tore down through the mountain, an unstoppable force of nature, their blades and bolts gutting the defenders’ ranks like a butcher with a fresh carcass.

Nothing was left in their wake, the mountain city a work of art vandalised by thoughtless brutality and wanton savagery. Behind the warriors of Russ was only death, and before them was their next target for destruction: the Great Library of the Phoenix Crag, where Magnus the Red and Phosis T’kar’s 2nd Fellowship stood in ordered ranks.

Finally, the Space Wolves rampage was halted.

AHRIMAN LED HIS warriors across a yawning chasm on a slender causeway that arched up towards a wide plaza before an enormous glittering pyramid of glass and silver. Many of its gilded panes had been shattered in the battle, but it was still a magnificent structure, like the pyramid temples of Prospero, albeit on a much smaller scale.

“Russ’ warriors made a holy mess of this place,” said Hathor Maat, surveying the damage done to Phoenix Crag. “I’m inclined to agree with you, Ahzek.”

“About what?”

“That maybe all this was a waste of lives,” said Hathor Maat, surprising Ahriman with the sincerity he heard.

This far up the mountain, Ahriman could see its summit, a sagging silver peak that belched smoke instead of symbolic fire. Fires burned across the mountain’s heights, and from his vantage point on the causeway he saw that the lower reaches fared no better.

Ahead of him, kneeling Astartes in the livery of the 2nd Fellowship defended the end of the causeway. The Astartes had their bolters levelled, and he saw the shimmer of kine shields distorting the air before them.

Lemuel Gaumon caught up with Ahriman. The man’s complexion was ruddy, and smears of blood coated his cheeks.

“What’s going on?” asked Lemuel, between greedy heaves of thin air. “Can you see the Wolf King? Are his warriors in trouble?”

“Something like that,” agreed Ahriman. “They are in trouble. I just do not yet know of whose making.”

Ahriman shared a glance with Uthizzar, but his fellow captain shrugged in bewilderment. That wasn’t good. If a telepath couldn’t fathom what was going on, then he had little chance.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s find out what’s at the heart of this.”

The warriors at the end of the causeway lowered their bolters at his approach, and Ahriman saw wide gouges torn in their shoulder guards. These were not the neat slices of shrike claws, they were the maim-wounds of chainswords.

The grandeur of the Great Library reared above him in a shimmering vitreous slope of polarised glass. A vast golden gateway led inside, and Ahriman took a moment to relish the thought of exploring its farthest depths to unlock this world’s secrets.