“Russ is a superstitious savage,” said Magnus dismissively but not before Ahriman saw the shock at the Wolf King’s action. “He speaks out of turn about things he does not understand. The Emperor knows I am his most loyal son.”
“We shall see,” promised Mortarion.
The Death Lord turned away and marched towards the Emperor’s dais as a thunderous braying erupted from the warhorns of every Titan on Ullanor.
“Now what do you suppose he meant by that?” asked Phosis T’kar.
THE SEKHMET FULFILLED their duty of seeing their primarch to the Emperor’s sheared mountain podium, marching in procession alongside the honour guards of the nine primarchs who had come to Ullanor. To move in such elevated circles was a notion Ahriman found himself hard-pressed to comprehend.
The primarchs took their place upon the steel-sheathed dais and their honour guards were dismissed. The chance to parade before the Emperor was a once in a lifetime opportunity for most of the warriors.
To know a primarch was an honour, but to parade before nine of them in the presence of the Emperor was the stuff of dreams. Ahriman would march with his head held high before demi-gods made flesh, the apotheosis of humanity and genetic engineering, wrought from the bones of ancient science.
That twenty such beings could have been created was nothing short of miraculous, and as he surveyed the noble countenances around him, Ahriman suddenly felt very small, the tiniest cog in an ever-expanding machine. The notion of the titanic forces at work struck a powerful chord within him, and he felt the power of the Great Ocean swell in his breast. He saw his metaphor take shape in his mind’s eye, a magnificent, planet-sized machine of wondrous artifice working seamlessly in balance with its every cog, gear and piston. Those mighty pistons thundered, powering the greatest industry and causing the worlds around it to swell with new life and new beginnings.
In the midst of the machine he saw a piston stamped with a snarling wolfshead, its amber eyes glinting like gems. It fired up and down in a bank of similarly embossed piston heads, each with an emblematic design stamped upon it, a golden eye, a white eagle, a set of fanged jaws, a crowned skull.
Even as the image formed in his mind, he saw that the wolfshead piston was fractionally out of sync with the other pistons in the machine, working to a different beat, and gradually shifting its direction until it was completely in opposition to its fellows. The machine vibrated in protest, its harmonic balance upset by the rogue piston, and the squeal of metal grinding metal grew in volume.
Ahriman stumbled and let out a gasp of horror as he saw that the machine would soon tear itself apart. To see such an industrious machine destroyed and reduced to little more than wreckage by a previously unseen defect in its design was truly tragic.
He felt a hand on his arm and looked into the face of a standingly handsome warrior in the pearl-coloured plate of a Luna Wolf. The vision of the machine vanished from his mind, but the lingering sorrow of its imminent destruction creased Ahriman’s features with anguish.
“Are you well, brother?” asked the warrior with genuine concern.
“I am,” replied Ahriman, though he felt sick to his stomach.
“He says he’s fine,” said a massively shouldered brute behind the warrior. Taller than Ahriman, with a gleaming topknot crowning his skull, he radiated choler and the urge to continually prove himself. “Leave him be and let’s rejoin our companies. The march will begin soon.”
The warrior extended his hand, and Ahriman accepted the proffered grip.
“You will have to excuse Ezekyle,” said the warrior. “He forgets his manners sometimes, most of the time in fact. I am Hastur Sejanus, pleased to know you.”
“Ahzek Ahriman,” he said. “Sejanus? Ezekyle? You are Mournival.”
“Guilty as charged,” said Sejanus with a winning smile.
“I said those Custodes didn’t know security worth a damn,” said Phosis T’kar, pushing past Ahriman to pull Sejanus into a crushing embrace. “Damn, but it’s good to see you again, Hastur.”
Laughing, Sejanus pulled himself free of Phosis T’kar’s embrace and punched him on the shoulder as two more warriors in the livery of the Luna Wolves appeared at his side. “Good to see you too, brother. Nobody’s managed to kill you then?”
“Not for lack of trying,” said Phosis T’kar, standing back to regard the warriors before him. “Ezekyle Abaddon and Tarik Torgaddon, as I live and breathe, and Little Horus Aximand too. I still tell my brothers of the foes we faced together. Do you remember the battles in the Slaughterhouses of the Keylekid? Those damn dragons gave us a hard fight, and no mistake. There was one, remember Tarik? The one with the vivid blue hide that almost—”
Little Horus held up a hand to stall Phosis T’kar’s reminiscence.
“Perhaps we can gather after the Triumphal March?” he said, adding, “All of us. I would greatly like to meet your fellows and swap more outrageous tales of battle.”
Sejanus nodded.
“Absolutely,” he said, “for I have it on good authority that the Emperor has a great announcement to make. I, for one, do not want to miss it.”
“Announcement?” asked Ahriman as a shiver of premonition passed along his spine. “What sort of announcement?”
“The kind we’ll hear when we hear it,” growled Abaddon.
“No one knows,” said Sejanus with a diplomatic chuckle. “Horus Lupercal has not yet deigned to tell even his most trusted lieutenants.”
Sejanus looked back towards the podium with a grin.
“But whatever it is,” he said, “I suspect it will be of great import to us all.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
New Order/Tuition/Fresh Summons
STARS SWAM IN the glass of the crystal pyramid, faint shimmers of light that winked from the past, the light already thousands or even millions of years old. To be able to look into the past so clearly had always fascinated Ahriman, the notion that what you were seeing in the present was an echo of the past.
The air within the Photep’s Sanctum was cool, a precisely modulated climate that owed nothing to machine control. The floor was a spiral of black and white crystal, each piece hand-picked from the Reflecting Caves beneath Tizca and shaped by Magnus’ own hand.
Starlight glinted on the reflective chips, and gleamed from the silver threads and blood-drop pendants hanging from Magnus’ feathered cloak. The primarch stood immobile as a statue beneath the apex of the pyramid, his arms folded across his chest and his head tilted back to allow him to look out into the immensity of space.
When Magnus descended to the surface of a world, his pavilion was a re-creation of this inner sanctum, but it could never hope to capture the rarefied atmosphere that filled this place.
“Welcome, Ahriman,” said Magnus without averting his gaze from the stars. “You are just in time to watch Mechanicum Borealis with me. Come, join me in the centre.”
Ahriman walked the spiral, following the black chips towards the centre, letting the walk cleanse him of his negative thoughts in readiness for his walk out along the white spiral. He studied Magnus as he walked.
Ever since the conclusion of the Great Triumph, the primarch had been withdrawn and sullen. Hastur Sejanus had been right about the nature of the Emperor’s announcement; it had radically changed the universe in which they operated. For close to two hundred years, the Emperor, beloved by all, had led the Great Crusade from the front, fighting in the vanguard of humanity’s second expansion to the edges of the galaxy.
Those days were over, for the Emperor had announced his withdrawal from the fighting, telling his faithful warriors that the time had come for him to relinquish control of the Crusade to another. The Astartes had wept to hear that their beloved master was leaving them, but as epochal as this separation was, it was more than matched by the Emperor’s next pronouncement.