I can hear him climbing the steps of my tower.
He will think I have done this because of Ohrmuzd, and in a way he is right. But it is so much more than that.
I have destroyed my Legion: The Legion I loved, the Legion that saved me. I have destroyed the Legionhe tried to save, and when he kills me he will be right to do so.
I deserve no less, and perhaps much more.
Ah, but before he destroys me, I must tell you of our doom.
Yet where to begin?
There are no beginnings and no endings, especially upon worlds of the Great Ocean. Past, present and future are one, and time is a meaningless.
So it must be arbitrary, this place where I begin.
I will start with a mountain.
The Mountain that Eats Men.
BOOK ONE
IN THE KINGDOM OF THE BLIND
CHAPTER ONE
The Mountain that Eats Men/Captains/Observers
THE MOUNTAIN HAD existed for tens of thousands of years, a rearing landmass of rock that had been willed into existence by forces greater than any living inhabitant of Aghoru could imagine. Though its people had no knowledge of geology, the titanic forces of orogenic movement, compressional energies and isostatic uplift, they knew enough to know that the Mountain was too vast, too monumental, to be a natural formation.
Set in the heart of an undulating salt plain the ancients of the Aghoru claimed had once been at the bottom of an ocean, the Mountain rose to a height of nearly thirty kilometres, taller even than Olympus Mons, the great Fabricator’s forge on Mars.
It dominated the blazing, umber sky, a graceful, soaring peak shaped like an incredible tomb, crafted for some ancient king, of magnificent, cyclopean scale. No regular lines formed the mountain, and no artifice of mankind had shaped its rugged flanks, but one look at the Mountain was enough to convince even the most diehard sceptic that it had been crafted by unnatural means.
Nothing grew on its rocky sides, no plants, gorse or even the thinnest of prairie grasses. The earth surrounding the Mountain shimmered in the baking heat of the planet’s sun, which hung low on the horizon like an overripe fruit.
Despite the heat, the rocks of the Mountain were cold to the touch, smooth and slick as though freshly raised from the depths of a black ocean. Sunlight abhorred its sides, its shadowed valleys, sunken grabens and sheared clefts dark and cold, as though it had been built atop some frozen geyser that seeped its icy chill into the rock by some strange, geological osmosis.
Surrounding the rumpled skirts of the Mountain, scattered collections of raised stones, each taller than three men, were gathered in loose circles. Such monuments should have been towering achievements, incredible feats of engineering by a culture without access to mechanical lifting equipment, mass-reducing suspensor gear or the titanic engines of the Mechanicum. But in the face of the Mountain’s artificial origins they were primitive afterthoughts, specks against the stark, brooding immensity of its impossibility. On a world such as this, what force could raise a mountain?
None of the many people gathered on Aghoru could answer that question, though some of the greatest, most inquisitive and brilliant minds bent their every faculty to answer it.
To the Aghoru, the Mountain was the Axis Mundiof their world, a place of pilgrimage.
To the warrior-scholars of the Thousand Sons, the Mountain and its people were a curiosity, a puzzle to be solved and, potentially, the solution to a riddle their glorious leader had sought to unlock for nearly two centuries.
On one thing, both cultures agreed wholeheartedly. The Mountain was a place of the dead.
“CAN YOU SEE him?” asked the voice, distant and dreamlike.
“No.”
“He should be back by now,” pressed the voice, stronger now. “Why isn’t he back?”
Ahriman descended through the Enumerations, feeling the psychic presence of the three Astartes gathered beneath the scarlet canopy of his pavilion with senses beyond the rudimentary ones nature had seen fit to gift him. Their potent psyches hummed through their flesh like chained thunder, that of Phosis T’kar tense and choleric, Hathor Maat’s lugubrious and rigidly controlled.
Sobek’s aetheric field was a tiny candle next to the blazing suns they carried within them.
Ahriman felt his subtle body mesh with his physical form, and opened his eyes. He broke the link with his Tutelary and looked up at Phosis T’kar. The sun was low, yet still powerfully bright, and he squinted against it, shielding his eyes from the reflected glare of sunlight from the salt flats.
“Well?” demanded Phosis T’kar.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Aaetpio can see no farther than the deadstones.”
“Nor can Utipa,” said Phosis T’kar, squatting on his haunches and flicking up puffs of salt dust with irritated thoughts. Ahriman felt each one like an electric spark in his mind. “Why can’t the Tutelaries see beyond them?”
“Who knows?” asked Ahriman, more troubled than he cared to admit.
“I thought you’d be able to see further. You’re Corvidae after all.”
“That wouldn’t help here,” said Ahriman, rising smoothly from a cross-legged position, and dusting glittering salt crystals from the inscribed crimson plates of his armour. His body felt stiff, and it took a moment for muscle memory to reassert control of his limbs after a flight in the aether.
“In any case,” he said, “I don’t think it would be wise to try on this world. The walls between us and the Great Ocean are thin, and there’s a lot of unchannelled energy here.”
“You’re probably right,” agreed Phosis T’kar, sweat dripping down his shaven scalp along the line of an elliptical scar that ran from his crown to the nape of his neck. “You think that’s why we linger on this planet?”
“Entirely likely,” said Ahriman. “There is power here, but the Aghoru have lived in balance for centuries without suffering any ill-effects or mutations. That has to be worth investigating.”
“Indeed it is,” said Hathor Maat, apparently unaffected by the furnace heat. “There’s precious little else of interest on this parched rock. And I don’t trust the Aghoru. I think they’re hiding something. How does anyone live in a place like this for so long without any signs of mutation?”
Ahriman noted the venom with which his fellow captain spat the last word. Unlike Ahriman or Phosis T’kar, Hathor Maat’s skin was pale, like the smoothest marble, his golden hair like that painted on the heroic mosaics of the Athenaeum. Not a bead of sweat befouled Maat’s sculpted features.
“I don’t care how they’ve done it,” said Phosis T’kar. “This place bores me. It’s been six months, and we should be making war in the Ark Reach Cluster. Lorgar’s 47th are expecting us, Russ too. And trust me, you don’t want to keep the Wolves waiting any longer than you must.”
“The primarch says we stay, so we stay,” said Ahriman.
Sobek, his dutiful Practicus, stepped forward and offered him a goblet of water. Ahriman drained the cool liquid in a single swallow. He shook his head when Sobek held a bronze hes out to refill it.
“No, take it to remembrancer Eris,” he commanded. “She is at the deadstones and has more need of it than I.”
Sobek nodded and left the shade of the canopy without another word. Ahriman’s battle-plate cooled him, recycling the moisture of his body and turning aside the worst of the searing heat. The remembrancers that had come to the planet’s surface were not so fortunately equipped, and dozens had already been returned to the Photep’s Medicae decks suffering from heatstroke and dehydration.