“As word of their power spread throughout the adepts of Tizca, devotees flocked to study at their feet, hungry to learn the new ways to harness the power of the Great Ocean.”
“And what of you?” asked Lemuel. “Why did you not become a cult leader?”
“Because I became the Magus,” said the primarch, “Master of all the cults.”
“Magus? That’s the highest rank isn’t it?” asked Lemuel.
“No,” said Magnus, “there is one rank above it, that of Ipsissimus, a being free from limitations, who lives in balance with the corporeal and incorporeal universe; for all intents and purposes, a perfect being.”
Lemuel heard Magnus’ pride and knew there could be only one man in creation that could match such a description, one man who Magnus looked up to above all others.
“The Emperor, beloved by all,” said Lemuel.
Magnus smiled and nodded, folding his arms across his wide chest.
“Indeed, Lemuel,” he said, “the Emperor. And it is with news of my father I come to the Library of Ahriman.”
Lemuel was instantly alert. Any scrap of information about the Emperor, the architect of humanity’s fate, and the powerhouse behind the monumental undertaking of the Great Crusade, was eagerly seized upon by the remembrancers. To hear such news first-hand from one of the primarchs would be an honour indeed.
“Now that the last elements of the Legion have rendezvoused, we are summoned to my father’s side once more.”
“Are we returning to Terra?” asked Ahriman. “Is it time?”
Magnus hesitated, deliberately teasing the moment out.
“It is not for Terra that we set our course, but the Emperor promises the most serious of conclaves, the most momentous of gatherings, where the greatest questions of the age are to be debated.”
Lemuel gasped. Such news was grand indeed, but there was more to this singular piece of information than Magnus was letting on.
He smiled, buoyed up with sudden confidence.
“There’s more isn’t there, my lord?” he asked.
“He is perceptive, this one,” said Magnus with a nod to Ahriman. “I think you are right, my friend; a stint with Uthizzar will hone his abilities nicely.”
Magnus turned to Lemuel once more and said, “This conclave will be the crux of our Legion’s existence, my friend. This will be our defining moment, where the Emperor at last acknowledges our worth.”
“You have seen this, my lord?” asked Ahriman.
“I have seen many things,” said Magnus. “Great events are in motion, the wheel of history is on the turn and the Thousand Sons will be at the forefront of the new universal order.”
“Where will this gathering take place?” asked Ahriman.
“Far from here,” said Magnus, “on a world named Nikaea.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nikaea/Thrown to the Wolves/The Emperor’s Right Hand
CATARACT CLOUDS OBSCURED the surface, a striated covering shot through with pyroclastic sparks and umber lightning. Nikaea was a new world, its geology unfinished and its final form not yet set. Tectonic movement and kilometres-deep pressure waves rippled below the crust, sending shockwaves through the mantle, and ripping some continents apart while slamming others together.
Two Stormbirds and a Stormhawk knifed through the clouds like swooping birds of prey, their crimson hulls painted with corrosive rain as they descended through the volatile atmosphere. Nikaea was a world in flux, its character in the throes of violent birth.
Space around the planet was a choppy soup of electromagnetic static, the approaches lousy with spatial debris caught in the whirling, inconstant gravity waves that rendered geomagnetic guidance systems inoperative.
Only by following a constant beacon of incandescent light that speared into the heavens from the world below could any craft hope to navigate the Nikaea system. To attempt to find Nikaea, let alone a fixed point on its surface without the aid of this signal would have been impossible for any but the luckiest pilots in the galaxy. It had taken an entire year for the 28th Expedition to travel from Hexium Minora to this remote corner of the galaxy.
Ahriman sat up front in Scarab Prime, the consoles before the pilots alive with flickering lights, vector diagrams and tri-dimensional contour maps of the jagged terrain. Pulsing cables connected the pilots to the avionics package, allowing them to fly purely on instruments, which was just as well, as the juddering canopy of the cockpit was smeared with ash and smoke.
Though the thought was faintly blasphemous, Ahriman hoped the Machine-God was watching over them. To lose control above such a hostile world was as sure a death sentence as could be envisaged.
Not that the pilots were actually guiding the Stormbird; that duty fell to Jeter Innovence, the Navigator strapped to the converted gravity harness where Ahriman normally performed his close-protection duties when flying into harm’s way. Innovence had protested at being forced to leave his hermetic dome aboard the Photep, but had recanted his objections when told who he would be guiding and whose light he would be following.
Magnus the Red sat behind the Navigator, resplendent in a gloriously embroidered tunic of red and gold, shawled with a weave of golden mail hung with feathers and precious stones. In honour of the occasion, each of Magnus’ forearms was sheathed in an eagle-stamped vambrace, and he wore an entwined lightning bolt girdle around his torso.
His hair was loose, glossy and mirror sheened, the colour of arterial blood.
No finer warrior scholar existed in the galaxy.
The slight form of Mahavastu Kallimakus sat beside Magnus, the heavy robes he wore unable to mask his gaunt frame. Kallimakus was venerable, as Lemuel had described, but Ahriman had not realised how much the primarch’s control over him was costing the remembrancer. A heavy satchel of blank books rested against the fuselage, fresh pages for the scrivener to fill with Magnus’ words and deeds.
Ahriman caught the primarch’s eye, today an excited eclipse of pale blue and hazel flecks.
“We are close, Ahzek,” said Magnus, “in every sense.”
“Yes, my lord. We land in less than ten minutes.”
“So long? I could have guided us in half the time!” cried Magnus, glaring at the recumbent form of the Navigator. His anger was false, and he laughed.
Magnus slapped a luminescent hand upon the Navigator’s shoulder, causing him to flinch.
“Ah, don’t mind me, Innovence,” said Magnus. “I’m simply impatient to see my father once more. You are doing a grand job, my friend!”
Ahriman smiled. The melancholy that wreathed Magnus’ soul after Ullanor had dispelled when word came of the conclave on Nikaea. The year spent traversing the immaterium from Hexium Minora had seen a frenzy of research and study aboard the Photepas Magnus handed out theoretical proofs, philosophical arguments and convoluted logic conundrums for his sons to solve in order to sharpen their minds. Nikaea promised to be the vindication of the Thousand Sons, and neither Magnus nor his Legion would be found wanting.
Ahriman turned back to the cockpit. According to the unwinding telemetry, they were practically on top of their destination, but the cloud cover was still impenetrable.
“Taking us down,” intoned the pilot. “Beginning approach. Ground landing protocols exchanged and verified. Tether signal accepted and control relinquished.”
The pilots sat back as control of the aircraft was surrendered to Custodes ground controllers. The aircraft dipped its nose and went into a steep, looping descent. Ahriman had a brief, sinking sensation in his gut before his enhanced physiology compensated. The clouds streaked past the canopy. The glass slithered with moisture and streaks of grey, muddy ash.
Then they were below it, and the landscape of Nikaea was laid out before them.
It was black and geometric, a profusion of angular debris strewn upon the ground like the primordial shapes that lay at the heart of everything, and which had yet to be cloaked with the lie of individuality. Perfect spheres rose from the basalt ground, rippled with the liquid lines of their formation. Vast cubes sat side by side upon stepped volcanic plains, arranged in convoluted patterns that seemed a little too random to be random at all.