"It is not simplicity, Ahzek," said Magnus as the surviving Thousand Sons gathered around him. "It is clarity of purpose."

"Is there a difference?"

"Time will tell," said Magnus.

"Then we are truly finished here?" asked Uthizzar.

"We are," confirmed Magnus. "What drew us here is no more, but I have uncovered the existence of a prize beyond measure."

"What manner of prize?" asked Ahriman.

"All in good time, Ahzek," said Magnus with a knowing smile. "All in good time."

BOOK TWO.

MUTATIS MUTANDIS.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Shrike/A Good War/The Wolf King DAWN WAS ONLY a few hours old and the battle for Raven's Aerie 93 was won. The slender, feather-cloaked bodies of its defenders lay strewn around its craggy ramparts. Thanks to the foresight of the Corvidae, the battle to take the hidden crag had been a ma.s.sacre.

Six months of flying the Great Ocean on the hunt for strands of the future and constant war had drained those warriors of the Thousand Sons Magnus had led to answer Russ' summons. They had been bled white matching the war pace of the s.p.a.ce Wolves.

The air in the southern polar mountains was thin and lung-bitingly cold, but it was a welcome change from the heat of Aghoru. Ahriman did not feel the cold, but the soldiers of the Prospero Spireguard were not so fortunate. To survive the sub-zero temperatures, they wore thick crimson greatcoats, heavy boots and silver shakoes, lined with fur cut from the wings of the snow-shrikes used by the Avenians as brutally effective line-breakers.

Ahriman, Hathor Maat and Phosis T'kar sat with three hundred Astartes attending to their wargear in the ruins of the mountain fortress. They cleaned their bolters and repaired chips in their armour while Apothecaries tended to the few wounded.

Dead Avenians littered the toppled battlements and shattered redoubts, a drop in the ocean compared to how many had died since the invasion of Heliosa had begun. Ahriman estimated they had killed close to three million of their warriors.

"Five thousand," said Sobek, returning from tallying the dead.

"Five thousand," repeated Phosis T'kar. "Hardly any. I told you there wasn't as much of a fight in this one as the last."

Phosis T'kar's bolter floated in the air in front of him, the weapon disa.s.sembled and looking like a three-dimensional diagram in an armourer's manual. A cleaning cloth and a vial of lubricating oil moved of their own accord through its parts, guided by Phosis T'kar's Tutelary. The faint glow of Utipa formed a haze around the components, as if a ghostly Techmarine attended the gun.

Hathor Maat's weapon sat next to him, gleaming as though lifted fresh from the sterile wrapping of a packing crate. He had no need to even strip down his weapon, and simply disa.s.sembled the molecular structure of the grease, dirt and foreign particles from the weapon's moving parts with the power of his mind.

Ahriman worked a wide-bore brush down the barrel of his bolter, enjoying the tactile, hands-on approach to weapon maintenance. Aaetpio hovered at his shoulder, but he had no wish to employ his Tutelary for so menial a task as cleaning his bolt gun. It was too easy to forget that while ensconced in one of the expedition fleet's many libraries or meditating alone in an invocation chamber.

In the six-week journey to the Ark Reach Cl.u.s.ter, Ahriman had spent much of his time with Ohthere Wyrdmake, the Rune Priest proving to be an entertaining companion. Though the terms they used for their abilities were very different, they found they had more in common than either of them had imagined.

Wyrdmake taught Ahriman the casting of the runes, and how to use them to answer vexing questions and gain insight into matters of inner turmoil. As a means of reading the future, they were a less precise method than those taught by the Corvidae, for their meanings required much in the way of interpretation. Wyrdmake also taught him the secret of bind-runes, whereby the properties of several different runes could be combined to draw similarly-attuned aetheric energies towards an object or person.

Wyrdmake's chest and arms were tattooed with numerous bind-runes: runes for strength, runes for health and runes for steadfastness. None, Ahriman noticed, were for power. When he asked Wyrdmake about this, the Rune Priest had given him a strange look and said, "To speak of possessing power is as foolish as saying you own the air in your lungs."

In return, Ahriman taught the s.p.a.ce Wolf more subtle means of manipulating the energies of the Great Ocean. Wyrdmake was skilled, but his Legion's teachings were tribal and violent in the drama of their effect. The calling of the tempest, the sundering of the earth and the rising of the seas were the currency of the Rune Priests. Ahriman honed Wyrdmake's abilities, inducting him into the outer mysteries of the Corvidae and the rites of Prospero.

The first part of this was introducing him to the concept of Tutelaries.

At first, Wyrdmake had been shocked that the Thousand Sons employed such creatures, but Ahriman believed he had come to accept that they were little different from the wolves that accompanied the s.p.a.ce Wolves. Wyrdmake's companion, a silver-furred beast named Ymir, had been less accepting, and whenever Ahriman summoned Aaetpio, the wolf howled furiously and bared its fangs in expectation of a fight.

Such secrets had never before been taught to an outsider, but Magnus himself had sanctioned Ahriman's work with Wyrdmake, reasoning that if a Legion such as the s.p.a.ce Wolves could be turned into allies through understanding and careful education, then other Legions would surely present few problems.

Though Ohthere Wyrdmake was a frequent visitor to the Photep, Lord Skarssen preferred to keep to his own vessel, a lean, predatory blade named the Spear of Fenris.

"Do you want me to help you with that?" grinned Hathor Maat, displaying a perfect smile of brilliantly white teeth. His hair was dark today, his eyes a deep brown. Though his features were still recognisably his own, they had taken on a rugged look, as if mirroring the terrain they had so recently fought over.

"No," said Ahriman. "I do not use my powers to accomplish things I can do without them. You should not either. When was the last time either of you used your hands to clean a bolter?"

Phosis T'kar looked up and shrugged.

"A long time ago," he said. "Why?"

"Do you even remember how to do it?"

"Of course," said Phosis T'kar, "How do you think I do this?"

"Spare us yet another *we shouldn't rely too much on our powers' lecture," groaned Hathor Maat. "Look at what would have happened to us on Aghoru if we had followed your teachings. The primarch might have died without Phosis T'kar's kine shield. And without my mastery of biomancy, T'kar certainly would be dead."

"As you've never let me forget," grumbled Phosis T'kar.

"Astartes first, psykers second," said Ahriman. "We forget that at our peril."

"Fine," said Phosis T'kar, dismissing Utipa and bringing the components of his weapon to his hands. He slotted the gun back together with a pleasing series of metallic clicks and snaps. "Happy now?"

"Much happier," said Ahriman, rea.s.sembling his own bolter.

"What's the matter?" asked Hathor Maat. "Are you afraid your new friend will disapprove?"

Phosis T'kar spat over the edge of the rampart, his spit falling thousands of feet.

"That d.a.m.ned Wyrdmake shadows us like a psychneuein with the taste of an unguarded psyker in its mandibles," he hissed, his anger fierce and sudden. "We could have won this war months ago but for the shackles you put on us."

Phosis T'kar jabbed an accusing fist at the smoking remnants of the tallest peak of the mountain aerie.

"The primarch shows no such restraint, Ahzek, why should we?" he asked. "Are you so afraid of what we can do?"

"Maybe I am," said Ahriman. "Maybe we all should be. Not so long ago, we hid our powers from the world. Now you use them like mere cantrips to save you getting your hands dirty. Sometimes it is necessary to climb down into the mud."

"Climb down into the mud, and all you will get is muddy," said Hathor Maat.

"Not much in the way of mud on this world," said Phosis T'kar. "These aeries put up little fight. How this planet has held out for so long is a mystery to me."

"The bird-warriors are stretched thinly now," Hathor Maat pointed out. "The Wolves have seen to that. And what Russ and his warriors haven't savaged, the Word Bearers have put to the flame. An entire mountain range was burned out with a saturation promethium bombing three days ago to cleanse the aeries that Ahzek and Ankhu Anen found."

"Cleanse?"

"Kor Phaeron's word," said Hathor Maat with a shrug. "It seemed appropriate."

Kor Phaeron was one of Lorgar's chief lieutenants, and epitomised all that Ahriman disliked about the Word Bearers. The man's mind was filled with zealous certainties that could not be shaken by logic, reason or debate.

"A waste of lives," said Ahriman, looking at the bodies the Spireguard were carrying from the broken fortress and arranging in neat lines for incineration.

"An unavoidable one," responded Hathor Maat.

"Was it?" said Ahriman. "I am not so sure."

"Lorgar led negotiations with the Phoenix Court," said Phosis T'kar. "A primarch no less, yet every attempt was rejected. What more proof do you need that these cultures are degenerate?"

Ahriman did not answer, having renewed his acquaintance with the Word Bearers' gold-skinned primarch at the greeting ceremony held to honour the arrival of the Thousand Sons. It had been a glittering day of overblown ritual and proselytising, as pointless as it was time-consuming.

Leman Russ had not attended the ceremony, nor even bothered to send representatives. He and his huscarls were at war in the soaring peaks of the east, and did not waste time with ceremony when there was fighting to be done.

For once, Ahriman found himself in complete accord with the Wolf King.

He put thoughts of the XVII Legion from his mind and turned his gaze upwards. A too-wide, too-blue sky yawned above him, and omnipresent clouds of birds filled the air: wheeling, black-winged corvus, long-legged migratory birds and circling carrion eaters.

Ahriman had seen altogether too many of the latter in the past six months.

THE THOUSAND SONS had proven to be instrumental in breaking open the defences of the Ark Reach Cl.u.s.ter, their additional weight of force tipping the balance of war in favour of the Imperium.

First contact with the disparate cultures of the binary cl.u.s.ter had been made two years previously, when scout ships of the Word Bearers' 47th Expeditionary Fleet discovered six systems linked together by trade and mutually supporting defence networks.

Four of those systems had fallen to the combined forces of the Word Bearers and the s.p.a.ce Wolves, the fifth soon after the arrival of the Thousand Sons. Only the Avenians remained to be conquered.

The defeated empires all stemmed from an incredibly diverse genetic baseline, far removed from the archetypal human genome by millennia of separation from the world of their birth. Mechanic.u.m geneticists confirmed such variances were within tolerable parameters, and thus Magnus had arrived in expectation of acquiring treasure troves of acc.u.mulated knowledge in the wake of compliance.

He was to be sorely disappointed.

Ahriman had seen a taste of the war the s.p.a.ce Wolves made on Aghoru, but the scale of what Russ' Legion left in their wake was nothing short of genocide. Their single-minded savagery left no room for anything other than the foe's complete and utter destruction.

Nor were the Word Bearers any more forgiving. In the wake of their triumphs, great monuments were carved in the flanks of the mountains, ten-thousand metre high representations of the Emperor and his conquests. Such a blatant challenge to the Emperor's edict on such things set a dangerous precedent, and Ahriman was uncomfortable with such behaviour.

Kor Phaeron had declared vast swathes of the indigenous culture unwholesome, resulting in virtually every repository of knowledge, art, literature and history being burned to ashes.

From Ahriman's perusal of the encounter logs, it appeared that Lorgar and Kor Phaeron had met with the Phoenix Court, a polyarchal leadership of the various worlds' kings and system lords, offering numerous overtures to entice them into the fold of the Imperium. Despite his best efforts, Ahriman could find no record of what these overtures had comprised.

In any event, all had been rejected, and thus the war of compliance had been unavoidable.

The histories of the Great Crusade would record it as a just war, a good war.

The subjugation of the Avenians had begun well, with the outer worlds falling quickly to the combined Imperial forces, but Heliosa, the cardinal world of their empire, had proven a tougher nut to crack.

Violent tectonic forces in ages past had shaped its landscape into three enormous continents almost entirely composed of jagged, mountainous terrain separated by wide expanses of azure seas. Its people lived in silver towers that clung to the flanks of the tallest peaks, with glittering, feather-light bridges spanning the chasms between them, while their people soared on billowing thermals on the backs of graceful aerial beasts.

As well as this lost strand of humanity, Helios was a world that belonged to the creatures of the air. The skies were alive with flocks of every description, from tiny, insect-sized creatures that fed on guano to rabid pterosaurs that hunted from lairs in hollowed-out peaks. More than one Imperial craft had been lost to bird strikes before weapon systems were modified to provide continuous clearance fire.

Its air was clean and its skies boundless. It reminded Ahriman of Prospero.

Ark Reach Secundus was the Imperial Cartographer designation for this world, a convenient label that began the process of a.s.similation before envoys were even despatched or shots fired in anger. Its people called it Heliosa, but the Imperial Army had another name for it, a name synonymous with the razor-beaked killers that were the bane of soldiers forced to a.s.sault the aerie fortresses.

They called it Shrike.

SINCE AGHORU, THE power of Ahriman's cult had risen, buoyed by unexpected swells in the Great Ocean, and the Corvidae were saving Imperial lives. They had seen echoes of future events, returning to their bodies with the locations of their enemies' hidden aeries and foreknowledge of their ambush tactics.

Armed with such vital intelligence, the Thousand Sons and the Prospero Spireguard had launched a campaign of coordinated a.s.saults on the aeries housing the fighter aircraft protecting the princ.i.p.al strongpoints of the Avenian defence network.

Magnus himself led many of the a.s.saults, wielding the power of the Great Ocean like weapons that could be drawn or sheathed at any time. No force could stand against him, his mastery of time and s.p.a.ce, force and matter beyond the reach of even his most gifted followers.

While the Word Bearers quelled the civilian population of outlying mountain cities, the Thousand Sons cleared a path for the s.p.a.ce Wolves to deliver the deathblow to the heart of the Avenian Empire. With the fall of Raven's Aerie 93, that battle was days away at most.

Ahriman walked the line of dead bodies, stopping to examine one of the Avenian warriors whose body had not been too brutally destroyed in the fighting. Aaetpio flickered at his shoulder, flitting down to the dead body to enhance the fading patterns of the soldier's aura.

Fear, anger and confusion were all that remained of the man's imprint on the world: fear that he was going to die here, anger at these inhuman invaders for defiling their homeland, and confusion... confusion born of not knowing why. Ahriman was surprised at this last emotion. How could he not know why the Imperium's forces were making war against his world?

The dead man wore thin black armour, form-fitting and gracefully proportioned to match his tall, overly slender form. A two-headed shrike with outstretched wings was moulded into the chest piece, an icon so similar to the Imperial bird of union that it was almost inconceivable that these warriors were enemies.

The Avenians were graceful and fine-boned, their facial features sharp and angular, like the mountains in which they lived. Their bodies appeared weak and fragile, but that was a lie. Autopsies had discovered bones that were flexible and strong, and their armour was augmented with fibre-bundle muscles not dissimilar to those within Astartes battle armour.

Ahriman smelled hot animal sweat, recognising the sharp, bitter tang of ice and claw that were the hallmarks of a Fenrisian wolf. The wolf barked, and Aaetpio fled to the aether. Ahriman turned to find himself face to face with a fang-filled maw and amber eyes that wanted nothing more than to devour him. Behind the wolf stood Ohthere Wyrdmake, wrapped in a wolf-pelt cloak. He looked past Ahriman to the dead bodies.

"A strange form to take on a world of mountains," said Wyrdmake.

"Proof that life can sometimes buck the odds," agreed Ahriman.

"Aye, you have the truth of it. Just look at Fenris. What sane form of life would choose to evolve on a world so hostile? Yet it teems with life: drakes, kraken and wolves."

"There are no wolves on Fenris," said Ahriman absently, remembering Magnus' words on the subject.

"What did you say?"

"Nothing," said Ahriman, hearing the warning tone in the Rune Priest's voice. "Just a scurrilous rumour I heard."