Ahriman: The Dead Oracle Read Free Page A

acknowledge my greeting. He did not acknowledge me at all. He is many things, but never weak.
    Astraeos sent something that I felt but did not hear. I was looking at the other figure who walked at Ahriman’s side.
    Sanakht returned my look. His movements were relaxed, yet precise. His face was hidden by the silver-fronted helm that he had worn since the fall of Prospero. His twin swords hung close to his hands, the hilt of one the head of a jackal, the other that of a hawk. Besides Ahriman himself there was only one other of our brothers that I would have been less pleased to find still breathing.
    He said nothing. And for that, at least, I was grateful.
    +This is all that you are taking with us?+ I asked.
    +This is all that is needed,+ replied Ahriman.
    +You are lying, brother,+ I sent to him alone. +The aether here is bloated. It is ready to tear. Your tamed renegade is right. Something has waited here for you to return. You cannot be blind to that.+
    He did not reply, but I could feel his thoughts turning over. He had received my words. +You are not blind to it, are you?+
    We boarded the gunship in silence, and the world became the thrum of its engines and the red-stained light of alert lamps. Ahriman was a still statue, his face hidden beneath the high horned helm, his thoughts behind hard walls of will.
    +It is not all that is needed, is it?+ I needled at him, my own thoughts turning in my head as my fingers tapped the silver half of my staff. +You do not want anyone else to see, do you? You want what we are here to do to remain a secret.+
    Ahriman turned his head to me. Beside him Astraeos and Sanakht stirred, and the gunship shivered on through the void.
    He did not answer.
    The silence followed us through the moon. A tunnel threaded its substance, leading ever deeper, though with every turn we had felt as though we were travelling further from the centre. We walked from the gunship, mist coiling around us, swallowing the passage beyond and hiding what waited. The eyes of the Rubricae glowed with green halos, and voices seeped from them, whispering just beyond hearing. Ahriman remained quiet, and Astraeos followed his example. Sanakht alone had reacted to the deadness of the place. He had drawn his swords, and walked with them held loosely at his sides.
    +Was it like this before?+ I asked, and my thought-voice echoed as sound in the mist.
    …like this before?
    …before?
    Ahriman half turned his head.
    ‘No,’ he said with his true voice, the sound of it flat and dead in the still air. ‘It was not like this.’
    ‘That does not give you pause?’ I halted in my stride. Ahriman did not stop or deign to answer. After a second I followed, my staff clicking dully on the passage floor.
    ‘Well that is reassuring,’ I muttered to myself.
    It was not the nature of the moon that troubled me. I am a creature who has lived many lives of mortals in a realm saturated by the stuff of manifest insanity. I have walked between worlds with a single step, and seen cities raised from nothing with a gesture. The warp is a place of horror, make no mistake, but it holds no terror of strangeness for me. But within that dead-glass moon my instincts were screaming to turn back, pact with Ahriman or no.
    The warp was there – it lapped through the air and the polished glass of the walls. The substance of the place itself buzzed with the stuff of impossibility. What worried me was that it was quiet, calm, and as featureless as the surface of a deep, stagnant pool. The warp is life. It is change eternal, and the power of unbounded possibility, but here it hung over everything like a lank shroud.
    And as I followed Ahriman, the Rubricae walking in lockstep behind us, the worse thing was that I was beginning to recognise its texture.
    I was opening my mouth to speak when we reached the Oracle.
    One moment we were walking through the mist-filled tunnels, and the next we were standing in a spherical chamber of polished stone. No door broke