The sky was a darker shade of yellow brown. The light would never really fade, so he wasn’t worried about negotiating the descent.
“This is amazing,” said Kallista, looking back the way they had climbed. “You were so right, Lemuel.”
“Yeah,” agreed Camille, taking out her picter. “Not bad at all.”
Lemuel shook his head.
“No, not the salt flats. Over there,” he said, waving towards a row of spiked rocks that looked like slender stalagmites at the edge of the plateau. If the artificiality of the Mountain had ever been in doubt, the sight of the stalagmites, which were clearly the remains of fluted balustrades, would have dispelled it.
“Over there,” he said between gulps of air. “Look over there.”
Camille and Kallista walked over to the stalagmites, and he saw the amazement in their body language. He smiled, pleased that he hadn’t let them down with his talk of a spectacular view. He stood up and stretched his back. His breath was returning to normal, but the drumming in his ears hadn’t let up one bit.
“You weren’t wrong to call it a temple,” said Camille, looking down into the valley.
“Yes, it’s quite a view, isn’t it?” said Lemuel, regaining some of his composure.
“It is, but that’s not what I mean.”
“It’s not?” he asked, finally realising that the drumming he was hearing wasn’t in his head. It was coming from the valley, a haunting, relentless beat that was hypnotic and threatening at the same time. The percussive booms of scores of drums interleaved with brutal disharmony, plucking at Lemuel’s nerves and sending tremors of unease down his spine.
Intrigued, he walked stiffly on tired legs to join the two women at the edge of the plateau.
He put a hand on Camille’s shoulder and looked down into the valley. His eyes widened and his jaw hung open in surprise. “Throne of Terra!” he said.
AHRIMAN HEARD THE drums, recognising the dissonant notes echoing from the Mountain as those once declared forbidden in an ancient age. Nothing good could come of such a sound, and Ahriman felt certain that something unnatural was being orchestrated within the valley. The Sekhmet matched his pace, their heavy suits driven on by uncompromising will and strength.
“This bodes ill,” said Phosis T’kar, as the drums grew louder. “Damn, but I do not like this place. I am blind here.”
“We all are,” replied Hathor Maat, looking towards the upper reaches of the valley.
Ahriman shared Phosis T’kar’s hatred of the blindness. As one of the Legion’s Adept Exemptus, he had attained supreme summits of mastery, aetheric flight, connection with a Tutelary, and the rites of evocation and invocation. The Sekhmet were powerful warrior-mages, and could call forth powers mortal men could never dream of wielding. On his own, each warrior was capable of subduing worlds, but in this place, with their powers denied them, they were simply Astartes.
SimplyAstartes, thought Ahriman with a smile. How arrogant that sounds.
Even as he scanned the valley ahead, Ahriman began forming the basis of a treatise for his grimoire, a discourse on the perils of dependence and overweening pride.
“There is a lesson here,” he said. “It will do us good to face this without our powers. We have become lax in making war as it was once made.”
“Always the teacher, eh?” said Phosis T’kar.
“Always,” agreed Ahriman, “and always the student. Every experience is an opportunity to learn.”
“So what lesson can I possibly learn here?” demanded Hathor Maat. Of them all, Maat had the greatest dread of powerlessness, and the walk into the Mountain had tested his courage in ways beyond what they had faced before.
“We depend on our abilities to define us,” said Ahriman, feeling the bass vibration of the drums through the soles of his armoured boots. “We must learn to fight as Astartes again.”
“Why?” demanded Hathor Maat. “We have been gifted with power. The power of the Primordial Creator is in all of us, so why should we not use it?”
Ahriman shook his head. Like him, Hathor Maat had faced the Dominus Liminus, but his mastery of the Enumerations was that of Adept Major. He had achieved self-reliance, but he had yet to achieve the oneness of self and ego-extinction that would allow him to reach the higher Enumerations. Few Pavoni could, and Ahriman suspected Hathor Maat was no exception.
“You might as well send us in unarmed and say we should fight with our bare hands,” continued Hathor Maat.
“Someday you may have to do just that,” said Ahriman.
THE GROUND, WHICH had been steadily rising for the last hour, began to climb ever more steeply, and the sound of drums grew louder, as though amplified by the soaring walls of the valley. As it always was, Ahriman’s gaze was drawn up the incredible height of the mountain. The summit was hidden from view by its sheer mass, an endless slope rearing into a cloudless, yellow sky that was darkening to burnt orange.
It seemed inconceivable that this towering peak had been raised by natural means. Its proportions were too perfect, its form too pleasing to the eye, and its curves and lines flowed with a grace that was wholly unnatural. Ahriman had seen such perfect artifice before.
On Prospero.
The Vitravian pyramids and cult temples of Tizca were constructed using golden means and the numerical series of the Liber Abaci. Their work had been distilled and refined by Magnus the Red to fashion the City of Light with such beauty that all who beheld it were rendered speechless with delight.
Everywhere Ahriman looked he saw evidence of geometric perfection, as though the mountain’s creator had studied the divine proportions of the ancients and crafted the landmass to their design. Spiral patterns on the ground described perfect curves, pillars of rock were equally spaced, and each angle of cliff and cleft was artfully arranged with mathematical exactitude. Ahriman wondered what cause could be so great as to require such magnificent feats of geomorphic sculpting.
The mouth of the valley funnelled the sound of drums towards them, the beats rising and falling in what, at first, seemed a random pattern, but which Ahriman’s enhanced cognitive processes quickly discerned was not random at all.
“Prime armaments,” he ordered, and fifty weapons snapped up in unison, a mix of storm bolters, flamers and newly issued rotary cannons capable of unleashing thousands of shells per minute. Their official designation was assault cannon, but such a graceless name had none of the power of its former incarnation, and numerological study had led the Thousand Sons to keep its previous title: the reaper cannon.
The Mechanicum had not the wit or understanding to recognise the power of names or the mastery and fear a well chosen one could instil. With six letters, three vowels and three consonants, the reaper’s number was nine. Given the organisation of the Thousand Sons into a Pesedjetof nine Fellowships, it was a natural fit and the name had remained.
Ahriman recited the mantras that lifted his mind into the lower Enumerations and calmed his supra-enhanced physiology, allowing him to better process information and react without fear in a hostile environment. Normally this process would enhance his awareness of his surroundings, the essential nature of the world around him laid bare to his senses, but on this mountain the landscape was dead and lifeless to him.
Ahriman saw the diffuse glow of torches and fires ahead. The vibration of the ground was like the heartbeat of the mountain. Was he an ant crawling on the body of some larger organism, insignificant and easily swatted aside?
“Zagaya,” said Ahriman, and the Sekhmet formed a staggered arrowhead, with him at its point. Other Legions knew this formation as the speartip, and though Ahriman appreciated the robust, forceful nature of the term, he preferred the ancient name taught to him by the Emperor on Terra at the island fortress of Diemenslandt.