Ahriman: Exile

by John French

  It brought a shaking limb up to its masked face. Its hand opened with a clatter of sharp edges. Slowly, almost delicately, it pulled its clawed fingers down its faceplate. Deep scratches wept blood. Carmenta glanced behind her. She could see other figures sprinting down the wide passage towards them. Guttural howls filled the air as gunfire lit the long chamber. Explosions blossomed on the deck by her feet. She felt shrapnel patter off the metal of her limbs.

  She looked back at the beast. In her mind, something changed. She felt suddenly calm, rational, as if the panic of before had belonged to another person. This was it. It was over, finally. She would not reach the bridge. She heard a cry inside her to keep running, to reach her ship, to reach her child. Part of her was screaming at herself, cursing herself for weakness, but she remained still. It was as if the panicked need to reunite with the ship belonged to someone else, as if a door in her mind had closed on the voice of another mind trapped within. Listening to the shouts inside half of her skull, she felt relief that it was all over, that she would be free of the Titan Child at last.

  The beast charged. It made no sound, but she imagined it howling as its steps sang on the metal floor.

  You have killed us, said a voice in her head. She felt her arms trembling. She could feel something within her willing her feet to run. She held still. You have killed us both, screamed the voice.

  No, she thought to herself. I will be free now. She drew a breath to speak. Her voice was one of the few things she had never wanted replaced by machine components. Her father had said she had a beautiful voice. It was the only thing she could remember him saying.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said to the beast as it charged to meet her.

  Lightning struck the beast as it reached for Carmenta. It touched the tips of the beast’s fingers and leapt up its arm. The beast stumbled, caged in jagged lines so bright that Carmenta’s eyes had to dim to near blackness. Its skin blistered and peeled. Its metal mask glowed, flesh cooking around its edge. It swung its arms as if trying to swat away a swarm of stinging insects. Three explosive shells hit it at the same moment and pulled the muscle from its torso. The next volley hammered through its faceplate and turned its head to bone splinters and red vapour. It collapsed, its muscles shivering to stillness as its blood spread.

  She looked to her side where a passage mouth opened. Astraeos was striding towards her, his three brothers following in his wake. Glowing cables and crystal nodes haloed his face. Frost covered the shoulders of his armour and ran down his arm to the tip of his sword. His brothers were still firing, hammering volleys into figures approaching across the chamber. She could see fatigue on his blunt face, and the drop of blood crusting at the corner of his mouth. He was muttering. A veil of cold light shimmered in front of him. Beside Astraeos his brothers had locked into firing postures, lacing the approach with bolter fire.

  ‘Go,’ called Astraeos. Fatigue and effort edged his voice. She looked to him; his eyes remained on the spectral veil of energy at the tip of his sword and the closing shapes beyond.

  She thought of his face when she had first seen it: coated in ice, the aura of the stasis field leaching all colour from his skin. It had been an impulse to take the survivors from the wreck of their ship, and a risk to release them. They could have tried to take the ship from her, but Astraeos and his three brothers had rewarded her whim with an oath. She never asked what doom they fled from, and they had kept their oath. In her life it was one of the few promises to her that remained unbroken.

  ‘Go,’ shouted Astraeos again. ‘There are others coming. I can sense them getting closer. If you cannot do something, then there is no way out of this.’

  She felt her mouth open to say that it was over, that there was no way back. Then her vision fizzed with static and a screaming wave of panic flooded her mind.

  I cannot fail, she thought. I will not let us die. Not now. Somewhere behind the rolling wave of emotion another voice cried in denied anger. She did not listen to it. She began to run towards the bridge.

  Something struck Ahriman’s shoulder and exploded. He was falling, his head filled with a high-pitched whine. His armour rang as he hit the floor. The helmet systems cut out, leaving him in darkness with the sound of his own breath. He could feel blood, thick and sticky, rolling down the inside of his right arm. Sound crackled in his ear and the noise of the battle returned. Somewhere close to him Karoz was howling. There was another burst of fire, a familiar sound of a serrated stream of detonations.

  Bolt-rounds. Ahriman extended his mind, and felt the psyches of their attackers burning like an iron-shackled sun. Space Marines, he thought. Not the Harrowing, but the minds of true Space Marines. Maroth has his wish; I will die here.

  And why not let it end here? He had fled and hidden, falling into darkness for a lifetime since his banishment, and for what? He had nothing beside the dust of his ideals, and the shell of his life. He should have let himself fade to nothing long before now.

  I am fate, come round at last. The words echoed in his mind, and he suddenly felt cold, as if he had looked into a dark doorway and seen eyes staring back.

  His helmet display cut back in, strobing with the flash of gunfire. Damage icons glowed red at the corners of his sight. He picked himself up from the deck and looked at the unfolding battle. A long chamber extended in front of and above him. Bronze plating covered its walls and ceiling, stained by verdigris. Starlight shone down in thin ropes from narrow windows high above. Twenty of the Harrowing and their slave beasts were advancing towards the high doors at the far end of the chamber. Fire bloomed around their silhouettes. In the distance he could see the muzzle flash of bolters. As Ahriman watched, a cluster of rounds hit one of the Harrowing. The warrior fell, his chestplate cracked open, his hearts beating blood into the air.

  Karoz let out a howl from the middle of the pack, and bounded forwards. Explosions traced his steps but the champion did not slow. Black coils of living smoke rose from his armour as he moved. Ahriman could taste the iron reek of it through his helmet seals. A Space Marine crouched behind the corpse of a dead slave beast, still firing as the champion charged. The rounds opened Karoz’s chest in a spray of meat and armour.

  Karoz did not stop. The Space Marine was still firing when Karoz leapt over the slave beast’s corpse and cut downwards. The Space Marine swayed to one side and the chainglaive’s teeth sprayed sparks from the deck. Blood fell from Karoz, smoking in the air. He straightened, and Ahriman could see his lacerated hearts still beating in the wet cavity of his chest. He reached up and peeled off his helm, and the face beneath had too many eyes and mouths for anything born a human.

  The Space Marine took a slow step back, dropping his bolter, and drew a blade from his waist. Karoz laughed with all the mouths of his changed face. He raised the glaive in mocking salute. The Space Marine lunged. Karoz punched the tip of the glaive into the Space Marine’s breastplate and rammed it forwards until the chain teeth chewed through the warrior’s chest.

  A flare of light hit Karoz from the side. It was so bright that it scored into Ahriman’s retinas and mind. Psy-fire. Karoz reeled, his armour and the skin of his face dribbling to the deck like tar. Ahriman looked again at the Space Marines, opened his senses and saw what he had missed before. A psyker, a battle psyker, with a mind so focused that it was like a blade. How had he not seen it before? It reminded him of something, something he had lost long ago. Something was about to happen, something that he could feel press against his mind even as he tried to shut it out. He started forwards.

  In front of him, Karoz’s pack charged after their champion. The psyker facing Karoz drew a blade and sliced Karoz from throat to hip. Ahriman could taste that blow: cold wind and bitter iron. The Harrowing initiate fell. The two remaining Space Marines flanked the psyker, firing into the charging pack. Two more of the Harrowing fell. Ahriman was a dozen paces away. He could feel it now, a rising beat in the warp like a monstrous heart pounding to life.

  Then Karoz stood. He
lifted from the deck, as if pulled by strings. Black fluid fell from him in thick ropes. A mouth opened in the charred lump of his head. It grinned with needle teeth. Something pink and mucus-covered twitched in the open wound of his chest. An eye blinked open on the pulsing heart. Its iris was the blue of a noon sky.

  The creature that had been Karoz roared and a thousand mouths and eyes opened across its body. Its shadow spread across the floor, eating the thin starlight, as Karoz towered towards the ceiling. Ahriman felt the physical details of the chamber blur, as if fading into the background behind a growing fire. He could see frost clotting the blood on the deck. Some of the Harrowing kept running, but more dropped to the deck, their bodies spasming. Then the shadow met them and swallowed them down without a cry. The daemon that had been Karoz loomed over the chamber. Beneath it the light of the psyker’s sword guttered out like a blown candle. He saw the psyker’s face, pale, surrounded by a psy-hood, his failing blade still gripped in his hand.

  The daemon turned towards Ahriman and looked at him with a thousand eyes.

  ‘Ahriman,’ it said, in a voice of whispers and laughter.

  No, cried a voice inside his mind. But the voice fell away as power rushed through him, carrying the colours of memories. He could smell the dust of the plain beneath the Tower of Magnus, could see his brothers in a thousand flickering glimpses: their flesh bursting from their armour, their bodies dissolving into liquid and hardening into nightmare. He saw Ohrmuzd, his true brother, lost long ago. Then he saw a face, a face he did not know, a face in a horned helm with eyes that burned like dying stars.

  Ahriman’s hand was rising, light dancing on his fingers. His mind ascended through patterns he had tried to forget.

  The daemon reached towards Ahriman.

  +No.+ A tongue of white flame burst from Ahriman’s hand. Dead words and occult formulae flickered at the fire’s edges like the flutter of wings. It cut through the daemon in a single bright line. For a second the daemon reeled, and then the flames leapt across its shadowed body. It shrieked and cried in voices from Ahriman’s memory: Ohrmuzd, Lemuel, Amon. The shrieks rose higher and higher as the shadow dissolved with a sound like the chuckle of wind blowing across a plain of dust.

  II

  Titan Child

  Ahriman smelt what they had done to the prisoner before he saw it with his eyes. The stink of blood and raw meat had met his nose as soon as the cell door had opened. They had hung the prisoner by his skin. A wire-covered lamp soaked his dangling body in yellow light. Rusted hooks punctured his back and arms and the skin of his hands was gone. The exposed flesh wept pale fluid as it tried to heal. A bloodshot eye fixed on Ahriman as he stepped into the cell. They had taken the other eye, he noted. Blood streaked the right cheek under the empty eye socket, and two wounds clotted on the prisoner’s forehead. Ahriman saw two metal studs glinting on the spattered floor.

  Gzrel had given the prisoner and his brother Space Marines to Maroth. Clearly the soothsayer had decided to try and break the Space Marine’s body before he started on his will. No doubt the skin of the prisoner’s hands now hung from Maroth’s armour.

  ‘Why did you come?’ asked the prisoner, his voice a rasping growl. For a moment Ahriman did not reply. Why had he come? Gzrel had been reluctant to let Ahriman near his latest prize, but Ahriman had persisted and Gzrel had relented. That had taken subtlety and was not without danger. Why had he taken that risk? He had thought it was to find out what the prisoner recalled of the battle. Looking into the Space Marine’s maimed and bloody face, he wondered if he had another motive.

  ‘What do you remember?’ asked Ahriman. After the daemonic manifestation Gzrel and the rest of the Harrowing had descended on them. Some of the survivors of Karoz’s pack had told of the shadow that had taken the champion, and of the fire that had banished it. Gzrel had presumed that it had been the prisoner who had burned the daemon. That feat had impressed the lord of the Harrowing; he had decided to keep the prisoner and his brothers. He had asked the Space Marines to kneel to him, but they had remained unbowed. That defiance had led the prisoner to this chamber, and cost him an eye.

  The prisoner curled his lip, pale teeth glinting from bloodstained flesh.

  ‘I remember my brother dying. I remember his chest splitting. I remember the stink of the warp. I remember a shadow.’ Ahriman saw a glint in the prisoner’s eye; his aura was fury-bright, rage and power chained behind fraying will. ‘I remember, sorcerer.’

  Ahriman nodded.

  He knows, thought Ahriman. He saw and knows what I truly am. He had not brought a weapon, but that would not stop him silencing the prisoner. His fingers twitched, and he felt the thought find an echo in the warp. It would be so easy. No, he thought. His mind relaxed, and the warp settled.

  ‘My lord wishes your service. He senses great power in you.’

  ‘Is that why you are here, sorcerer?’ Again Ahriman heard the hate in the words.

  ‘I serve my lord,’ said Ahriman. ‘You are a psyker, trained for battle and destruction. He has a taste for the oaths of psykers, and you intrigue him much.’

  The prisoner stirred his bared muscles and the chains clinked. Fresh blood ran from where the hooks looped through the skin.

  ‘Your lord is a slave to lies and ignorance.’ Red-flecked spit came out with the words. ‘My oath is my own, and I will not give it to him.’

  ‘There are worse things.’

  ‘Are there? To you, sorcerer, perhaps. You fear the truth, I see that without needing to see your face or hear you say it. I do not fear truth, though it will kill me.’

  Words I would once have said myself, thought Ahriman. ‘Yet you live.’

  The prisoner heaved up a bloody laugh, which shook the chains. ‘Yes, I live. Your lie bought me that. Do you wish thanks for it?’

  Ahriman was silent for a moment, and then he reached up and pulled his helmet from his head. Blue eyes set in a face of smooth olive skin met the prisoner’s single eye and gouged socket.

  ‘My lord believes you are powerful, and you are,’ said Ahriman. Without his helm his voice was soft and resonant.

  ‘I am no traitor, and I will not serve your lord.’

  ‘You are no traitor, yet this is an outcast Imperial ship,’ said Ahriman, ‘and you have the mark of one who has already broken oaths.’ It was true the Titan Child at first glance was not a rotten renegade like the Blood Crescent, but it was no lost loyalist either.

  ‘I broke no oaths.’

  ‘But you are here, an outcast from the Imperium that created you. Is there a difference?’ asked Ahriman. The prisoner spat, the red-flecked phlegm hissing as it ate into the metal floor.

  ‘To you, sorcerer, maybe not.’ The prisoner let his head loll to his chest, his eyelids closed. Ahriman nodded; he would get nothing more. He turned and walked to the cell door, his hand rising to rap on the dark metal. He paused and turned back to look at the prisoner.

  ‘I am sorry for your brother,’ said Ahriman. ‘The other two live, though for how long I cannot say.’

  The prisoner looked up. Ahriman saw the hard angles of his aura blur for a second before it snapped back into its diamond-like lines. The prisoner gave a small nod.

  ‘What is your name, sorcerer?’

  Ahriman looked down at the black helm in his hand. Perhaps there were some that might still remember his name, but he was not Ahriman, and he would not be again.

  ‘I am Horkos,’ he said.

  The prisoner gave a laugh that turned into a racking cough. ‘Another lie. Do not worry. You saved my life. That is a bond I would not have, but one I will honour. I will not break your lie.’ The prisoner paused and took a breath. ‘My name is Astraeos, sorcerer, and I place my silence on your conscience.’

  Ahriman did not reply, and left the prisoner hanging in the gloom.

  The Harrowing were making the Titan Child their own. Ahriman’s path back to his quarters led almost the entire six-kilometre length of the ship. With every step and turn he
saw another sign of the Harrowing’s fangs sinking deeper into the vessel. They had struggled to wake the Titan Child’s systems, but that had not stopped them marking their claim to its soul. Servitors and whipped slave gangs had cleared the slaughter done by the battle, but only so that the Harrowing could replace it with more. The stink of charring flesh and soot was thick on the air. On the open decks and wider passageways Ahriman came across packs of the Harrowing clustered around crude braziers and heaped fires of corpses. Flesh burned on those fires, and the Harrowing howled beside them as the fat and skin boiled and smoke spread in greasy clouds. They shouted guttural chants and poured dark liquid on the deck in libation.

  Ahriman skirted the baying packs, walking on the edge of the firelight, closing his ears to the howls and his eyes to the shapes which coiled in the pyre smoke. He changed his route through the ship, avoiding the hangar and cargo spaces where the Harrowing gathered. He wanted to clear his mind, to consider his words with Astraeos, to understand the half-formed inferences and fears that clustered on the margins of his thoughts. The mental disciplines that once were so much a part of him would have given him swift clarity, but they were tools he could not wield again. He would try and find quiet, and perhaps in that he would find peace.

  Peace eluded him. Even in the side passages and walkways he saw the signs of the Titan Child’s changing fortune. It seemed to have no truly living human crew, only servitors, and the Harrowing had marked all those that he saw. Those which still had human faces had been flayed of skin, so that they grinned at Ahriman with wet faces of sinew. Those without true faces had skins hammered over their visors so that their eye-sensors gazed from stretched eye-holes and gaping mouths. They had brought slaves from the Blood Crescent, too. They shambled past in long lines, pus weeping from the brands on their grey skin. Most had laboured on the Blood Crescent for their entire lives. Crammed into living spaces, breathing pollution-fogged air, never seeing the light of a true sun, they existed to toil. It was a pitiful life and one that would grow no lighter on the Titan Child. Already the mutant overseers stalked the walkways and lower decks, their beaten armour glistening with blood and hung with the skin of those who had in some way displeased their masters.