Ahriman: Exile

by John French

Ahriman nodded slowly.

  ‘I don’t know. At first I thought it was simple vengeance, but I should have known that it was not. Amon may want revenge, but his mind is too deep for such singlemindedness.’ He gave a weary smile. ‘Our Legion is not given to thinking on a small scale.’

  ‘So you will search for answers now?’

  Ahriman felt the tension in the words. In truth he had not thought his next move through yet, but as he thought about the question he realised that there had only ever been one answer.

  He nodded stiffly. Kadin stared at him for a long moment, and then walked to the hatch without looking back. Thidias followed a moment later. Astraeos gave Ahriman one last hard look before stepping through the hatch and pulling it shut after him.

  ‘Do you wish that you had never begun?’

  Ahriman flinched at the sound of the voice. He had almost forgotten that Carmenta still stood in the corner of the room. She took a step forwards, her mechadendrites twitching at her robes as if they were the unconscious movements of nervous hands.

  ‘Do you?’ she said again.

  Yes, he thought. I wish that I had never listened to the whispers of my heart. Some might have called those whispers hope, but it was arrogance. The arrogance of knowledge that believes that there can be no limit to what it encompasses, that cannot see the precipice at its feet.

  ‘I am not sure,’ he said at last.

  Carmenta shook her head as if trying to clear a sound from her ears. For a moment he wondered if she was going to ask another question, but then she moved to the hatch and pulled it open to leave.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and left Ahriman looking after her in puzzlement.

  IX

  Dead Space

  Ahriman found himself at the door of the lightless cell as the Titan Child ran blind. He had walked the decks for hours. Clusters of servitors had slunk out of his path as he passed through the machine decks, their ink-black eyes reflecting luminous green in his helmet display as they watched him pass. He had walked through the shuttered corridors that ran along the spine of the ship, and seen nothing but the dust glimmering in the light of his eyepieces as it fell softly to the ground. He had been looking for Maroth, trying to discover if the broken soothsayer still lived, or if he had curled up and expired in a lightless hole. His search had begun on a whim, a meaningless task to help him make his decision, but he had found no sign of Maroth and his decision still weighed on his mind.

  Why now? Why does he come for you now? The questions had rolled endlessly through his thoughts ever since Kadin had spoken them. There had to be a reason why other exiles had been taken or killed. He remembered Tolbek telling him to come with him, and the creature hissing ‘Alive. Yes’. Amon wanted Ahriman taken alive.

  He remembered the feeling of claws sawing into his guts. Alive at least in mind, if not whole in body.

  He had considered possibilities, but all seemed meaningless without genuine information. ‘Speculation is fantasy,’ Magnus had once said to him. ‘Knowledge does not encompass doubt.’ Ahriman had only speculation, and one means of obtaining knowledge: the warp. It was that cold conclusion that had hardened as he walked through the echoing ship, and found himself in the frozen dark outside the crude warded door. For a second he wondered if his worries had guided his steps. The thought made him want to shiver, but did not stop him stepping through the door.

  The bound daemon was already staring at him when he stepped into the chamber. Ahriman had the feeling that it had been watching him even before he entered. Its body had a clammy look to it but the chains and bindings were in still place.

  ‘Cadar,’ said Ahriman, the words sounding hollow inside his helm.

  The daemon smiled, and made a sound like bones rattling in a dying man’s chest. Ahriman could feel his skin become cold, as if numbed by ice.

  He had not meant to come here, but an obvious possibility now occurred to him.

  ‘I seek an answer,’ said Ahriman. There was no air to transmit the sound but the bound daemon heard, of that he was certain. It tilted its head from side to side. ‘Will you answer?’ The creature went still. Ahriman could feel its hunger beating at the bindings that held it in place.

  +Feed.+

  Ahriman heard the word in his mind and ears at the same time. A hot iron taste filled his mouth and throat, and he felt a need to bite, to rend and gorge. The creature ground its teeth, and Ahriman realised he was mirroring the movement. He brought thought wards crashing down on the intruding instincts, and forced his will into his voice.

  ‘By the bindings placed on you in this place, I call you to answer.’

  The creature thrashed as if he had struck it. Thick layers of ice began to run down the chains holding it in place. It snarled, its black tongue flicking in and out of its mouth. Ahriman felt its frustrated rage, and knew that no answer would come. It was a spirit of hunger, its power bent only to feasting on mortal flesh, its nature devoid of the intellect to know what he needed to know. Ahriman had suspected as much. Maroth’s bindings were powerful but crude, and his skill unequal to catching a more devious daemon.

  Ahriman turned to leave, feeling the bound daemon’s hunger still chewing at his mental defences. He would have to do what he had hoped to avoid more than anything else. As he stepped from the chamber the daemon-husk hissed to itself and watched the door as it closed.

  Blackness surrounded the dead station. Astraeos watched its shape resolve bit by bit, like an ancient wreck revealed by a beam of light in the ocean depths. Starlight, weak and curdled to the colour of pus, caught the edges of the station’s bulk and snagged on its spires. It was an irregular half-sphere, towers and domes covering its flat upper surface while masts and sensor blisters hung in thick forests from its curved underbelly.

  Astraeos blinked rapidly and the image became a single window at the corner of his helmet display. The gunmetal cave of the craft’s troop compartment filled his eyes. To his right the loading ramp hung open, the shuffling shapes of servitors clacking across the deck as they performed final checks. To his left, more void-suited servitors sat in silent rows on either side of the dull metal chests that filled the compartment’s floor. Kadin and Thidias sat across from him. The eyes of their helmets looked at him but he knew they were watching the image of the dead station.

  It had taken them weeks to get out here. In his amniotic cocoon Egion the Navigator had ridden the Titan Child to the edge of the Eye, its Geller field envelope creaking like a sail in a high wind. Now they waited in the guts of their one remaining gunship and watched the feed from the Titan Child’s sensors. He looked at his two brothers; there was an unseeing, stiff quality about them, as if they were empty armour. He had not told them why they had come to this scrap of dead space, of course. Ahriman had told Astraeos when they broke from the warp, but Astraeos had said nothing to Kadin or Thidias.

  Is that because of how you think they could react, said the doubting voice in his head, or because if you say it out loud it will become true? He remembered Cadar hanging in a web of chains, a daemon grinning from his empty eyes. This is how it begins. One lie grown on another until you cannot remember the truth. But still he said nothing.

  He flicked his eye back to the waiting image of the station, blinked and it filled his view again. Tens of thousands of souls had once dwelled here, but they were long dead and the derelict hulk was silent, dark and cold. It was difficult to judge its size from an image but the numbers and scales that twitched at the edges of the screen told him that the station was over fifty kilometres in diameter. In comparison the Titan Child was like a fish drifting towards the corpse of a leviathan. They were approaching the station on minimal power. Linked to her ship, Mistress Carmenta was holding the ship’s power in reserve, poised to become speed or weapons fire if needed. Watching the station draw closer, Astraeos could not shake the feeling that they were intruders into the realm of a sleeping beast.

  ‘It is deserted?’ said Kadin over the vox.

  ‘
So it seems,’ said Astraeos, keeping his eyes on the luminous image of the station.

  ‘It was Imperial,’ said Thidias, quietly, from just beside Astraeos. ‘And it died by force; look at the plasma burns on the lower sections.’ Astraeos had already noticed the characteristic blistering and smooth ripple burns on some of the station’s armour. Ship-killing plasma weaponry had fired on the station, and there were other signs: tumbled and broken towers, ragged holes that must have been at least a hundred metres wide, still clouds of debris that caught the starlight like crystal sand. Astraeos did not need the battle signs to know that the station was a dead shell; he knew it with a leaden certainty he could not explain.

  ‘Something of this size must have taken some killing,’ said Thidias. ‘Defence batteries, shield generators, it has enough to hold off a battleship.’

  ‘Not enough, though,’ growled Kadin, and turned away from the image on the screen to look at Astraeos. ‘Why have we come here?’

  ‘It was an astropathic relay station,’ said Astraeos. His eyes had fixed on a statue that rose from the back of the station: an angel, its wings spread against the stars, its hands reaching into the darkness. Its bronze skin was uncorroded, its form whole. But it was the face that drew his gaze. Someone had bored its eyes out with plasma blasts. Without thinking, Astraeos brought his hand up to the eyepiece above his own lost eye. ‘Hundreds of astropaths sifted the immaterium here, catching messages and spitting them back out. Then the Eye swelled, and swallowed it.’

  ‘Why seek such a place?’ said Kadin, his voice thick with contempt. ‘And how did he know it was here?’

  ‘Because I helped destroy it.’ Ahriman walked up the ramp and ducked into the gunship’s compartment. His armour was still the same battered plate he had worn serving the Harrowing, but now it was blue. The old battle damage was still visible beneath the fresh lacquering. A tabard of pale fabric hung from his torso, and his face was bare, the ambient light of the gunship’s hold darkening his smooth skin to the hue of polished wood. ‘I was here when this place died. I saw its crew killed and its astropaths burned alive in pyres.’ He paused and looked at Kadin. ‘Their screams still hang in the warp here. All those messages and minds wore the barrier between worlds thin.’

  ‘Is that why we came here?’ spat Kadin, and Astraeos could feel the aggression fuming from his brother.

  ‘It is also a long way from anything else,’ said Ahriman, his voice calm. Astraeos could feel control radiating from Ahriman like cold from frosted steel. He sat beside Astraeos and locked a mag-harness around his torso. With a wheeze of pistons and pressuring air the loading ramp began to close. The frame of the gunship began to shiver as its engines caught.

  ‘Why?’ said Kadin, his voice low but loaded within soft aggression.

  ‘Because of what I must do.’

  Carmenta watched the gunship slip from her flank. Somewhere she breathed and twitched in her cradle of cables.

  No, she thought, not my flank, the ship’s flank. The shuttle was exiting from the Titan Child, its engines brightening as it built speed. I have to keep the separation, even if it is only for a few hours. I have to rest, but not yet. Ahriman had said that they had to be ready: ready to leave, ready to fight, ready for something that he had not wanted to tell her. After the encounter at the black moon it was an understandable request, but she had stayed linked to the ship for weeks without pause, and the link had begun to take its toll.

  After the exhilaration of battle and sudden flight had come the iron-flavoured feeling of exhaustion. It was in those moments that she was weakest, and when she was weak the Titan Child slipped deeper into her thoughts. She had woken from dreams as they scudded through the warp, unable to remember who or where she was. Whispered thoughts of weaponry and sensations of clicking machinery filled her even when her memory returned. Worse were the moments when she had been deep within the sensations of the ship only to find her mind dumped into her body. She would lie in the tangle of interface cables, unable to move, panic washing through her until her body reconnected to her mind. She needed her link to her ship, but at times she loathed it, like a drunk grown tired of drunkenness.

  She had no time to rest, though, not now.

  She watched the gunship as its flight curved under the station’s belly. Somewhere, on the edge of her perception, her fingers twitched. She scanned the station again with auspex and deep penetration augurs. She raked across its scarred surfaces, listening with multi-spectrum aerials. No movement, no heat signs; just pockets of air trapped in the superstructure, like bubbles trapped in a sunken wreck. The station was a corpse, an empty shell. It made her want to run, to light her engines and dive back into the blackness. She began her slow orbits of the station, her sensors twitching between it and the void. Somewhere, in the body she half forgot she had, she was shivering.

  The gunship slid into the station through a ragged hole in its underbelly. Bright white lights stabbed out from the small vessel’s nose and wings. Blackened girders and tangled metal threw shadows into the cavernous space beyond. The gunship glided forwards, the weapon pods in its chin and flanks twitching as they searched for targets. The space had once been a series of holds and stores, but explosions had gouged it to greater dimensions, breaking through floors and walls to create a vast cavern.

  In the gunship’s belly Ahriman sat in silence. Tolbek’s sword rested across his knees, his helm’s red eyes staring at nothing. In his freshly lacquered plate and helm, he was a statue. The warp was quiet, like still water around a half-submerged wreck. That quiet did nothing to reassure him.

  Ahriman let his mind reach out into the dead space that clung to the station’s bones, probing gently, feeling the tatters of reality slide over his senses. Memories coated in blood and wrapped in screams surfaced in his mind. He had been on the station decades before when the Brotherhood of Darkness had stripped it of life. What they had left was a torn layer of scar tissue over a deep wound. The warp was still, but only in the way ice was still before it cracked.

  He pulled his senses back into his immediate surroundings. Residual images and sensations prickled the surface of his thoughts. He blinked and flicked his eyes over the hold. He had not enabled his armour’s enhanced vision and the only light was from Astraeos, Thidias and Kadin’s eyepieces, which glowed like coals in the gloom. He and the three other Space Marines sat closest to the hold’s ramp. Further in, and filling the rest of the hold, were the servitors. They sat along both walls, their bulbous helms lolling and shaking as the gunship manoeuvred. They would not move until commanded. A memory of the hand of the Rubricae closing around his wrist rose in his thoughts and then sank again.

  ‘Landing area identified,’ came the vox-flat voice of the pilot servitor.

  ‘Very well,’ said Ahriman. ‘Set us down.’

  ‘By your will,’ replied the servitor. The whine of thrusters rose in intensity, as the gunship slipped through a web of girders to settle on the torn remains of a platform. There was a thump as its landing feet magnetically locked to the deck.

  Kadin had already opened his mag-harness, his bolter ready in his hands. The inter-armour comms were silent, but Ahriman could hear the words of Kadin’s battle oath in his mind like a whispered prayer. Sat beside his brother, Thidias was still, his thoughts a steady beat of battle focus. Astraeos shifted, and glanced at Ahriman.

  Ahriman stood and moved to the assault ramp, his sword held ready in his hands. Astraeos rose, his own blade loose by his side.

  ‘Will you tell us now what you expect?’ said Kadin.

  ‘I am not certain,’ said Ahriman. He felt the stab of contempt in Kadin’s thoughts, but said nothing.

  The high-pitched whine of the engines still shook the gunship as the pilot servitor held it poised to boost away at the slightest sign of trouble. Pistons pushed the hatch wide and the gunship’s air hissed into the darkness outside. Ahriman’s helmet display flickered to life, turning his world into night-piercing monochrome. Hard vacuum
and gravity warning runes pulsed red at the edge of his sight. Threat markers glowed in unresolved amber. He stepped from the hatch and felt the magnetised sole of his foot clamp on to the platform. He began to walk, his feet locking and releasing with each step. For a moment it felt as if it were his armour walking, not him, as if he were a passive watcher inside. He shook his head, and saw Astraeos was already moving past him, heading towards where the wide platform met the cavern’s wall. Kadin and Thidias overtook him and spread to either side, their heads moving to scan the cavern. Ahriman followed.

  ‘All quiet,’ said Thidias, and a popping screech of static filled Ahriman’s ear. He had reached the wall that edged the platform like a cliff rising above a strip of tidal sand, and he stopped and looked back to where the gunship sat. Hard white beams of light still stabbed from its chin and wings, but the airless dark of the cavern seemed to swallow their brightness.

  ‘Unload,’ he said on a closed channel. Another wail of distortion answered him. For a second he wondered if they had heard him, then the servitors began to march down the gunship’s ramp. They moved in lumbering lockstep, their faces hidden by thick brass domes, their bodies clad in vulcanised rubber. Between them they bore the grey metal chests.

  ‘I have found a door,’ said Astraeos, his voice chopped by static. Ahriman turned his head and waited for Astraeos’s locator marker to settle in his vision.

  ‘Stay where you are,’ said Ahriman, and he began to move towards Astraeos’s marker. He found the Librarian on one knee, watching an opening in the cavern wall. The door was as tall as a super-heavy tank flipped on its end, a black gulf edged by the teeth of the blast doors pulled back into its frame.

  ‘I do not like it,’ said Kadin as he came up behind them. He too was looking up at the waiting doorway, his bolter tracking his eyes. ‘No energy readings, no life or movement signs, it’s like it was scooped out.’ He turned his head and looked at Ahriman. ‘What did you do to this place?’