Ahriman: Exile

by John French

  ‘They…’ began Ahriman and then paused. He had been there, he had helped. It was not his design, but he had had a hand in its completion. He thought of the Brotherhood of Darkness, the runes glowing on their midnight armour as they lowered the astropaths into the pyre on chains. They had screamed and screamed until their tongues charred in their mouths. Fat had dribbled off them as they burned. There had been shapes in the fire, shapes which pulled the burning psykers down into the embers. There had been hundreds of astropaths on the station and the pyre had burned for days. The Brotherhood of Darkness had watched from the shadows, their armour glistening with dried blood, whispering their prayers to the night, and Ahriman had stood amongst them.

  Think what you were, and how far you have fallen, said a voice in the back of his thoughts, and for a moment he thought he heard the rustle of crows’ wings.

  Ahriman shook his head, and looked away from Kadin. He let his mind slide along the angles of the wall and through the doorway. His senses stretched across metal and airless space, flowing down lightless passages and tasting the pockets of stale air trapped behind sealed doors. It felt cold, as if he were swimming through black water under a crust of ice. His mind shivered. It was so easy, like running one’s hand through fine sand, or smelling wood smoke on a winter wind.

  The darkness pressed against his thoughts; every inch of the station was bare of the smeared colours left by life, emotion and thought. He paused. Had he been wrong; was this place not what he thought after all? There was only one way to be certain. He let his mind dip just below the level of the real and opened his senses to the dimension beyond –

  – a jungle of colour and light, splitting, re-forming, refracting and battering against eyes he did not have.

  Heat, the smell of excreta, roses, a feather caress.

  Shapes tumbling one over another, like oil mixing with blood and boiling gold.

  A shape looked up at him with a pair of eyes the colour of amber and a chuckle spread across a face that formed as it grew. It laughed. There were more faces and a thousand eyes staring at him.

  There were hands. Pale, soft hands pawing at black, enfolding liquid.

  The stink of ash and urine, the cold of ice and the stickiness of drying blood –

  Air gasped into Ahriman’s lungs. He could feel sweat beading on his skin. For a second he could see a lingering after-image, a luminous imprint of juddering hands reaching from a springing vortex of colour. He tried to move but felt his armour resist, and for an instant he felt panic. He was dead in his armour, trapped in its iron grasp, forever falling, forever drowning. Like his Legion, like the brothers he had destroyed.

  ‘Ahriman.’ Astraeos’s voice filled his ear, urgent and raw.

  Ahriman tried to move and this time his armour unlocked as he tensed against it. His vision cleared. Biorhythm warning icons glowed cold blue in his eyes. He had passed out and his armour had locked around him, holding him unmoving. He turned his head. Thick hoar frost covered the platform around him, crawling up the cavern wall and doorway.

  Astraeos stood five paces from Ahriman, his sword drawn. Green light clung to the sword’s edge and haloed his head. Thidias and Kadin stood further away, but both had their bolters levelled. Ahriman shook his head again. His throat was dry and his voice cracked when he spoke.

  ‘How long?’ he said, hearing his words echo in his helm, and the vox scratch and pop in his ear. Thidias glanced at Astraeos. Slowly the Librarian lowered his sword and the light soaked back into the blade. Beside him Thidias let the muzzle of his bolter point down to the floor. Kadin did not move.

  ‘Two seconds. I felt it,’ said Astraeos. Clicking static filled the pause. ‘Whatever you did, I felt it.’ Ahriman nodded, but said nothing.

  He had intended to taste the warp; instead his mind had broken through the veil of reality. Transiting one’s mind to the warp was a delicate matter; it demanded ritual, and care. It should not have been that easy, he thought. He had simply punched through. He remembered the power flooding through him when he had faced Tolbek, the raw joy of it, the ease of power unlike anything he had felt before. But even here it should not have been so easy.

  Slowly he took a step towards the door. His muscles were shaking; a taste of burned sugar and soured milk was still on his tongue. He extended his mind again, probing at the warp around them, letting it drift just ahead of his steps. He felt his senses want to leap ahead, to soar in the warp-thinned reality, but that was dangerous in a place like this. Any use of power without fine balance and control was a risk. He should have known that, and for a second he wondered why he had allowed himself to slip before.

  The procession of servitors closed in behind them, their magnetised steps sending a tremor through the platform. Ahriman looked back to where Astraeos and his two brothers watched.

  ‘Follow,’ he said, and stepped across the doorway. Behind him Astraeos glanced at his two brothers and followed into the dark.

  Kadin watched Ahriman as they walked through the station’s silent passages. The sorcerer could kill, Kadin had seen that truth, but he moved like a lord rather than a warrior. Kadin had seen it before, an arrogance that ran so deep it bled from words and gestures. It was the mark of one who would destroy anything, and break oaths for truths that only they could see. Kadin had seen his Chapter burn at the hands of such men. Now he was oathbound to ideals that might see him dead.

  They turned into another passage. Straight and narrow, it seemed to stretch away into eternity. Kadin turned his head to look back. The servitor procession was ten paces behind him. He blink-clicked his helmet display to infra-vision. The heat fuming from the servitors’ bodies glowed from white to dark blue. He snapped back to the green glow of night vision, and returned his gaze to the tunnel ahead. Astraeos and Ahriman were ahead of him, their positions lit by green runes.

  His eye lingered on Astraeos. The Librarian was changing, Kadin could see it; there was rage and defiance still but there was something else, something that perhaps the Librarian was not aware of. Astraeos still held to their former ways, but they were a Chapter of three, and the old oaths seemed thin to Kadin. They had broken their vows, and spilled blood to do it. They were warriors, clinging to lives they should have laid down. And now a new master had their words of loyalty.

  Ahriman briefly halted in the darkness in front of Kadin. The sorcerer turned his head to look back. Kadin went still and met his gaze for a moment. Then Ahriman turned away and kept walking. Kadin followed, but his eyes stayed locked on Ahriman’s silhouette. Parchment strips haloed the sorcerer, floating in the zero gravity. Kadin had watched Ahriman attach them to his armour as they rode the gunship. He could not read what was written on the parchment, nor understand the words the sorcerer had muttered as the red wax had bonded them to the blue armour. Just another secret that their saviour was keeping to himself, but then Kadin would have expected no less.

  Oaths. All they had were oaths, so Astraeos had said, but Kadin had seen every oath to him broken and broken his own in turn.

  We are traitors, he thought. We call our vows sacred as we did when we had a thousand brothers. But they are gone.

  The rune marking Ahriman pulsed green in Kadin’s eye. Green. Green for no threat. Green for friendly. The rune flicked to amber ringed by red. An alarm began to shrill in Kadin’s ear. He knew what it meant: the muzzle of his bolter had followed his stare to point at Ahriman’s back. The warning alarm sounded louder. He blink-clicked the warning away but kept staring.

  We have fallen. There is no higher cause to give our allegiance to. Trust and we are dead.

  He could feel his trigger finger tighten. The alarm started to scream again, filling his helm. He focused on Ahriman, seeing the path of the bolt-round, the point of impact, the secondary target points.

  There is only survival.

  Kadin blinked the targeting rune to threat. Red filled his eye.

  And we survive alone.

  Ahriman stopped, and turned. Kadin fro
ze. The red targeting rune spun above Ahriman’s right eye. Kadin stared. Ahriman was completely still, his hands by his sides, his weapons sheathed. Astraeos had stopped a pace in front of Ahriman and was looking back.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Astraeos’s voice crackled over the vox. Ahriman cocked his head, the red eyepieces still fixed on Kadin.

  Slowly, the sorcerer shook his head.

  ‘No, it was nothing,’ said Ahriman, and walked away down the passage. Astraeos looked at Kadin for a heartbeat then turned to follow Ahriman. Kadin did not move. The red targeting rune held steady in his eye. Then he blinked it away and followed.

  They reached the choral chamber after four hours. Ahriman had felt Kadin’s hostility itch at the back of his skull for every step of the journey. A well of bitterness boiled in the warrior; Ahriman did not need to read Kadin’s mind to know it. Distrust ran through Kadin’s being like worms burrowing deep into dead meat. There was no end to it, just a pause, a momentary cessation.

  He is right not to trust me, thought Ahriman.

  The door to the choral chamber was small and framed by an arch of cut stone. Thorns, bones and angel wings crawled over the surface, and a carved skull looked down on him as he crossed the threshold. The space beyond was utterly lightless, and his helmet display fizzed with fog as it tried to pierce the gloom.

  ‘Bring light,’ said Ahriman. Behind him he could sense Astraeos, Thidias and Kadin taking up positions flanking the door. Ahriman smiled, but without humour. There was nothing here to guard against, at least nothing that a defensive dispersal could counter. The servitors followed, burbling acknowledgement of his order. Most of them would have to be destroyed after they were done. The whispers of the place would have got into the remaining meat of their minds. Ahriman was surprised they had functioned so far.

  The servitors mag-clamped the metal chests to the floor and began to unfasten the heavy lids. The first chest held glow-globes which they ignited and sent spinning through the airless dark. Ahriman looked up as the spheres of light revealed the chamber around them. Hanging terraces of stone rose above them. Pillars circled each terrace, each pillar a figure carved in green stone that glittered with crystal impurities. There was an angel, its face hidden by its hands; there was a war saint, his face grim beneath a beaten copper halo; and there was a withered woman clasping a twisted staff, a snake coiling over her shoulders, her eyes hidden and her mouth sewn shut.

  It was not as he remembered it, as if the silence and darkness had slid a mask over the past. He remembered the screaming, the statues on the lower tiers looking down as the pyre grew, their carved skin blackening with soot. The fireglow had danced shadows across the walls. Smoke had spiralled up, underlit by fire, grey stained to orange and red.

  The scars were still there, though. Lengths of chain and crude iron frames still hung from the higher tiers, the metal twisted by heat. The astropaths had screamed, even as fire filled their lungs they had screamed.

  He looked down to the heat-cracked floor. It had been a mosaic of crystal and polished stone. At its centre a great eye had looked up at the astropaths when they gathered on the terraces. Images of saints and symbols had spiralled out from the eye to the chamber’s edge. Now the pattern was gone, the tiles melted and fused into an iridescent swirl of colour. At the edge of the floor he could see a face, its features still recognisable. A laurel circled its brow and it looked up at Ahriman with a serene expression at odds with its scorched surroundings.

  He felt Astraeos approach. Caution and uncertainty layered the Librarian’s thoughts and questions bled from cracks in his armoured mind. But there was something else besides the unusual hesitancy.

  He is changing, thought Ahriman. I am changing him. I am making him what I need: a pupil, an ally to stand by me when I have none. Does he know what I do, does he realise where it might lead?

  ‘What now?’ asked Astraeos.

  ‘Send Thidias and Kadin to guard the passage back to the gunship,’ said Ahriman. Distortion ran through his words. He could feel the wild surge of the warp churn just out of sight. It was responding to them, responding to the light of their minds and the dance of their thoughts.

  ‘Guard? There is nothing here.’ Astraeos gestured at the shadows clustering at the corners of the choral chamber.

  Ahriman was silent as he walked to the remaining dark metal chests. He unlocked the lid of the first. Inside, a bronze bowl the size of a storm shield gleamed in the dim light. Circles and symbols spiralled from its centre to its rim. Ahriman lifted it out, his eyes reading the symbolic layers of the pattern. He had instructed Astraeos in some of what they needed to do, but he had never told him the entirety, he had never said it aloud. Astraeos had not asked, but the question and his doubts had boiled at the edge of his thoughts for days.

  ‘I thought we came here so that you could get answers,’ said Astraeos from behind him.

  ‘That is why we are here,’ said Ahriman, and turned towards the centre of the chamber.

  ‘But why here? The warp is close here. I can feel it as you can. This is not an auspicious place. This is a wound.’

  Ahriman walked to the centre of the crazed floor and looked up, judging his relative position to the walls with a glance. With a careful flick of his hands Ahriman let the bowl go. It hung in the gravity-starved space, spinning around its centre, gleaming. At the chamber’s door Thidias and Kadin waited, listening. Ahriman let his thought glide out until it touched Astraeos’s mind.

  +You know, Astraeos, you know why we are here,+ he sent. Astraeos flinched, but replied.

  +You intend to perform a rite– +

  +No.+ Ahriman’s reply severed Astraeos’s thought like a knife parting cord. He stood and looked up from the offering bowl. Astraeos had taken a step forwards, his body tensed, his hand unconsciously brushing his sword hilt. Thidias and Kadin were watching, deaf to the thoughts passing between the two psykers. +We are not performing a rite,+ sent Ahriman, and then paused. Will an oath, still fresh and untested, hold him to this? +We are here for a summoning.+

  Astraeos was still, his hand resting on his sword hilt, his eyes on Ahriman.

  ‘Send the others to guard the passage as I ordered,’ said Ahriman, his voice crackling across the vox. He could feel emotion radiating from Astraeos, sending ripples through the aether like stones dropped into already churning water. Then the Librarian straightened.

  ‘As you will,’ said Astraeos, and bowed his head.

  Ahriman watched as Astraeos set another bowl spinning at the edge of the chamber. Ninety-nine of them now floated in the choral chamber, spinning around their centres at different heights from the floor. Each bowl was the width of his palm, and fired from smooth black clay. Crystals of incense sat frozen in the bottom of each one. Ahriman looked around the chamber, taking in every detail as if it were fresh, comparing each object and alignment to the shape that he held in his mind’s eye. The black bowls floated in a pattern that created a multi-planed polyhedron. White candles formed a many-armed spiral across the cracked floor. Both bowls and candles formed alignments with each other, with the chamber, and with the cracks and melted patina of the floor. Ahriman had considered every value, every significance and detail. There was no accident, no chance of concordance or discordance in the design; it was the architecture of his intent made real. He looked down again to where the large bronze offering bowl spun at the centre of the design. Above it an athame held steady, the light of the glow-globes catching the silver of its blade and setting the marks etched on its surface dancing. The chamber was like the tight skin of a drum, ready to resonate to the intent and will of those within its bounds.

  Slowly Ahriman touched the athame’s handle with his left hand. It began to turn, spinning with a heartbeat slowness.

  +I am ready,+ sent Astraeos.

  +Very well.+ Ahriman reached out to grip the athame floating above the offering bowl. +We will begin.+

  X

  Summoning

  It was darker
than Kadin had ever known. It was not that he could not see, for he could; it was that the darkness seemed to press on his eyes. Blackness hung over everything like a heavy curtain. Objects would appear in his green-washed view, sometimes so close that he could not believe that he had not seen them before. He would look ahead and see nothing, only to take another step and find a bank of machinery looming above him, or a thick vine of cabling barring his path. Several times he had looked back at objects he had passed, and seen nothing but blackness, and a fizzing hash of green static.

  Long ago, on a world only he and his brothers now remembered, he had been born in the dark. They all had. In caves that no sunlight or starlight had ever seen, he had learned to read the flow of air, and sense by smell, touch, and sound. When they had come for him and raised him up to the light, he had remembered the dark. The dark was his father, and mother. So the Chaplains had taught, and Kadin had learned the mysteries behind those words. He was the darkness and the darkness was him. Except here, in the night-vision-tinted corridors of a dead station, he remembered the darkness that sometimes would bubble from the depths of his birth world. He remembered the shunned depths of caves where the beating of his heart was the only thing he could hear or feel. It had been a long time since he had remembered such things.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said into the vox, and heard a crackling echo of his own voice in his ear.

  ‘Understood,’ came Thidias’s voice, as stiff and controlled as ever even over the scratched transmission of the vox. ‘Threat signs are negative here.’

  They had been patrolling the passages for close to an hour, following Astraeos’s order to guard the route back to the gunship. They moved alone, connected only by the vox and the locator icons pulsing in their retinal displays. Since they had begun Kadin had seen nothing, heard nothing, sensed nothing, but still he did not like it. Inside his helmet there was no sound other than his own breath and the buzzing whirr of his armour. The sounds should have been reassuring; he had lived with them for so long that to be out of his armour felt like the absence of a limb. But in the dark of the passages the familiar sounds felt alien, as if they belonged to someone else.