Ahriman: Exile

by John French

  I have to know. I have come this far. I have to know.

  ‘There is not much time, Ahriman. If you wish to know then I must show you the path to what you seek.’ Ahriman looked at the open palm of the daemon’s hand. On the opposite side Astraeos started forwards. Ahriman reached out, and touched the daemon’s hand.

  Fingers closed around Ahriman’s wrist. Cold spread up his arm and laughter filled his ears.

  ‘Thank you, Ahriman. Thank you,’ said the daemon, and its pleasure made him feel suddenly sick. A pattern unfolded in his mind, layered with formulae, metaphor and ritual; a path through stars and space and impossibility. ‘I spoke truth, this is the path. I give this to you, Ahriman, but you will never see the path’s end.’

  Ahriman tried to pull himself back, to pull his hand away, but could not. He could see both the warp and the physical realm, like two pict feeds overlaid. The daemon bloomed in the warp around him, becoming a snake covered in burning feathers. It spiralled around him, pulling him into an embrace of fire. In the physical realm the daemon still wore his brother’s face as it roared with glee. It stepped towards him and Ahriman felt the bindings he had placed on it shatter, each one a bright nova in his skull. He saw his mistake, then, and the trap that waited to swallow him.

  He had summoned and bound the daemon, but beneath those bindings were others which wove through it at a deeper level. Someone had already bound the daemon to a different purpose, someone who had guessed what he might do to get answers. He had summoned the daemon, but it served another.

  Ahriman’s battle plate glowed red under the daemon’s grasp. His skin was blistering against the inside of his armour. The candles on the floor rose into the air, the tallow melting in an eyeblink. The bowls of incense crashed to the floor. Shards of black porcelain fell towards the ceiling. The servitors standing at the edge of the room burst apart, exploding into spheres of blood mist. Green ball lightning crackled over the walls. Out on the edges of his aetheric sight, Ahriman could see vast shapes made of the shades of night. The shapes bulged and swelled with thousands of hungering faces and reaching hands.

  The daemon looked down at him. It no longer looked like Ohrmuzd, it no longer looked like anything even slightly human. Ragged black feathers pushed through its pale skin. It reached out a taloned hand and touched Ahriman’s forehead. The metal of his helm buckled and cracked. Armour integrity warnings screamed in his ears. The air in his armour stank of carrion meat and hot metal. He thrust his mind at the daemon, trying to draw power to him, finding only the constricting presence of the daemon choking his soul.

  ‘I will be free,’ whispered the daemon, and the whisper echoed, rising in volume and changing until it filled Ahriman’s ears. He tried to move his sword hand but it moved so slowly, and the daemon’s mouth was opening wider and wider. ‘I will take your mind to my master, and I will be free.’

  Ahriman felt his strength wither. He had failed. He was nothing, a heretic and fool whose reach had exceeded his grasp, a remnant who should have fallen to dust long ago.

  The daemon shrieked, and suddenly its grip on Ahriman vanished. It writhed, clawing, its back arching. The point of Astraeos’s sword projected from its chest. Blood and pus bubbled from the wound, sheeting down its torso.

  Behind the daemon Astraeos let go of the sword’s hilt. The shadows behind the Librarian were moving, forming shapes of limbs, tentacles and teeth-ringed mouths. Astraeos’s shoulders were shaking, thick plates of ice cracking from his armour as he moved. He looked at Ahriman and sent a single word.

  +Run.+

  XI

  Warp Breach

  ‘We must run,’ screamed Egion.

  Carmenta felt terror, and it was not all her own. Egion was crying in her soul, his terror bleeding through the mind-impulse link. Her engine’s flames fluttered and misfired. Stars and darkness blurred in the sensors that were her eyes.

  Don’t let me go, she moaned. Please don’t let me go. The Titan Child’s engines spluttered and died. It streaked forwards on its momentum, the station looming closer by the second. Hold on to me, she pleaded. Something is coming for us, for us all. Do not let me go.

  In her cable cradle her body went into convulsions. She retched oil and blood through the mouth slot in her lacquered mask. She was drifting, her mind unanchored. Voices whispered in her ears, telling her of things she had forgotten, of the darkness of a labour hab, of the broken turning of a fan, and the chopped light falling across the body of a man curled on a soiled pallet. He twitched and gave a hacking breath. His eyes opened. She had thought he was looking at her, but he would never see her again. The air had reeked of urine, mould and rust, she had forgotten that. How could she forget that? It was not a memory, it was the present. She was not the Titan Child. She was not Carmenta. She was nothing but a girl starring at her father’s face, and watching his blood-pink spittle dribble down his cheek. She could see the cogged tattoos of service under the runnels of spit.

  The memory vanished.

  I am losing control, she thought.

  ‘It’s here,’ shouted Egion, over the link. She could almost see him twisting in his amniotic tank, defecating and bleeding in panic. ‘It is here, we must run. Run.’

  ‘No. We must…’

  ‘We must run,’ he shouted, and as he shouted his voice carried the vision of his fear into her mind.

  She saw what he had seen. It was like seeing a reflection caught in rippling water, all form and pattern breaking as soon as it was seen. She could see beyond the grey lines of the station, behind the stars. Shapes moved there, huge and protean. Scales and scabs of colour clung to their bulk. They waited, their hunger barely restrained.

  Carmenta shrieked as a machine. Throughout the Titan Child power conduits ruptured, spilling gas and burning fuel into her insides. The plasma reactors faded and surged. She felt her own body twist in the cradle of cables. Her engines were still burning, but she was numb to them. She was losing her grip on her Titan Child. Her hull was shaking, trembling like skin exposed to an icy wind. Egion’s terror was flooding her with human fear and the ship was trying to shake her free. She had to cut the interface with Egion, or he would destroy them.

  She forced her mind back into the link. Her mind became the Titan Child again, ramming through her systems, trailing code damage and corrupt routines. She grasped the mind-impulse link and in that instant she saw him.

  He floated in his amniotic tank, churning it to froth with his vestigial limbs. Ribbons of fresh blood stained the fluid. Feed and waste tubes had ripped from the sockets in his mouth and back. His head seemed grotesquely large atop his shrunken torso, his eyes milk-white with blindness, his mouth stapled shut. The open eye on his forehead twitched wildly at the view beyond the crystal walls of the chamber.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  She shut down the link and the vision of the Navigator’s chamber vanished. The slow beats of her plasma-filled heart pulsed through her as she hung silent in the void. Then the Titan Child’s engines roared to life. Fire ran through her veins, and she wanted to run, to run and not look back. But she turned towards the dead station.

  ‘Ahriman,’ she shouted in an electronic cry.

  Ahriman did not run. The chamber’s stone walls and pillared tiers were melting. In front of him the daemon arched its back, and vomited a great wash of black liquid into the air. The sword impaling the daemon began to glow with heat. Astraeos staggered backwards, his palms smoking. The daemon quivered, scattering burning droplets of blood as its body dissolved into a boneless pool of flesh. More daemons stepped from shadows like congealing smoke. Bodies of wasted muscle and cracked skin clawed out of the gloom. Ahriman glimpsed white eyes, claws, and rows of hooked teeth in mucus-thick jaws.

  Exhaustion bubbled up inside Ahriman. Black circles popped at the edge of his eyes. Hoots and chitters scratched at his thoughts. He felt as if he were falling down a lightless shaft. He took a step backwards. His muscles ached as if he had been fighting for weeks with
out rest.

  A daemon stepped from the growing throng. It had a long, vulpine head, and its skin was taut over a hunched body of lean muscle. It took a slow step, its black eyes flicking over Astraeos and Ahriman. Ahriman saw its legs tense. The daemon jumped. Behind it the rest of its kin came forwards in a single wave. Astraeos began to turn to face the leaping daemon, but too slowly. The daemon’s claws touched his shoulder guard just before it was about to land.

  +Down,+ shouted Ahriman. Astraeos dived to the floor. The telekinetic wave hit the daemon while it was still in mid-air, and flung it back in a spray of black slime. The charging daemons faltered, and Ahriman ran forwards and pulled Astraeos to his feet in the instant before they rallied and came on again. Bright light danced in front of his eyes and his skin felt clammy. The circle of daemons closed over them before they could take a step. Ahriman heard claws scrabble at his armour. Teeth and eyes filled his vision. Rancid breath fogged his eyepieces. He felt something sharp slip through a joint in his leg armour. Armour integrity warnings lit in his helmet display.

  +Astraeos,+ he called, and reached for the Librarian’s mind. He felt Astraeos’s mind resist for an instant, and then open. Their wills became one, and Ahriman felt his fatigue fall away. He formed a single, blunt thought and heard its echo in Astraeos’s mind.

  The dome of force exploded outwards. Daemons ripped from the floor and tumbled through the air. Fragments of pottery, metal and bone rose in a scattered cloud. A moment of perfect, still calm flowed through Ahriman. He could feel every mote of dust and scrap of debris caught on the edge of the expanding telekinetic sphere. He changed the shape of his thought and Astraeos followed. The debris exploded outwards in a wave of shrapnel. The daemons caught in the blast fell in shredded heaps. The way was open to the door out of the chamber.

  The calm had vanished from Ahriman as suddenly as it had come. He felt Astraeos’s mind buckle. Voids opened in his own will. They ran for the door.

  The daemons followed, pouring into the passage opening like a swarm of insects. Frost ran down the walls in front of them. Cracks opened in the plated metal, glowing with a blue light. Ahriman tumbled end over end, his mag-grip on the floor broken. He reached out blindly, felt his hand hit something solid and grabbed on. His body spun around his grip and slammed into a hard surface. Force juddered through him, and the air left his lungs. He could not tell if he was holding on to the wall, ceiling or floor. Confused runes swam across his eyes. He twisted around, trying to find the direction in which they had been running. Silence filled his skull. He could feel blood hammering in his ears. Something hit his arm, and he twisted to bring his sword around. Astraeos’s eyepieces were inches away from Ahriman’s faceplate. The Librarian had clamped on to the passage wall.

  +Which way?+ sent Ahriman, but Astraeos was reaching past him, pointing.

  No, realised Ahriman. Not pointing. Aiming.

  The bolt pistol fired. A jet of silent flame spat over Ahriman’s shoulder. Ahriman spun around, still holding himself in place with his right hand. The bolt-round’s detonation lit the darkness for a second. A living wall of mouths and reaching claws filled the passage behind them. Ahriman pulled his sword around and closed his eyes. He burrowed deep into his being, calling on reserves of focus he had kept sealed for so long he had almost forgotten them.

  +Burn,+ he sent, and the fire leapt from the blade tip. It shone blue with heat. Ahriman’s mind went with the fire, riding its fury and guiding its path. It struck a daemon with a halo of waving arms, and burned straight through it. He swept the fire around, cutting through the daemons in a brilliant arc. Some of the daemons split into two smaller bodies which floated for a second in the death-slime of their parent before swimming forwards. Others burst apart in explosions of multi-coloured steam.

  Ahriman was shivering, his skin clammy and wet with sweat inside his armour. The formulaic patterns in his mind were burning, tainting his senses. He could smell smoke, and feel heat prickle his lungs. Somewhere beside him Astraeos had stopped firing.

  They had to move. He released his hold on the flame. It did not end. The fire still coursed from his sword tip, ripping through his mind and body. He could not stop it; he could not release the power he had called. In his mind the burning pattern glowed brighter and brighter, becoming more complex, sucking in thoughts and sensations like a hurricane wind. The hand holding the sword began to glow. Pain lanced from his fingers, but he could not open them; he could do nothing but watch as fire boiled out of the cracks of his soul. His skin blistered. There was just fire roaring in his mind. He could not stop. He could not remember how it had begun.

  I am Ahzek Ahriman, came a voice from the depths of his mind. It was an old voice, forgotten and rejected.

  No, he screamed in a thought that was charring to nothing. No, I am not. He failed. The dream failed, and I fell.

  The power vanished, soaking back into his mind. He opened his eyes. The lance of heat still lingered as a smear of neon light hanging in the vacuum, cooling and fading from blue to purple. The distant door to the choral chamber was still visible, edged by a pulsing blood-red glow. Globules of slime and skin spun in the half-darkness. As he watched, pink amorphous shapes began to form from the vaporised slime. He could see sucker-tipped fingers flexing as they extruded from the congealing matter.

  Ahriman turned to look for Astraeos. The Librarian was already flying down the passage, kicking off walls, floor and ceiling. Ahriman started to follow. A beam of actinic light fizzed past him and melted a hole in the passage wall. He turned as a daemon hooted and flicked another beam of light from its fingers. The daemon was crawling across the buckled floor-grating. A wide mouth split the face in the centre of its torso, a thick tongue slavering over teeth. Blue and yellow flames were licking its skin, and lighting the hunger in its saucer eyes. Its six limbs moved with boneless speed as it scrambled closer.

  Ahriman spread his mind into the passage walls. Sweat instantly sheeted his skin, and then froze in hard droplets. His body floated to the centre of the passage, cradled in a telekinetic web. Pressure built like a tightening bowstring. The metal of the walls began to buckle. He felt as if the noon sun were blazing in his skull. In front of him, Astraeos was spinning as he shoved away from the roof. He folded his mind around the Librarian. Astraeos resisted, shoving back with a panicked wave of will. Ahriman felt the pain in his head increase.

  +Submit,+ screamed Ahriman, and felt the resistance drop away. He released the force of his mind, as a daemon reached for him with a flame-wreathed hand. Ahriman and Astraeos shot forwards like arrows loosed from a bow. The tunnel ripped apart in their wake. The star of pain in Ahriman’s head exploded. Shreds of metal scattered before them, half melting or dissolving into grey dust as they flew into the waiting dark.

  The Titan Child rolled and skidded as Carmenta felt thrusters fire too hard. Opposing forces shook through her bones, and she screamed in pain. Coolant was venting into her holds, oil spraying from ruptured pipes, her corridors filling with acidic gas and steam. Bulkheads snapped shut, and she felt parts of the ship go numb. The Titan Child kept skidding. The iron cliff of the station’s flank loomed out of the static of her sensors, so close she felt she could touch it. Then her sensors cut out and plunged her into blindness.

  No, no, no, she thought, no, not like this, not blind. She was alone and could feel nothing. No, not like this. I am not flesh. Only flesh dies. I am metal, I am data, and machine. I am Titan Child.

  Her machine eyes opened again as data punched back into her mind. She was in time to see something pull itself from the station.

  A hundred-metre-wide sheet of metal cracked from the station’s back and lifted up like the carapace of a vast turtle rising from mud. Tendrils of lurid energy trailed from it as it emerged. Under its shell the creature had limbs of wreckage, pincers of twisted metal, and fins of torn steel. A blunt head formed from twisted gun turrets turned and looked at the Titan Child. Its eyes were gouged holes that wept molten metal. Carment
a looked back at it and felt the promise of ruin in the creature’s gaze.

  The creature roared, an impossible sound that rang across the void. Carmenta fired. Plasma batteries and turbolasers lit the narrow gulf between her and the station. The creature leapt. Debris spun behind it, sparkling like snowfall under starlight. Wings of crumpled metal unfolded from under its shell. Carmenta could not process what was happening. She had missed. The creature was accelerating towards her.

  No, it was flying in the airless void. The buzzing beat of its wings flooded her sensors. She readied to fire again, feeling the thrum of charging capacitors and vibration as breeches closed on macro-shells.

  With a shower of void-pitted metal another creature broke through the back of the station and leapt into the void, then another, and another.

  Carmenta fired. The creatures vanished as plasma-tipped shells exploded in a spread of overlapping fire-spheres. The release of each shot was hot, filled with a scream of molten fury.

  The creatures came through the inferno, red with heat, mouths wide. Carmenta felt cold, the cold of dead iron spinning through an endless night. She fired once more before the wave of burning creatures passed through her shields and sank their claws into her hull.

  Ahriman’s mind buckled as his thoughts slurred. They were tumbling now rather than flying through the station, banging off walls, floors and ceilings. Ahriman’s helmet display cut out, returned and cut out again. He could hear air hissing from rents in his armour. He had no idea how much further they had to go, or even if he had guided them back the way they had come.

  The frame of an open blast door slammed into his helm. Sparks ignited behind his eyes. Part of his awareness fell away, as a portion of his brain blacked out. He hurtled on unguided, momentum spinning him on as his telekinetic projection died.