Ahriman: Exile

by John French

  For a second Astraeos wondered if he should not have let Ahriman keep his brother shut away, forgotten and quiet. Even if he wakes and can speak, he will not be your brother, said Ahriman in his memory.

  Perhaps death would be better, thought Astraeos. But then I would be the last, and then what would any of it have meant?

  ‘You won’t let me die, brother,’ said Kadin without looking at him, then turned his head slowly to fix Astraeos with his green, reptile eyes. ‘You don’t have the strength.’ Kadin raised his chin towards Ahriman. ‘And he needs you, so he won’t kill me even though he should.’

  Astraeos found his hands were clenched, his own scarred face set in hard lines. It was not his brother, he knew that the moment Kadin had spoken, but he had to know what of him remained. Slowly, hesitantly he extended his consciousness out and into Kadin’s mind.

  It was like plunging a hand into an open wound. He could feel textures of torn thoughts, holes where memories and beliefs had been. What remained hung together in a tangle of tattered remnants. There was nothing else there, no daemonic intelligence nested in the ruins, just a mutilated hole where it had once been. Astraeos broke the connection, and met his brother’s gaze. Kadin gave a smile that was almost a grimace.

  Ahriman had stepped up beside Astraeos. ‘And what do you intend?’ he asked, his voice cold and flat.

  ‘Why, to follow where you lead, Ahriman,’ said Kadin and spat another clot of blood and acidic phlegm onto the deck.

  ‘Do as he says,’ said Ahriman to Carmenta. ‘Rebuild what you can of him.’ Astraeos found his mouth opening to say something, but Ahriman had already turned and walked out of the chamber. He looked back to his brother, the unformed thought still caught in his open mouth.

  Kadin grinned up at Astraeos, as thickening blood oozed from the corners of his mouth.

  Kadin had heard Maroth before he had seen him. The low cough of rust-clogged servos and the stuttering whine of the sorcerer’s armour had followed Kadin as he walked the deep and silent spaces of the Titan Child. He had been walking ever since Carmenta had finished her work, ever since he had been remade.

  He closed his eyes and heard the sound of creaking armour again, closer now, moving between the rows of machinery at his back. He opened his eyes and the monochrome, shadowless world returned. His leg pistons snapped and hissed as he moved. Carmenta had done her work, folding the remains of his body around limbs of plasteel. In some way those additions had been stranger than the other changes: his regrown eyes, the fact that he was sure that he could not remove his armour if he had tried, that the world he saw, touched and breathed seemed as dead as a holo projection.

  His mind was no longer whole; he could feel the breaks and voids in his own psyche like the ghost sense of a lost limb. Emotions and thoughts did not link up, and his memories were a ruin of holes and fragments. Whole sections of his life were gone, and some seemed so unreal that it was as if his life belonged to someone else. He no longer knew what any of it meant, but worse, he was not sure that he cared.

  Kadin’s tongue flicked out and he tasted the air. It was warm with the static pulse of thousands of cables and pipes which twisted across the chamber. The darkness was almost complete but the passage stretched in front of him in yellowed monochrome, as if dirty moonlight shone from behind him. He had always been able to see in the dark, that was the first gift of the world which had borne him and then of the gene-seed which had remade him. But now the shadows seemed to melt away from his gaze. Every now and again he would close his eyes just to feel the touch of true darkness.

  He did not know what had happened to his augmetic eye; there was no mark of it on his face, just smooth skin and bone circling the socket in which a new eye looked out at the world. He breathed out slowly. His breath still tasted of the blood of the immersion tank, sweet iron on his tongue. The sensation enfolded him for a second, and in the darkness behind his eyes he could feel nothing but the thick flow of blood on his skin, inside his veins, in his lungs and mouth.

  A low hiss of breath filled his ears, so close that it felt as if it were next to his ear. Kadin spun and his arm snapped out, pulling Maroth from his hiding place in a machine niche. Piston-driven fingers squealed on fracturing ceramite as his grip closed around the collar of Maroth’s armour.

  Rage filled Kadin. Rage like a thundercloud. Rage that shook him like the shout of a god. He remembered the sorcerer leaning in towards him, smiling, blood dribbling down his chin. ‘Your eye tastes of weakness,’ he had said. ‘Just like your brother’s,’ and all the while all Kadin had been able to think of was Cadar falling, his chest open to the air. The rage became a scream inside him that merged with the metal screech of his closing grip.

  Then suddenly nothing, just blank emptiness that flowed to the horizon of his thoughts like a black mirror. He looked at Maroth dangling at the end of his grasp. A wet laugh spluttered from Maroth’s speaker-grille.

  ‘You will not kill me, Kadin,’ said Maroth.

  ‘And what makes you think that?’ Kadin gazed at him, his hand still gripping the collar of Maroth’s armour. The sightless lenses of the hound-shaped helm blinked with light.

  ‘Because you and I are kin,’ hissed Maroth. His legs were scrabbling, trying to find purchase on the decking as he clawed at Kadin’s arm. ‘That is why I have sought you, because we are the same now.’

  It was Kadin’s turn to laugh. ‘We are no kin.’ The fingers of his hand tightened, and he heard something pop in Maroth’s neck.

  ‘You are here searching the shadows. You look for yourself but you will find nothing.’

  Kadin reached up with his free hand and gripped Maroth’s wrist. Slowly, he twisted and heard the armour break and the bones within pop. Maroth screamed, the high sound echoing through the machine stacks before turning into a rasping gurgle. Kadin tensed to begin to pull the arm from its socket. Pistons bunched down his arms.

  ‘Tell me that you feel anger as you once did,’ said Maroth, and his voice held no laughter or madness, just a weariness that held Kadin as still as if he had been bound to stone. ‘Tell me that you remember what it was to hate and know why. Tell me that you cannot feel the abyss within your soul.’

  Kadin had gone completely motionless. Maroth nodded as if in agreement. ‘It will grow. Yes it will. In time you will bathe in blood just to try and remember what it was to feel anything. You will kill and burn all you once treasured and find that it means nothing. The abyss will take all. I know this. It is why I found you, why I am here.’

  Maroth shook his head, and the gesture for an instant was that of Thidias looking up at him from the floor of his chamber. ‘We are falling,’ Thidias had said, ‘and the sun is a vanishing memory.’

  Kadin felt his hand tense to snap closed, then he breathed out and dropped Maroth to the floor. He looked down at the broken being that had once been a man, and then a Space Marine, and now was just a creature. He watched as Maroth patted at his cracked armour like an animal licking a wounded paw. He could see nothing of the strength of a warrior, nothing of the pride of the gene-seed and tradition that had once made Maroth. He saw only filthy armour hiding a body within that had nothing left to it but the next breath coming from its mouth.

  ‘We are the abyss’s hollow children, you and I,’ said Maroth, and cocked his head as if waiting. Kadin watched him for a heartbeat and turned to walk away. After a second Maroth scrambled after the sound of footsteps.

  Ahriman shook. Blood had run from his eyes and dried in long brown runnels across his cheeks. Sweat sheened his skin and his mouth was numb with repeating the same phrases for days.

  But this place has no days, he thought. No days and no nights. Just the slow-moving surge of thoughts and emotion, rising, spiralling, and falling, like the deep tides of an ocean, like the winds of Terra, like the sway of a forest.

  He realised that his focus had slipped, and that the next ritual phrase had almost caught in his throat. He forced his mind back into the rote pattern, an
d aligned his heartbeat to the rhythm of the words coming from his dry mouth.

  He sat on the bare metal floor of the viewing tower where he and Astraeos had looked towards the Cadian Gate. Black iron shutters closed off the view beyond the crystal dome above. The only sound was that of his slow breaths. A polished circle of silver hung in front of him, suspended by his will, its surface rippling with the reflected light of another world. He gazed into the mirror surface, watching patterns form, his mind shifting between remembered stores of symbolism.

  +Reduce engine output by two-fifths. Allow us to drift for six seconds then continue on previous vector.+ The effort of the sending forced fresh sweat to bead his bare arms and chest. He felt Carmenta understand the message, and sensed the Titan Child’s engines dim in response. Astraeos sat opposite him, mouth closed, his mind syphoning strength into Ahriman. Even with such support, scrying their route towards the Cadian Gate was draining Ahriman to the point of delirium.

  They were travelling a relatively short distance, at least in terms of real space. In the warp, though, distance meant nothing. Thought, emotion, imagination and dreams were more real than anything physical. A true Navigator was able to look directly into that unreal realm and read its tides. Ahriman knew that what he did was a shadow of that ability. Where a Navigator saw the warp directly, Ahriman was looking at an echo captured by ritual and interpreted by symbolism. It was as crude as the ancients divining the course of the future in the coiling of smoke, or the way that sand fell from a child’s hand.

  Yet crude or not, it took his entire mind to avoid the reefs and storm tides of the warp before the ship hit them. He had not blinked since they had entered the warp. He could not; one missed instant of perception would end them all.

  On the scrying mirror the patterns of light and colour shifted suddenly and he felt his mind reel. A wave of dizziness and nausea rose from his guts, and he fought it down, focusing on the changing patterns and colours. He clawed for understanding of what he was seeing. Then, without warning, he had clarity.

  +Exit. Now.+ The thought blurted from his mind, and a second later he felt a slippery sensation beneath his skin as the Titan Child dived back into real space. Ahriman did not move; in his mind the oracular calculations spun on like cogs driven by a still-tense spring. The scrying mirror still swirled with colour and light.

  ‘We have made translation,’ came Carmenta’s voice over the chamber vox-speaker. Ahriman did not blink. His consciousness was fading; only the rote processes he had held steady in his mind while guiding the ship were still running. On the polished silver of the mirror a shape appeared, like a shadow cast through mist.

  What is this? What am I seeing? The thoughts formed in Ahriman’s mind, but the momentum of his ritual had unwound, and blackness rose from within to claim him. His eyes closed and he slumped back. The mirror fell to the floor and shattered.

  He lay on the stone floor and dreamed of shadows shaped like men, and soft voices telling him to forget.

  He opened his eyes hours later to see stars looking down at him from beyond crystal. Astraeos had gone. He picked himself up, his head aching in bright stars behind his eyes. He limped to the vox-speaker and thumbed it to life.

  ‘Ahriman?’ Fatigue filled Carmenta’s voice.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘We are stationary in real space.’ Silence crackled from the speaker-grille, and then she spoke again. ‘I can see Cadia, Ahriman. We are close enough that I can see the light of its star.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, and was already moving. He was tired, but they had to prepare. There was no time for the doubts of dreams.

  Part Three

  TO DUST RETURNED

  XIII

  Clockwork

  ‘Signal. Partial. Imperial probable. Minimal energy output. Additional energy readings indicate weapons fire, field and hull damage.’ The servitor finished its monologue of information and went silent. On the circular command platform of the Lord of Mankind Inquisitor Selandra Iobel registered the report with a pursing of her lips. It was unexpected, but then nothing in the Eye of Terror was totally predictable, even on its margins. They would need to decide what to do, and quickly. That did not please her; hasty decisions had a habit of being regretted later.

  They were on course for Cadia, its star shining several weeks of real space travel away. No one, not even an Inquisitorial augur mission, dropped from the warp close to Cadia, at least not if they expected to survive. So the Lord of Mankind pushed through the void like a sea voyager of old returning to port after a storm. Iobel wanted to see that fortress system again, to not be on constant alert, be free of the chronotrap, and allow herself to be tired. Above all she looked forward to being free of her damned armour. Fire-orange lacquer covered its plates, and the outlines of angel wings, raptor heads and rayed suns spread across its surface in lines of black iron. She shifted in her seat, unconsciously trying to release slowly cramping muscles. She had worn the battle plate for weeks, and it had begun to feel like a hand clamped over her skin. Not that there was any choice. Every member of the crew wore armour; it was a necessity.

  She turned to look at her two peers. Inquisitor Erionas sat on his brass throne, his eyes closed above the rebreather that covered the lower part of his face. He wore graphite-grey armour sculpted across the chest to resemble flayed musculature. A spread of thick cables connected his throne to the cogitator towers that ran down the centre of the command chamber. Iobel could see light playing across the inside of Erionas’s eyelids. He gave no sign of having heard the servitor’s report, but she knew he had; he heard everything. On her other side Malkira sat on her own seat of polished bone. The thrones were tiresomely symbolic, of course. Iobel’s own throne was silver, but no more comfortable for it. A hunched figure crouched to the right hand of each throne, its features hidden by red robes woven with sacred names.

  Malkira gave a blood-wetted cough, her usual preface to speech. ‘We should ignore it.’ Iobel turned to look at Malkira, and was met by the inquisitor’s black eyes glinting back at her from the wrinkled skull of her face. ‘Time is running low.’ Malkira raised a hand and tapped the chronotrap fixed to the chest of her pearl-white armour. Cogwork whirled behind the circular pane of crystal. Iobel glanced down at the brass frame of her own chronotrap, her eyes reading the movement of the numerals etched into the silver and brass cogs.

  ‘You are correct,’ said Iobel.

  ‘Of course I am,’ snapped Malkira, and coughed again. The rhythmic pumping of the life-sustaining systems built into the crone’s armour became louder. ‘We are risking too much if we divert our course now. A few more weeks and the data will be secure.’

  ‘You don’t need to convince me,’ said Iobel.

  ‘No,’ said Erionas. Both Iobel and Malkira turned to look at him. He had not moved, and his eyes were still closed. ‘We should divert course to investigate.’ His voice crackled out of the vox-grilles set into his respirator.

  ‘Ridiculous,’ sneered Malkira, her lips peeling back from her silver teeth.

  ‘No.’ Erionas’s voice held no emotion. Iobel had heard him order the razing of cities with an equally dead voice. ‘This is an opportunity. I have accessed the scanner readouts. The ship is of unusual construction. It’s definitely Imperial, in my opinion. Psyocculum assessment says that it has been deep within the Eye. Yet it does not exhibit macro levels of malign warping. A culling of its data stores could tell us much.’

  ‘Or get us all killed in the sight of safety,’ spat Malkira.

  ‘Safety is not why we came here.’ Erionas let that reminder sit in the silence.

  He was right, of course, Iobel could not deny it. They were an augur expedition, a ship sent into the Eye to gather information on its nature and current state. The data and lore they carried in their warded stacks was beyond value. It was a glimpse of the face of their enemy, one that might warn them of growing threats, or reveal weaknesses.

  Such expeditions were dangerous in the ext
reme, and the possibilities of attack and violent death were the most minor of the risks they faced. The Eye itself was toxic to the soul and body. Warp energy and matter overlapped in the Eye, and physical laws became thinned to the point of non-existence. At the edges of the Eye a weak skin still existed between the two realms, but at its heart nightmare reigned unchallenged. To venture even partway into the Eye risked corruption.

  The Lord of Mankind had been crafted specially to make such a voyage. Prayers and wards had been etched into every plate and rivet of her hull. Psychic dispersers and null generators ran through her structure. Any part of the ship could be sealed and flooded with nerve gas should the systems detect an intrusion. Most of the crew were servitors, and almost all of the human crew were kept in stasis until needed. All but the three inquisitors would be executed on return to the Imperium. The risk of corruption was too high. All of them knew this, and yet all still served. It was a fact that caused Iobel to feel puzzlement and admiration every time she looked into the face of one of the doomed but dutiful crew.

  But the warp not only corrupted, it also made a mockery of time. It was possible for an expedition to spend a handful of months in the Eye and return to Cadia thousands of years later, or seconds after they left, or in the past. There was also no guarantee that all of those on the ship were experiencing the same amount of time. So each member of the crew wore a chronotrap, and more were set into the structure of the ship. The traps measured subjective time and exposure to the substance of the warp, slicing it away in a million cog clicks.

  ‘There is no time,’ said Malkira, tapping the chronotrap set onto her breast. Iobel felt the fluttering whir of her own chronotrap send a small vibration through her armour.