Ahriman: Exile

by John French

  Above him, the cogwork set into the ceiling broke. Cogs the size of tank wheels fell, glowing at their edges. He realised he had stopped moving. Somewhere, at the edge of his sight, he saw Kadin standing, bloody and steaming. The screams and shouts of the fight rolling around Kadin sounded dull, as if they had passed through water. On the floor Silvanus moaned and stirred as if in an unpleasant dream. Astraeos could not take his eyes off the warp tunnel as it opened. Slowly, as if wading through sand, he began to drag the Navigator forwards.

  He was halfway to the warp tunnel when the seraphs came out of the dark with a crackle of lightning and metal.

  ‘Mecrurias!’ Iobel spoke the word of activation as she ran. Behind her, the three hooded figures that followed her leapt forwards. Beneath their hoods, mouths opened in tongueless roars. Drug injectors dumped aggression and reaction boosters into their blood. Veins stood out across their skin. Their red robes burned from their bodies as their power lashes activated. Juddering with speed, they began to run. After five paces they had overtaken Iobel. As their null limiters shut down Iobel had to suppress the instinct to run in the opposite direction.

  The seraphs glowed in the warp-tainted air, the warding circuits in their skin crawling with letters and symbols from dead tongues. They had once been ordinary people, taken by the Black Ships from worlds where they were shunned. Then the Inquisition had taken them and forged them to a new purpose. All their thoughts were transformed into murderous rage. Held by pacifier helms, they became their true selves only when activated by the speaking of ritual words. The Ecclesiarchy called such a process arco-flagellation, but the seraphs were creations of a higher order. Each was a pariah, a soul with no soul, a creature that cast no shadow in the warp, untouchable by its powers. As they ran through the passage opening, their numbing presence hit the gathering vortex of warp energy like a sea tide meeting lava.

  Ahriman felt the presence of the seraphs, and his will slipped. His eyes snapped open. The rainbow light of the warp lit the junction chamber in front of him. At his back he could feel the warp tunnel shrink, its existence collapsing as the seraphs numbed his mind. He could see the Titan Child’s hold just beyond the opening, so close, yet drifting further away. Multi-coloured lightning arced through the air, crawling across the heaped corpses and bronze walls. Astraeos was standing halfway across the chamber, a limp figure in a soiled blue robe hanging from his fist.

  +Go. Through. Now,+ he sent, and with every word he felt his will slip and the warp tunnel begin to close. The seraphs were bounding closer, their hunched shapes blurred by shadow in Ahriman’s eyes. Astraeos began to move, lifting the Navigator like a sack. The seraphs’ blankness howled in Ahriman’s mind. They were black holes sucking his reality into a shrieking silence. Where his mind should have seen the flame of their souls, all he saw was an abyss. He felt like he was suffocating, as if the air were being pulled from his lungs. He saw a human female in flame-coloured armour.

  Astraeos was a pace away from the gate. He paused, raised his sword and sent a fork of lightning at the seraphs. It vanished in mid-air even as it arced from the sword tip. Ahriman felt the power drain away like water poured on sand. Astraeos paused, and his sword tip wavered and dipped.

  +Go!+ screamed Ahriman. Astraeos turned and ran through the gate. Ahriman looked up as the lead seraph bounded over a heap of corpses, its movements juddering like a jammed pict feed. He could see the drool hanging from its rotting teeth, and the veins twitching in its taut muscles. It leapt, its legs curling underneath it, its flail-tipped arms raised above its head. Ahriman stared – he could not move, he was frozen, numb.

  A huge shape hit the seraph in mid-leap. The seraph twisted, power crackling over its flails. Kadin landed on top of it, and his chainsword cut it in two before it could rise. Blood formed a mask of rubies on his pale face. He turned, his chainsword rising, as the second seraph brought its flails down. The power whips wrapped around the blade, licking it with lightning. For an instant the teeth of the chainsword tried to turn, and then the blade shattered. Ahriman saw Kadin fall, his face a ruin of punctured meat. He gripped the seraph as he collapsed, a metal hand clamped around its throat.

  The third seraph was still bounding towards Ahriman, its metal-muzzled face low to the bloody deck, its muscles tensing to leap the final metres. He felt the warp tunnel shrink. His skin was cold, his head pounding in rhythm with his hearts. Then he saw movement behind the seraph.

  The human’s face was pale, her skin the colour of snowfall. Orange and black armour encased her slender form. He could see the silver-headed pins holding the red blaze of her hair above her head. She was looking at him, directly at him. Her eyes were blue. He felt an echo in that gaze, a spark of something that cut through the numbing fog of the seraphs. Recognition, fear, triumph, a tumbling of half-formed memories that flared from her mind. She raised a boltgun and his eyes met its dead gaze.

  The third seraph leapt.

  The gate held open at his back crumpled.

  Three paces away Kadin came to his feet, roaring, the head of a seraph in his hand.

  The human woman fired.

  Ahriman saw the gun flare, felt his mind slide off the shell as it flew through the air.

  Kadin’s shoulder hit him in the chest.

  Ahriman fell, and did not hit the ground.

  XV

  Secrets

  Voices came out of the night. Ahriman thought he recognised some of them, but were they voices or were they thoughts? Were they his thoughts?

  ‘We are taking fire…’

  +Oh God-Emperor, oh holy God–+

  ‘He is bleeding.’

  Why did she know me? How could she recognise me? What did she recognise?

  +Turn by three quarters. Grid 657 through 754, accelerate.+

  ‘Oh God-Emperor.’

  ‘Be silent.’

  Fate has come for you, Ahriman.

  +I am going to die. Oh Throne, oh Throne, oh Throne…+

  ‘Mistress Carmenta?’

  I fell to my own pride.

  ‘He is not conscious.’

  +Route power through conduit alpha 101721.+

  ‘That was a hit. They are coming after us.’

  +Shield failure… cannot recharge… shield failure...+

  It was a mistake. I am sorry. We should never have begun. I am sorry, brother.

  ‘… conscious…’

  +…there is no way out from this…+

  ‘Jump to the warp.’

  Apollonia. Because of Apollonia.

  ‘There are fragments inside the wound.’

  No, it is one of the nine. One of the Fifteenth. A son of Magnus. The dreams of enslaved worlds scream his name.

  ‘If you do not guide us we all die here.’

  + Throne, I want to live–+

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Jump to warp. Do it now.’

  …going to die… jump… collate…. blood loss… god… mistress… end it now… jump–

  White. Bright white; the white of sunlight on unwritten paper.

  Everything was still. He looked down at his hand. It was bare. He flexed his fingers. They moved, but he felt nothing. Everything was quiet; the whisper of thoughts on the edge of perception, the shifting surge of the warp in his mind, the noise of sensation, all of it was gone.

  I am cut off, he realised. I am trapped somewhere inside myself. Something has made parts of my brain and body shut down.

  There had been a gunshot. He remembered the muzzle flash, and the feeling of falling backwards through the collapsing warp tunnel.

  Yes, he realised. The shell hit me. It had found the weak armour under his arm and punched into his torso. An instant later Kadin had pitched him backwards into the warp tunnel.

  There had been no pain, just a sudden numbness as his body shut down. Then there had been a second feeling, a feeling of being wrapped in deaf oblivion. Something was in his blood, in his body, surging around his veins with every heartbeat. It had cut his c
onnection to the warp. The voices, they had been the last vanishing calls out of the dark as night fell. He knew all this with detached certainty.

  He looked around. The whiteness had been complete, but now a checked stone floor extended away to the horizon. He turned his head again. A long corridor met his eyes. He could see sunlight streaming in through arched windows.

  This is my memory palace, he realised. My mind is retreating to the one thing that exists wholly within itself.

  Slowly he stood, and took a step down the corridor. There were no doors, just blank smooth stone. He kept walking.

  You may be dying, he thought. Do you even know how long you have been here?

  The corridor extended without ending. He turned and started to walk the other way, and stopped.

  Two doors stood on opposite sides of the corridor. He recognised only one of them. The door on his right was small, wooden and carved with a flock of birds rising towards the sun. It was an old door, one of the first he had placed in his memory palace, and he had not opened it since. He took a step towards it then hesitated, and looked over his shoulder.

  The second door was obsidian, polished to a mirror surface, without handle or hinges. He had never seen it before.

  What is beyond here?

  He stepped closer and saw his reflection slide across the oil-black surface. His hand rose almost without his realising it, his fingers extending to touch the black stone. He froze. The reflection had gone. In its place he saw the flash of a gunshot again, and the echo of light in the armoured woman’s eyes. His mind had leapt outwards as the shell had left the gun, like a hand scrabbling for dry land before sinking beneath the waves. Her mind had been open, the terror and triumph of the moment leaving her unshielded. He had touched her thoughts as the bolt shell hit him, and seen something of the secrets she kept.

  This is a door of secrets. His hand moved forwards, then paused again. He looked down the corridor in both directions. There were no other doors except the obsidian door and the small door of carved wood.

  He paused for a long moment. Then he pushed open the black door, and saw what the inquisitors had found in the Eye of Terror.

  Ahriman’s pupils went wide in his eyes. He gasped. A fresh wash of blood gushed over his lips. Carmenta froze, her mechadendrites poised over the open wound.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said, and saw his eyes focus on her. He stopped moving. She tried to relax, to focus on the movement of the blades and callipers inside the wound. There were pieces of shrapnel still inside his chest. She had been teasing them out of the torn flesh for hours. Slowly she withdrew a mechadendrite, a sharp sliver of blood-slick silver held between its pincers. Ahriman’s eyes focused on the fragment.

  ‘Where are we?’ he croaked.

  ‘Holding steady in real space,’ said Astraeos from behind her. She saw Ahriman’s eyes refocus. He nodded, and his eyes pinched shut as if at sudden pain. His skin was clammy and its colour had bled away to a cold grey.

  He is dying, she thought. She turned and dropped the fragment into a glass cylinder. A dozen scraps of silver lay at the bottom. And perhaps that is best, came another voice in her head. He has led us to the edge of ruin again and again. Sooner or later he will lead us too far and we will fall.

  ‘I will see the Navigator,’ said Ahriman, and began to push himself off the polished metal slab. Tubes that had been sucking the blood from his open wound came loose and began to splutter red droplets over his bare skin. Ahriman winced, then his face hardened. ‘My armour,’ he said, his mouth barely opening. ‘Bring it to me.’

  ‘There are still fragments in the wound,’ said Carmenta. Ahriman slowly turned his eyes on her.

  ‘I am aware of that.’ A bead of blood formed at the corner of his lips. ‘I can feel them. They are like needles in my mind. You won’t be able to remove them all. Two of them are hooked into the flesh next to my heart.’ He breathed hard. ‘Seal the wound.’

  ‘If I don’t get them out…’ she began.’

  ‘They may kill me, but not for a while, and I need that time.’ He glanced from Astraeos to Carmenta. ‘Seal it, and then bring me my armour and the Navigator. We have much to prepare.’

  After a long moment she nodded and began to cauterise the wound. The smell of charring flesh caught in her throat as it rose from her tools.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, as she stapled the lips of the wound closed.

  ‘Where we have always been going: to my brother. To Amon.’

  Ahriman’s eyes were suddenly bright, and Carmenta felt more terrified than she had in all her years of flight. Astraeos did not move, but she could feel him waiting.

  ‘After all that has…’ began Astraeos.

  ‘The ship we took the Navigator from was no wandering pilgrim. It had gone into the Eye, looking for secrets. Their mystics had read portents of a power rising in the Eye, gathering forces to it.’ Ahriman paused and Carmenta could see something briefly replace the pain in his eyes.

  ‘How can you know this?’ said Carmenta before she could stop herself.

  ‘I saw it in the mind of the one that shot me.’ Ahriman moved his right hand to touch the lips of the wound in his side. His fingers came up red. He stared at his own blood.

  ‘What did they find?’ asked Astraeos quietly.

  ‘They found the ashes of a war.’

  Astraeos frowned.

  ‘There is always war within the Eye. You have told me this yourself: eternal war for power, for resources.’

  ‘This was not that type of war, it was a war of annihilation.’ Ahriman looked back up, his eyes unfocused. ‘Scars cut deep into the warp itself. Vortices of destruction that scream the names of those who created them. Daemons scavenging the remains of hell worlds cracked open like soft fruit. All just the by-blows of one battle.’

  ‘What battle?’

  Ahriman’s face looked like a mask of dead grey skin.

  ‘The fall of the Planet of the Sorcerers. The final death of my Legion.’

  ‘This has happened?’ asked Astraeos carefully.

  ‘Not yet,’ Ahriman shook his head. ‘Time is not a single river in which we all float towards one end. It flows in many streams. Some flow fast, some slow. If you stand within your own stream you see only your own time, but within the warp you can move between them. A ship may enter the warp and return before it left, or emerge after centuries that the crew have experienced as hours. Such things have happened. Within the Eye, the streams of time are broken and tangled: moments of futures and pasts crammed together in an unravelling knot.’

  ‘So it will happen,’ said Astraeos.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘How could it not, if it has already happened in the future?’

  ‘Knowledge is power, knowledge changes everything. I know, and so that can change what happens now.’ Ahriman gave a smile that was as cold as snow. ‘I have never believed in fate.’

  ‘Amon,’ said Astraeos after a long pause. ‘This is the answer that you looked for. This is what Amon gathers for: to prepare for this war.’

  Ahriman said nothing.

  There is something he is not saying, thought Carmenta. Another secret he is holding close.

  ‘Prophecy,’ said Ahriman, his voice suddenly heavy with resignation. ‘All glimpses of the future are flawed. Believe them to mean one thing, and you are falling into a trap. Ignore them and they pull you back in. Prophecy has followed me since I could dream, and all of it has led to ruin.’

  ‘There are wars that we must run from,’ said Astraeos.

  Ahriman shook his head. He looked older and more tired than Carmenta had ever seen him.

  ‘No. I will not bow to fate.’

  Even if it kills you, thought Carmenta. Even if it brings ruin to all of us. Ahriman looked at her, and she wondered if he had heard her thoughts.

  ‘You cannot do this.’

  The words hung in the air. For a second Carmenta thought she had spoken without realising, but then Astraeos spok
e again.

  ‘You cannot do this, Ahriman,’ he said. Carmenta looked at him. His face was as blank and fixed as stone. He shook his head and his armour purred as it followed the small movement.

  Ahriman did not reply, but pulled himself to his feet. His eyes closed for a second and he swayed where he stood, then he steadied to complete stillness. To Carmenta he suddenly looked like a bronzed statue, washed with drying blood. Slowly his eyes opened.

  ‘I must do this,’ said Ahriman softly. Astraeos walked away without another word. All Carmenta could look at was the blood slowly dripping from the edge of the metal slab.

  The precise gap between loyalty to the Imperium and betrayal was not something Silvanus had considered before. He knew about the warp, of course; he knew about it as few others born in the Imperium ever would. The warp was his reason for existing, it gave him purpose and meaning. Without it he was just a mutant with a third eye in the middle of his forehead. He knew how the warp could corrupt, about daemons and their thirst for the weakness of mortals. He had seen the reality behind the secrets as he gazed directly into the churning ocean of the warp’s heart. He had been tested by the Inquisition, and they had found what he already knew: that he had a mind that was unconventional, highly resilient, and difficult to tempt. What they had not considered was that Silvanus, while reckless, was not suicidal. Risks were calculations, gambles with at least a chance of coming out the other side. Faced with the certainty of death, he would rather stay alive. As he bowed before his new master he reflected that this last quality was the breaking point of his loyalty to the Imperium.

  ‘Rise.’ The voice was deep and resonant. Silvanus obeyed and stood, trying not to grit his teeth as the bruises from his abduction sent sharp complaints up his nerves. The figure who stood above him was a Space Marine. Silvanus’s eyes skittered over the blue armour, noting the imperfections and battle damage hidden under the lacquer. He looked up and met blue eyes. He flinched. It happened before he could stop himself. They were bright blue, like sapphires catching sunlight. It was not the colour that surprised him, but their utter stillness.