Ahriman: Exile

by John French

  ‘I bind your will to me.’ The chains holding the daemon shattered. It rose, twisting and juddering like a string of images from a broken pict feed. Astraeos felt one set of bindings dissolve even as his mind made them anew, anchoring them in his own consciousness. The daemon gave a single spasm, its body rippling like a cracked whip. Then it was still, and the darkness and twilight haloed it like a cloak.

  Astraeos raised his hand and beckoned. The bound daemon drifted forwards. Maroth had gone silent. The daemon bared its teeth.

  +Feed,+ said the daemon into Astraeos’s mind. He flinched at the sensation of its thought. He could still taste blood in his own mouth, and feel the creature’s hunger. Its jaw opened, and closed silently. +Feed,+ it growled again, and he realised that his own jaw was working.

  ‘You will feed,’ said Astraeos.

  XXI

  Remade

  The crimson Storm Eagle left the hull of the Titan Child and began a long burn aimed at the core of the gathering fleet. A dozen ships’ sensors saw it, registered it as one of Amon’s own and averted their gaze. The Sycorax itself had been expecting the craft and a hangar deck yawned open to receive its returning child. The gunship settled amongst others of its kind: craft of greater and lesser size, all crimson, all gleaming under the harsh white light. Tech-wrights moved around the other craft, caressing their hulls, connecting or disconnecting pipes and cables while muttering in a low hooting tongue. Bird masks of verdigris-stained bronze covered their faces, and ochre robes swirled around them as they moved. All of them were of the Cyrabor, a clan of long corrupted tech-wrights. Their masters had given their bond to the great sorcerer Amon, and so they served him, maintaining his weapons of war. Such service was a blessing of the many-eyed god, and the Cyrabor viewed the sorcerers they served with fear and awe. When they saw the craft enter they noted its marks of status, identified it as serving the personal acolytes of Amon and moved to receive it.

  The ramp in the Storm Eagle’s nose hinged open. Two of the Cyrabor moved forwards, then stopped. A figure stepped from the inside of the gunship. It wore red armour, and the robed figures recognised the horned crest and disk on the top of the helm as the mark of one of the twin acolytes of Amon. Rents and crumpled impact wounds marked both helmet and armour. The figure paused and looked at the waiting machine-wrights, then began to stride across the deck. Behind him two Rubricae followed, coal black in the stark light. One Cyrabor glanced at its fellow, hooting and clicking in a half-whisper. More of the machine-wrights began to move away, some staring at the red-armoured Space Marine. Many had seen the twin acolytes only once, from a distance, but they knew that they were never apart: where one went the other followed. Yet here was one alone.

  The mutters became louder. Across the chamber more of the robed figures began to look up, and some began to move towards the docking bay’s exits. Weapon brutes began to pull themselves from niches in the chamber’s walls, weapons clattering ready at the end of slab-muscled limbs. Bronze plates covered their chests and torsos. Their heads were lumps of beaten metal with asymmetric clusters of multi-coloured rangefinders. They stalked forwards, their eyes fixed on the Space Marine who was still walking calmly across the deck. Low-level threat condition messages began to pulse across the Sycorax’s vox-net. Requests for more details came back from command nodes. The Space Marine halted, his gaze taking in the closing ring of weapon brutes.

  Somewhere a series of checks and questions hit a critical level of concern. A siren started to wail in the distance. A challenge began to burble from the weapon brutes. The Space Marine looked back at the Storm Eagle. His voice when he spoke was clear and calm.

  ‘Now,’ he said.

  Astraeos began to run. Behind him the two Rubricae raised their bolters. He could feel the ghosts of their movements in his mind. The creatures in front of him were tall, hunched, lumps of brass and bronze fused with spiral-tattooed flesh. A sweep of his mind counted twenty in the hangar bay. He sensed their crude thought processes shift from challenge to threat in a heartbeat.

  Gun mounts roared. A lattice of fire converged on him. Astraeos did not stop. His mind re-formed reality around him. There was a stutter in time. He felt the rounds pass through him; they felt like the prick of needles. He was a ghost flicking between solid and illusion. Ricochet sparks scored the deck behind him.

  +Fire,+ he sent. Behind him the Rubricae obeyed. A weapon brute exploded, its flesh and blood burning before it could hit the deck. A tech-wright beside it became a collapsing torch of cyan and rose flames. Astraeos had a curved khopesh sword hanging from his belt, but his own straight sword was in his grip. The bolt pistol in his other hand roared. Another brute fell, its head a bloody crater. The rest kept firing, heaping the deck at their feet with shell cases.

  Sirens screamed through the docking bay. Strobing yellow light filled Astraeos’s eyes, and then he hit the enemy line and was amongst the weapon brutes. The brute in front of him seemed to realise he was not stopping and tried to shuffle backwards. Astraeos’s blow split it from shoulder to hip, and he felt his blade become blood-hot in his hand as it cut. Slick pink offal spilled onto the deck. Astraeos pivoted with the momentum of his first blow and brought his sword around low. A second weapon brute collapsed, its legs severed at the knee. It fired as it fell, spraying rounds into the air as it scrambled to rise on bloody stumps. The remaining brutes were turning to try and bring their guns to bear.

  Astraeos raised his hand. A wave of telekinetic force ripped out along a line from the point of his palm. Weapon brutes and debris spun into the air. Some of the creatures were still firing as they tumbled. A stray round found a fuel line and a red mushroom of flame thumped upwards. The weapon brutes fell back to the deck with cracks of snapping bones. Machine-wrights were running for the blast doors even as they sealed. A fresh cluster of weapon brutes lumbered from their niches at the far end of the bay.

  A shadow was spreading from the open ramp of the Storm Eagle. It coiled along the deck and the snout of the gunship like an exhalation of frozen night. The figure of the bound daemon emerged from the craft’s troop compartment. It floated forwards, moving with serene slowness. The surviving weapon brutes registered its presence and swivelled to fire. A sphere of lightning flashed around the daemon as a storm of rounds rose to meet it, sheets of white blotting out the red alarm lights. A smell of sweet flowers and spoiled meat filled the air. An arc of lightning whipped out, and a machine-wright exploded. The lightning jumped on, running from body to body, snaking across the metal of the deck in thick ropes.

  The creature was roaring in Astraeos’s mind, and he bit back the shriek of glee that was rising in his throat. His vision crawled with ghost images as his mind boiled. He felt a part of his concentration slip, and a blow crashed into his right shoulder. He staggered, caught himself and ducked the second blow. A weapon brute, its guns dry, had barrelled into him, swinging its flesh-metal arms as clubs. His mind reached into the brute’s chest, and crushed its heart. It collapsed to the floor with a dull thump of slack muscle.

  The Rubricae were beside him now, shooting any of the weapon brutes that tried to rise from where they had fallen. He glanced back to the Storm Eagle. Kadin had emerged and behind him was Silvanus, supporting the crumpled form of Carmenta.

  +Ready?+ he sent, and Carmenta nodded stiffly. He switched his sending to Kadin. +Get her to where she needs to be.+ Kadin did not acknowledge the order, but moved towards a tower of machinery which rose from the hold’s deck. Carmenta and Silvanus limped after Kadin, keeping close to his back as if sheltering from a high wind. Astraeos saw rounds spark off Kadin’s armour.

  They did not have long: a minute at best, a handful of seconds at worst. Amon and his servants would be coming. Against those numbers there was no hope. Astraeos smiled behind his helm as he pointed his sword and flame washed across a weapon brute. Its skin flaked black, the meat of its muscle cooking as it staggered and collapsed. There was next to no hope as it was.

  To his left
the daemon was drifting forwards. Lightning reached out from its body and crawled over the hull of a hunch-winged craft. The fuel feeds linked to the craft ignited, and it rose into the air on a plume of oil-stained flame. Astraeos felt the wash of heat through his armour. He dived to the side as the craft crashed down onto the deck. A second explosion blossomed, and then became a red and black cloud that spread across the bay’s ceiling.

  Astraeos came to his feet. The docking bay was a fire- and smoke-smeared vision of hell. Bodies lay scattered in blackened heaps; weapons fire still stitched through the smoke. As he watched, another bolt of lightning bleached the drifting smoke white. He heard the daemon cackle at the edge of his thoughts. The two Rubricae walked through the flames, their heads and weapons turning to fire at targets that Astraeos could not see.

  +It must be now,+ he sent. The vox crackled, and Kadin was speaking in his ear.

  ‘It won’t work, brother. She collapsed when she connected to the machines. We–’

  ‘I. Am. Here. Librarian.’ The voice cut across the vox. It was a voice made of the scratch of static and the clicking of gears. It shook Astraeos’s skull.

  +Take it,+ he sent, and mag-locked his feet to the deck.

  A weapon brute, its left arm severed, loped towards him. He measured the distance to the charging brute with a glance. It would never reach him.

  The sirens fell silent. Every light in the hangar bay went dark. For an instant, before his helmet display compensated, he felt as if he were watching flames and shadows dance in a cave far beneath the earth. Then he felt the deck tremble as the external blast doors ground open. Starlight met firelight, and a wind began to howl. A second later the atmospheric containment field cut out. The open blast doors exhaled the rolling cloud of flame and smoke. Bodies dragged across the deck. The living flailed as they tumbled out into the night beyond the Sycorax’s hull. Then the sucking wind was gone and Astraeos was standing in dark silence. He began to move, and the daemon and Rubricae followed him. He reached out and touched Carmenta’s mind.

  +Find Ahriman, mistress. Find him and keep us alive+.

  It took three minutes for the forces on board the Sycorax to realise the scale of the threat they faced. Cohorts of bronze-armoured Cyrabor wardens mobilised from their lodges deep in the Sycorax’s gut. Sorcerers breathed commands into hundreds of Rubricae and they began to march through the corridors of their ship, silent but for the ring of their feet on the decking.

  Amon, alone in his high tower on the spine of the Sycorax, received a sending from one of his inner circle, and rose from his meditation. He had taken five paces across the chamber when the Sycorax began to shudder.

  The Cyrabor machine-wrights felt it first. Attached to the Sycorax by cables and webs of half-metal flesh, they began to babble and scream. They felt a presence rise through the ship’s systems like a shark emerging from the depths. It spread like poison, flooding from minor system to minor system until it was pouring into the controls of entire sections of the ship.

  The Sycorax had swum the lightless depths of the Eye of Terror for millennia; the warp had permeated its hull and heart, and in a very real sense it was alive. Every drop of blood spilled on its decks, every restless dream of its crew, every battle it had fought, had grown inside its bones. It was a proud creature with a mind like a king predator, but it was unprepared as a black cloud poured into its systems. The cloud spread to machines, to cypher slaves and datastacks, it spread between parts of the Sycorax not connected to anything else, and it spread even as the Sycorax tried to contain it. And all the while, as it subverted systems and melted overrides, it called a name.

  ‘Titan Child,’ it roared, as if calling for vengeance for the dead.

  Across the ship bulkheads slammed shut on troops running to respond to the incursion. Plasma reactor vents flooded sections with glowing super-heated clouds. Outer deck holds opened to deep space. Emergency hatches opened in sequence, creating open passages from the depths of the Sycorax to the cold void. Hundreds of slaves, machine-wrights, warriors and drone breeds died in the minutes after they heard the alert sirens. They died scrabbling for weapons; they died in the dark, half waking from dreams; they died muttering prayers to the god of fate that had betrayed them.

  The Sycorax reacted like a beast clawing at its own flesh as parasites ate it from within. It activated defence turrets in corridors packed with its own slave crew. Power, gravity and life support fluctuated across the ship. Airless dark swallowed the bridge, and the human slave crew choked as the atmosphere was sucked from the chamber. Electrical discharges ran through the hull, arcing between walls and floors.

  Only the Thousand Sons moved through the ship with unblunted purpose. The sorcerers melted through closed bulkheads with blue-hot fire, and jumped through barriers like insubstantial ghosts as they moved to meet the enemy. With them came hundreds of Rubricae, slow marching statues of red armour, the green light cold and obedient in their eyes.

  A cold peace had come to Ahriman after Amon had left. He had slid back into his own mind until he was walking through the palace of memories. It was quiet in a way that he had never realised possible. His footsteps echoed as they carried him down passages he had not walked for a very long time. He heard old memories scratching at the doors. Occasionally he paused, listened, and heard voices of friends long gone. Sometimes his hand went to push a door open, but he always hesitated, and then walked on. He walked until he found himself in front of a small door. A carving of birds spiralling towards the sun covered the door’s dark wood. Dust had accumulated in the recesses. There were older doors in the palace, but this was a door he had not opened since he had first closed it. He hesitated, then pushed. The door swung softly open.

  A wide balcony extended away from him to meet a view of dry desert, and a sky divided between clear blue and a layer of ochre storm cloud. A boy sat at the edge of the balcony, swinging his legs into the warm air, his hair stirring in a sudden gust of wind. He was tossing stones into the air, catching them without looking at them. Occasionally the boy would close his eyes, and a stone would halt in its fall to hang in the air. He looked no more than ten, but there was a seriousness to his face that made him seem older as soon as he looked up at Ahriman. The boy’s eyes were bright blue. He smiled.

  ‘Hello, Ahzek,’ he said, and the stone suspended in the air in front of him dropped into his palm. Ahriman smiled.

  ‘Ohrmuzd,’ said Ahriman, and watched as the memory of his true brother turned away, closed his eyes and tossed another stone into the air. It hung, the black water-polished ovoid turning slowly in front of Ohrmuzd’s closed eyes.

  Ahriman sat by his brother. He had no armour, he realised; just a pale blue tunic that was the echo of the one Ohrmuzd had worn in this memory. He looked at his twin. The lines of the young face were the mirror of his own. He had remembered every gesture and syllable of this moment since it had first unfolded. At the time he had wondered why. Later, with Ohrmuzd gone, he had thought he knew why. Now, as he gazed at his twin again, he knew he had been wrong before.

  ‘Stop it,’ said Ohrmuzd without opening his eyes. ‘You are distracting me.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Ahriman, and looked towards the horizon. The dirty yellow cloud had grown, eating up the blue of the sky. A fork of lightning flashed at the cloud’s edge. A warm wind swirled over Ahriman’s skin, and he could smell the storm charge in the air. He frowned.

  ‘There was no storm,’ said Ahriman.

  ‘What?’ said Ohrmuzd, a note of irritation in his voice.

  ‘There should be no storm. This is the memory of the day before we were sent as aspirants to the Fifteenth Legion. There was no storm that day.’

  Ohrmuzd shrugged. His face was smooth, unmarked by any of the many changes that would come in the years to follow. Ahriman felt his lips form a weak smile; he was in a sense looking at his own face; they had been almost indistinguishable except for perhaps a tendency for Ahriman’s forehead to crease when he was in thought, or wo
rried. He had been worried that day; all the dire possibilities of what was about to happen to them had crowded his thoughts, so that he could do nothing but roll them over and over and over in his mind. Ohrmuzd had known, he had always known.

  ‘It will be all right, Az,’ said Ohrmuzd. Ahriman blinked, then stared at his brother as he had in his memory. He had said something, too, some frightened little question. ‘Stop that,’ Ohrmuzd had replied. ‘You always have to think the worst, don’t you?’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Ahriman, and knew that he had said the same in the past.

  ‘And stop saying sorry.’ Ohrmuzd had opened his eyes and let the floating stone fall into his palm. ‘Can’t you just be excited? Think of what we might become, what we might learn, what we might do.’ He gave Ahriman a sharp look. ‘Have you been dreaming again?’

  He had, of course. He had always dreamed and even when he was a child those dreams had had a tendency to come true. Ohrmuzd sighed. ‘They are not necessarily true, you know.’ His voice dipped the way it always had when he had found an opportunity to impart serious knowledge. ‘To talk of fate is foolishness.’

  ‘You never could resist quoting to show off,’ Ahriman chuckled.

  ‘Fate is for us to choose, to make our own. If we are destined for a particular future it is because we have chosen that end.’ Ohrmuzd gave the solemn nod of a clever child pronouncing truth. Then he grinned. ‘Anyway, we will be all right.’ He glanced at Ahriman and there was fierceness in his eyes. ‘I will make sure it is all right, Az.’

  Ahriman said nothing. He looked away from his brother, back to the storm that had rolled over the view like a curtain. The blue sky was gone, and the light had a shrouded, dirty quality. Rain began to fall, first a few drops, then more, until water was trailing out of the sky and streams rolled down the faces of the dunes. Ahriman breathed in. There had been no storm that day, but the air still smelled of the storms that he remembered.