by John French
Ahriman had no choice. He reached his mind out and enveloped Maroth’s crippled psyche. The effort made lights dance in front of his eyes and he had to fight down sharp pain. He straightened Maroth, pulling his mouth open and breathing words into his mind.
‘Do you dare threaten me?’ spat Maroth, and pointed to Hagos’s collapsed lump of a face. ‘I will flay the skin from you, and feed the rest to the nether creatures of the warp.’ Hagos lowered his chainaxe. Ahriman made Maroth spit at Hagos’s feet, and the guard bowed his head as they passed through the sealed hatch.
The chamber stank. Without his helmet Ahriman could taste the congealing blood and stagnant air. Astraeos looked up as they entered, and the pupil of his remaining eye narrowed to a pinprick of hate as he saw Maroth. Ahriman heard the hatch seal behind them and let go of his hold on Maroth’s mind. The soothsayer slumped to the floor, and began to mewl and twitch. Ahriman felt a wave of nausea and fatigue bubble up as he broke the link. There was a sweat on his skin and he had to take a deliberate breath to balance his thoughts.
Astraeos was looking at him, his expression stony and his mind a caution-clad fortress.
‘I can free you,’ said Ahriman. Astraeos was silent, his eye still fixed on Ahriman as if weighing the possibility of the offer being true.
‘How?’
‘The leaders of the Harrowing are dead,’ said Ahriman, and saw Astraeos’s eye flare with surprise.
‘At whose hand?’
‘Mine,’ said Ahriman. Astraeos shook his head, the chains holding him clinking at the movement.
‘You did not do that to free me.’
‘No.’ Ahriman held Astraeos’s gaze. ‘But I will free you.’
‘To what end?’ growled Astraeos and there was laughter in his voice. ‘To be another lord’s pet? To be yours?’
‘To save yourself, and your brothers,’ said Ahriman, and he watched Astraeos’s aura flare and churn with conflicting emotion. He hoped he had the measure of the renegade Librarian, and that this gambit would work. If it did not…
‘But what is the price, Horkos?’ snarled Astraeos, loading Ahriman’s false name with contempt.
‘You will give me your oath, and follow my word,’ said Ahriman levelly. Astraeos did laugh at that, a full snarling laugh that hacked from his lungs and shook the chains.
‘You say you have slain your masters, so you will have few allies and less time.’
‘I need this ship, and the Harrowing on board must die. For that I need you and your brothers.’ Ahriman could see Astraeos struggling to contain warring instincts. ‘I can give you more,’ he said, and paused. ‘I can give you vengeance.’
Astraeos gave him a long hard look, then spat on the floor.
‘My oath and the oaths of my brothers are not goods to be bartered for.’
Ahriman nodded slowly. He had thought it might come to this, that he would have to take this step. He did not want to; Astraeos’s loyalty and defiance were qualities he admired, but there was no choice.
‘Very well.’ Ahriman raised Tolbek’s sword. He could feel the crystal at its core sing in tune with his mind. A thought drove cold light down the blade’s edge. He raised the sword and Astraeos followed with his eye, defiance hardening his face to pale stone in the sword’s light.
Ahriman cut, the movement and his mind flowing as one. Astraeos fell to the floor. Maroth yelped from the corner at the sound of shearing metal.
‘Now you are free,’ said Ahriman, looking down at the figure at his feet.
‘Curse you,’ whispered Astraeos, anger making his voice shake. He remained on the floor, kneeling, with the remains of his chains hanging from his wrists. ‘Curse you to the end of all things.’ Ahriman nodded, swallowing a breath. The sword’s glow reflected from his eyes, and he turned towards the hatch.
‘Come,’ he said quietly. ‘I need your repayment for the life I give you.’ Astraeos did not move. He was breathing hard and Ahriman could feel the Librarian struggling to contain his rage.
‘You have my oath, sorcerer. But give me one thing in return for its theft.’ Astraeos looked up. ‘What is your name?’
‘My name is Ahzek Ahriman.’
Astraeos nodded, without emotion or recognition.
‘We will need the ship’s mistress. If this insanity is to work we need her,’ said Astraeos and turned back to Maroth. The soothsayer was a hunched and foetal shape, clad in armour and tanned skin. Maroth’s jaw twitched as if he were going to speak but he said nothing, his black eyes jumping at every movement.
‘You can have him,’ said Ahriman, glancing from Astraeos to Maroth. ‘You may not demand vengeance but I give it to you.’ Astraeos got to his feet and flexed the scabbed skin of his healing hands.
‘No! You said I would live,’ yelled Maroth as Astraeos stepped forwards.
‘I did. You will live, and I will not take your eyes.’ Ahriman looked at Astraeos. Maroth went still, and then smiled up as Astraeos’s shadow fell over him.
‘Your eye tasted of the dung you are, and those of your brothers too,’ hissed Maroth, and licked his teeth. ‘You are a brotherhood of the half-blind.’ He laughed. Astraeos’s sudden rage filled the room. He bent down, his bare hands reaching for Maroth’s head.
Ahriman turned to the door. He closed his eyes briefly, seeing the raven soaring against the red sun, and the robed figure looking down on a Legion that was less than dust. He had hoped for so long that it would fade to a memory and then to nothing. Perhaps he had kept himself alive to live that punishment. Now he had chosen a different path. Someone was hunting him and fate had him in its claw. He had to know who and why. There were choices and possibilities ahead of him; he saw that even through the daemon’s lies. ‘If you do not tread those paths, others will,’ the daemon had said. Daemons lied, but he felt the truth of those words as if he had always believed them. There was no choice.
He opened his eyes and pushed his will into Tolbek’s blade again. He rapped on the hatch and cut down into the space beyond as it opened. Behind him, Maroth screamed.
Carmenta stopped in the darkness and let the silence surround her. Slowly she extended a hand and placed it against one of the pipes that ran along the narrow passage wall. The pipe vibrated under the brass of her fingers.
Hush, she thought. I will find a way to return soon. I will. I promise.
She had been so close to linking with the ship when they took her. So close, another second and she could have purged them from her and reduced their ship to molten wreckage. Instead she had watched as the Harrowing tried to claim her ship. They had turned the decks and holds into entrail-littered caves filled with smoke and the cries of the dying. Their feral enginseers swarmed through her ship’s innards like rats. But for all their defilement they had not succeeded in wakening the Titan Child. The ship remained silent, its systems sleeping. Carmenta felt a brief sensation that might have been the memory of a smile. It would never waken for them, not without her, and they had yet to realise that fact. The Harrowing had forged the slave collar around her neck, but had accepted that she simply maintained the ship for Astraeos and his brothers. If they considered her at all it was only as a creature whose knowledge of their new prize might be useful. She was grateful for their stupidity. They had had the wit to seal and guard the bridge, though.
The clinking of metal on metal broke her thought. She looked around and then realised that her brass hand was shaking, the fingers rattling on the metal pipe. She snatched her hand away. The shaking was getting worse with every passing hour.
A squall of angry data blinked across her vision. She still had a link to the ship in a sense, a thin thread of crude data fed directly to her implants. Through this link she could feel the slow dreams of the Titan Child and feel its pain. Every crude attempt by the Harrowing to wake the ship had sent pain stabbing through her body. At first that connection had been comforting but now it seemed only to make the lack of true connection worse; it was enough for her to share its pain but not
enough to soothe it. She was also not certain how clearly her mind was working.
Bright light bloomed in her skull. She stopped and steadied herself against the wall.
She could not focus her thoughts. For a split second she panicked, her mind and memory suddenly a blank void. Then processes of sensation and thought returned. She looked around herself. She was standing in a narrow, pipe-lined corridor.
Behind her cracked mask her face was aching. She wondered whether it was the ghostly sensation of a smile, but she could not remember why. She reached a hand out to the wall of the passage. The metal was quiet under her touch, and then shivered as somewhere a system protested. For a second she had a sense that she had done this before, but she could not remember and it did not matter. All that mattered was that someone was hurting her. Again the metal vibrated under the touch of her fingers.
They will die, she thought. All of them. I promise.
‘Mistress Carmenta.’ The voice crackled into her ear. She went still. The voice had spoken directly to her using the vox-system implanted into her cranium. The ciphers for that system were known by very few.
She registered and identified the voice. It was Astraeos, but that made no sense. The Harrowing had him chained in a cell, and his brothers with him.
‘Astraeos,’ she said, the word passing from mind to vox without leaving her lips. For a second she wondered if his voice was real, or just a ghost of sound caught in her memory. Static hissed in her head, and then the reply came.
‘We are free, and we will take back the ship.’
Silence and static returned, and then she heard laughter ringing over the vox and down the passage. It took another beat of her machine heart to realise that the laughter was hers.
They took the ship by murder rather than battle. The Harrowing were scattered through the Titan Child and they took those they found by swift bloodletting. They worked through the dark, Thidias and Kadin moving ahead of Ahriman and Astraeos. They had taken armour and weapons from the Harrowing after Ahriman and Astraeos had silenced the guards. The armour was mismatched, poorly maintained, and stank, but it worked. To a glance they were Harrowing initiates, but it was a disguise that would never stand more than one look. Just by looking at them Ahriman could tell the difference. Astraeos, Kadin, and Thidias might look like Harrowing but they did not move like them. There was a ragged intensity in every Harrowing gesture, as if every twitch were a suppressed blow. Astraeos and his brothers moved with precise discipline, every turn and gesture formed from practice and focus.
When they encountered Harrowing or their slaves Ahriman would whisper confusion into their minds. Thidias, Kadin and Astraeos would then come out of the shadows, moving like wolves running silent towards prey. The damage done to their bodies was still healing, but it took away none of their killing edge. They slew with combat knives, ramming the points through neck joints down into the chest or through eye sockets. Blood would splutter from the wounds as the trio pulled the convulsing corpses into the shadows. The three one-eyed brothers said nothing all the while, but Ahriman noticed that they paused for a second to scoop out the eyes of every Harrowing they killed. Twelve Harrowing and six slave masters had died that way by the time they reached the antechamber to the Titan Child’s bridge.
Scorches from Ahriman’s banishment of the daemon still marked the brass-inlaid floor. There were five Harrowing pacing in front of the high arched doors. Ahriman knew them. Like the gaoler Hagos, they were mute, their flesh chewed by scars and their minds of dull iron. Gzrel had never trusted most of his followers, and the mute brutes were the only ones he allowed to guard what he valued. Ahriman mused briefly that Gzrel’s arrogance had meant that he had never extended that guard to his own life.
Ahriman stepped towards the guards. The space in front of the doors to the bridge was a semicircle of black metal that crawled with spiralling patterns inlaid in brass. Its ceiling arched to a shadow dome of armourcrys. The stars beyond glowed dimly alongside the dirty light of the Great Eye, its shape and colour a curdling whirl against black. In the dim light the guards took a moment to see Ahriman. He had Tolbek’s sword in his hand, its crystal core quiet, but his mind and body ready. Fatigue pulsed through him, but he had used the time since breaking Astraeos from the cells to pull himself into a state of calm focus. He would pay later, he knew, but only if they survived.
The guards turned to look at him. Ahriman kept walking.
One of the guards must have sensed something was wrong because the chainsword in his hands growled to life. Ahriman could see doubt and brute instinct flicker amongst the guards’ minds. They began to move, closing to the side and behind him. He formed a thought, let it multiply and take form in the aether. After years of denying such power it almost made him lightheaded.
‘Open the doors,’ he said quietly. The head of the mute guard directly in front of him twitched in what might have been a denial.
The sound of revving chainblades filled the air. He felt time slow as if it were his own heartbeat. His mind was like mirror-still water. He breathed out and with that breath the sword lit in his hand.
The first blow came from the front, an overhead cut with a chainaxe aimed at Ahriman’s head. It was fast, but nowhere close to fast enough. Ahriman pivoted to the side. The chain teeth roared within an inch of his face. The tip of Ahriman’s sword punched through the guard’s neck. Bright red blood spat from the wound as he pulled the sword free to meet the next blow. He could see the fight unfolding in front of him, a net of possibilities and his own movements meshed perfectly together.
The sword in Ahriman’s hand shook as it met the turning teeth of a chainsword. He willed fury into the sword’s core, and felt the chainsword shear in two. He stepped and turned, slicing low to cut the leg from beneath one guard. A broad-headed axe hacked at his head but he was already moving. He did not need to see his enemies, he had watched each movement already. He kicked backwards, and felt his foot slam into a chest that he knew would be there. He cut to his left. The sword shuddered as it ended a life. A shape moved in front of him, the muzzle of a pistol rising. He took a step forwards and cut off the hand holding the weapon, turned back and rammed the point of the blade into the groin of a guard rising from the floor. He cut again, blind but still finding a join in the armour. He stepped to his right, and a blow missed him, and he gave a backhanded cut that parted a skull to red ruin, and…
…the webbed-strands of the future dissolved into the present. For a second he felt nothing, and then his hand began to shake. He blinked and the chamber drifted back into focus. He was kneeling; on the ground around him, the dead lay still. Astraeos was walking towards him, unease dancing in his eyes.
‘We need the tech-witch now,’ said Ahriman between deep breaths. ‘Will she come?’
‘She is here already,’ said Carmenta.
It was like returning to the embrace of the mother she had never known. The cradle of cables snaked around her, and lifted her from the deck of the bridge. Her awareness of her body faded. Mind-links opened her to the systems of her ship. She was dimly aware of gasping as the beat of the plasma reactors became her own, as her skin became asteroid-pitted iron, her gaze the sweep of sensors through the void. Her mind and instinct briefly rebelled, fighting the alien instincts and sensations of the Titan Child. Then they were one, the ship and its mistress, their wills and senses bound together. It was like dying and coming to life, like plunging into ice water only to find you could breathe. You were not supposed to control a starship like this; its spirit was too large and too powerful, the intellect of a controller too weak to do anything but break in the grasp of such a machine. Blasphemy, they had called it, the crowning sin in a life of sins. To Carmenta it was the most precious thing she had ever known.
She felt the familiar touch of servitor feedback, and the grumble of waking systems. The background hum of countless signals filled her thoughts. She saw her corridors, chambers and launch bays through a thousand machine eyes. Looking o
ut through pict-capture lenses she saw the bridge around her, the tiered banks of servitors and cogitators wrapped in red-tinged shadow. She saw the one she had called Horkos standing and looking up at the knotted cradle of cables that held her body. Her human body, at least. He was a creature of lies. She flicked between views of his face. Emotionless, smooth-skinned and bright-eyed. He was dangerous, and a liar. Astraeos called him Ahriman, and he was not the weakling she had thought. She had watched him kill five Harrowing in a handful of seconds, As if he could hear what she thought, he tilted his head; but of course he could not hear her thoughts. He was a thing of flesh, and she… She was a goddess of iron.
She refocused on preparing herself, cleaving off parts of her mind to ready her systems. Slowly the output of her reactors began to rise. Power flushed into her field generators. She was nearly ready, and then she would be truly free. She watched the other two ships hanging close to her in the void. Their shackled spirits made her want to weep in sympathy and laugh in contempt. The Blood Crescent was a dying wolf, its insides rotting, its spirit reduced to base instincts. The ship that had brought the emissary was a blade-like presence. Its weapons and engines were already armed, she noticed. A blunt statement and challenge. So obvious, so arrogant. She spread her consciousness through her systems, preparing dozens of subtle and gross actions.
There was one final matter to address.
‘Egion,’ she said in a voice that was a pulse of data. ‘Egion, wake. It is time again.’ Within the sensations of data she felt another psyche unfold. It was not her but it connected to her, brushing her thoughts like a hand touching hers.
‘I dreamed, mistress,’ came the reply. To her the voice sounded like the boom of ocean waves against cliffs. ‘I dreamed we were becalmed and taken by enemies. I dreamed of blood, and death, and fire across the stars.’