Ahriman: Exile (21 page)

‘I cannot see,’ said Kadin’s choking voice.

The
Titan Child
was burning across half her hull. Carmenta knew it, but could not feel it any more. Her void shields were gone. Scabs of molten slag had peeled off across her flanks and prow. The creatures crawled over her, chewing and ripping at armour plates softened by the heat of their breath. She was half blind but she could see the gunship, spinning in a clear sphere of space a few hundred metres away. It was so close but it was tumbling like a broken bird. In one of her still functioning landing bays, a slab-sided lifter rose from the deck. Its servitor crew blurted an acknowledgement of her order. Blast doors unfolded and the lifter pushed into the void.

Kadin floated towards Ahriman. Steam was rising from him even as frost thickened across his armour. Shreds of skin hung from the stumps of his legs. Kadin’s wounds closed before Ahriman’s eyes, fresh flesh filling the chewed gaps.

Astraeos lunged towards Kadin. Kadin’s head twitched, and a telekinetic wave slammed Astraeos into the wall. He rolled with the impact and sprang forwards. Kadin drifted to the side and struck him across the chest with a lash of energy. Ahriman heard a dry crack of splintering ceramite. Astraeos folded, and before he could hit the floor the daemon’s power smashed him across the compartment. He lay still, blood seeping from the cracks in his armour.

Kadin looked back to Ahriman.

No
, thought Ahriman.
It is not Kadin, not any more
. He could see it now, the daemon rooted in Kadin’s flesh like a parasite, snaking through his blood and bone like horned chains. There was nowhere to move. He tried to summon power, but it slipped out of his grasp like a rope tugged away by the wind. The daemon gave a sorrowful cackle in his head. He could not move. He felt invisible hands grip his flesh, holding him in place. The daemon raised Kadin’s arm. A long talon of frozen blood extended from the chewed stump. Delicately, almost gently, the daemon placed the tip on the lens above Ahriman’s left eye. The daemon pushed the talon forwards. The crystal of the eye-lens splintered. Ice-blue light flooded Ahriman’s left eye. He could not look away as the needle tip extended towards his pupil.

+Kadin,+ said Ahriman, and felt the last inch of his strength shorten. The talon tip halted. The daemon roared with rage, the sound ripping from Kadin’s blood-clogged lungs. +Kadin. I bind your flesh. I compel you by your blood.+ The daemon staggered, and around them the stricken gunship spun and spun. Ahriman’s will flowed into Kadin’s body. It was not fully the daemon’s. Not yet. The daemon had taken Kadin as a host, but it had done so by blunt force. There was still a fragment of Kadin’s mind and body it had yet to conquer.

Into that shrinking gap Ahriman poured the last of his will. He did it without subtlety, ramming his raw strength against the daemon. He felt the scraps of Kadin’s soul lend him strength. The daemon vomited, and the neck seal of Kadin’s armour burst as red-streaked bile spilled down his chest. The stolen body twitched, striking the walls of the compartment. Ahriman felt his knees buckle. His own body felt like a distant memory. The daemon’s hold on Kadin’s flesh weakened, then began to slip. The daemon’s back arched. Kadin’s body was glowing like an overheating furnace. Ice melted from him, turning to steam before it could hit the floor.

Then he felt another presence pour into Kadin’s body. It was cold and black, like water gathered from a deep cave. The daemon that had been fighting for Kadin’s flesh vanished beneath the oncoming tide. Ahriman felt the edge of the new presence touch his own mind. It was like being stabbed by needles of ice, and the shock snapped him back into his body.

Above him the new creature shivered with Kadin’s flesh and stepped forwards. Kadin’s features vanished as his body moved, as if he had fallen into shadow. For a second he looked like a hole cut in the background of the world.

The newcomer reached down and lifted Ahriman from the floor, cradling his head in Kadin’s hands. He could feel the creature’s eyes looking at him, into him. He looked back.

‘No, not you,’ croaked Ahriman. ‘It cannot be you.’

+Forget,+ said the shadow. Ahriman blinked.

He saw billowing clouds of light that spiralled to a vanishing point. His body was cold, his mind was numb. He could not think. Somewhere beyond the border of his senses, he was bleeding. The world was silent. He was not sure if he was still breathing.

He could not remember where he was. Warm darkness crept over him.

He saw nothing.

XII

Change

Ahriman woke suddenly, pain and nausea replacing a blank absence of sensation. His eyes were open, but he could not see. He tried to raise his hands to touch his face, but they would not move.

‘Subject conscious,
’
said a machine voice, and he flinched at the suddenness of the noise. A high ringing filled his ears, and he could hear the whir and scrape of mechanical gears.

‘Remove the dermal covering,’ said another voice. This one was human and female. He recognised its hard edge. ‘Start at the face.’

‘Carmenta?’ he said. Something sharp pricked his forehead, and scored down the centre of his face.

‘Yes, Ahriman.’ He felt something tug at his face, and light stabbed into his eyes. He blinked, for a moment as blind as he had been before. Then the world around him resolved into blurred shapes and indistinct colours. ‘You are alive.’

He turned his head. He wore no armour, and was bound to an upright frame in a long chamber that extended away to blackness on either side. Bright lights stabbed down at him from a hoist suspended above him. The walls and ceiling were gloss red, and a channel ran down the scuffed metal floor. He could smell antiseptics, machine oil and crude but powerful pain suppressors. A hunched servitor stood close beside him, staring at him with a cluster of green lenses. Red-brown spatters covered its off-white robe, which trailed in scabbed tatters across the floor. The servitor peeled an inch-thick layer of what looked like pale fat from Ahriman’s skin. Carmenta stood in front of him, her cracked red lacquer face tilted to one side, watching. Ahriman thought she looked exhausted, but he could not say why.

‘You have been unconscious for six solar days,’ said Carmenta, as if answering an unasked question. ‘You suffered extensive internal damage, bone fractures, blood loss and burns.’ She stepped forwards, a mechadendrite reaching out to take the limp layer of flesh from the servitor’s razor fingers. He noticed the lattice of capillaries running through the soft material. ‘Luckily your body has done much to heal the damage itself. The layer of synthetic flesh was mainly to treat the scorching. You looked like you had been cooked.’ Ahriman looked beyond the harsh circle of light. He could see metal frames and racks, nests of machine arms gathered close to the ceiling, and metal-sided vats connected to thick pipes that snaked across the floor.

‘You are a biologos, as well as a machine-wright?’ he said.

‘I dabbled once. This is one of the servitor reclamation holds.’

‘Helpful.’

‘Not really. The little I know of your kind just confirmed that there was little that we could do. Your own flesh is your salvation.’ Ahriman nodded. The injuries he had sustained must have induced a healing coma. As sensation returned he could tell that he would be below peak condition for some time. His aetheric senses also felt dull and sluggish, as if a deadening fog wrapped his mind. The memories of the last moments on the gunship were indistinct blurs. He shook his head. That he was alive, and that the
Titan Child
had clearly survived, was enough for now.

‘Where are we?’ he asked.

‘In a dead stop in the deep void.’ Carmenta paused. ‘It cost us. I hope it was worth it.’

‘Astraeos?’

‘Is alive,’ she nodded. ‘Like you he suffered significant physiological damage. He is still in the same type of coma you just woke from. Kadin suffered worse. I am not sure what happened to him, or why he is alive.’

Ahriman’s blurred memories snapped into sharp focus. Adrenaline roared through his tired veins. He could feel damaged muscles twitching in response. He was suddenly aware that his limbs were still bound to the metal frame, thick rubber-covered clamps holding him at the wrists and ankles. A thought pulled them open with a grind of bending metal. He stepped to the floor.

‘Where is he?’ he growled.

‘He is unconscious in a sanguinary immersion tank,’ said Carmenta, carefully. ‘I don’t know if he will wake again.’ He looked at her and something in his look must have shaken her, because she stepped back, her hands and mechadendrites rising. Ahriman stilled his own emotions.

‘Isolate it,’ he said. ‘Shut down every connection to where he is held and override all access protocols. Keep it that way until I see him.’ Carmenta did not move. ‘He is a danger to the ship, to all of us.’

‘Really?’ If she had had lips Ahriman was certain they would have curled. ‘An unconscious cripple kept alive in a tank is a danger? You think I don’t know that you already keep an abomination on my ship? The thing created by your pet Maroth.’ She was staring at him, her bionic eyes lit with coldness.

‘Do as I say,’ he snapped, and she flinched and took a quick step away from him.
She is still human
, he thought.
Broken and driven half mad by the machine she tries to tame, but she still feels and fears.
It took him a moment to reach what he judged a correct response. ‘I am sorry for what happened, mistress.’

‘My ship, you nearly killed my ship, and you say that Kadin is a danger to us.’ Her voice trembled as she spoke and her mechadendrites twitched. ‘Parts of the ship are still burning. Half of it is just wreckage: systems, weapons, engines. All so you could get answers?’

Ahriman returned her stare. He had once known many tech-priests and adepts of the Mechanicum. In the time since he came to the Eye he had met many more who had fallen to the warp. All had seemed to him to become colder with age, more withdrawn, as if becoming like the metal of their machines. It was a form of insanity, he supposed, an obsession that dissolved away everything outside it. In Carmenta, though, the closer she bonded with her ship, the more fractured and raw her emotions, the more human part of her became; and what was left became… What?

‘We will find supplies, and there are places on the Eye’s periphery that can remake ships. Even one of this size.’

She shook her head, a strange combination of mechanical precision and human exhaustion.

‘Egion is dead,’ said Carmenta in a flat voice. Ahriman understood then what she meant: the
Titan Child
was dead in the void. It would be able to jump to the warp, but without a Navigator it would be rudderless, capable only of short, unguided hops before having to re-enter reality. They would be guessing their path and even the most modest journey would take an eternity. Worse, they balanced on the rim of the Eye of Terror in a region already saturated by unstable warp phenomena and storms. They might be alive for now, but Carmenta was facing near certain death if they attempted to move. For someone who was still human in a sense, she was taking it well.

‘How did he die?’ he asked, after a pause.

‘I am not sure,’ said Carmenta, and there was a note in her voice that he could not place. ‘Perhaps it was this place that killed him. Perhaps he was dying before we went to the station.’ She turned away with another shake of her head, and took a clinking metallic step towards the end of the chamber. ‘We fled once we had you. Some of the… the creatures were still on my hull. I had to shake and burn them off.’ She paused, an angry catch in her voice. ‘I had to destroy parts of the ship’s hull. I had to hurt my own ship. Egion was screaming all the time we were in the warp, then he just stopped, and we were here, and he was dead.’

He looked at Carmenta as she took another limping step. Dried blood stained her charcoal robe, and he could smell servo systems overheating as she moved. She was hiding something from him, but he restrained the instinct to simply take it from her thoughts; he had taken too much from her already.

‘Where are we now?’ he asked. Carmenta kept walking, and did not look at him as she replied.

‘Egion was raving as we fled. I do not know how their kind function, but I think at the end he was not navigating so much as running in terror.’

‘Where did he flee to?’

Carmenta stopped, and slowly turned her head to look back at Ahriman. In the low light the cracks in her mask looked like the traces of black tears.

‘Home, Ahriman,’ she said. ‘He tried to flee home.’

Looking out of the armourcrys cupola Ahriman saw the Cadian Gate as a fluttering dot of light, set in a lone patch of black in a voidscape stained with nauseous colour. It was a gate only in the abstract sense, of course. A system turned into a fortress, it guarded the only stable passage from the Eye of Terror into the Imperium. There were other ways into and out of the Eye, but they were uncertain and dangerous paths, difficult to find and likely to kill any that sought them. Any sizeable fleet wishing to pass into or out of the Eye of Terror had to pass through Cadia, or so it was said. Garrisoned by millions of troops, ringed by space fortresses, and circled by war fleets, anything trying to break through had to either bring overwhelming force or wear the face of a friend. Time and again armies of renegades had tried to break Cadia and failed.

‘Towards the light,’ said Astraeos softly from beside him. Ahriman glanced towards the Librarian.

No,
he thought.
Not a Librarian, an acolyte, an apprentice. My apprentice.

Astraeos still wore the robe the servitors had given him while he slept and healed. Glossy burn scars covered his face and arms, and all his facial hair had vanished. His breath hissed and cracked with the sound of unhealed bones. Ahriman felt an echo of the lingering pain in Astraeos’s body every time he looked at him.

Both of them stood under a wide dome of brass and crystal high on the spine of the
Titan Child
. Beneath them the living wreck of the ship glimmered in the curdled starlight. Black wounds like huge bites ran along the ship’s hull. In places he could see gas and liquid still venting from holes. The leaking gas formed a mist, which hung over the buttresses and gun towers like smoke rolling over a burned city. The ship was still at a dead stop and had been for days. In that time Astraeos had woken, Carmenta had healed what she could of her ship, and Ahriman had brooded on what to do next. He knew, of course. The options were limited, but that did not make them any less dangerous, or any more palatable.

After a long moment Astraeos turned his head to look at Ahriman.

‘The Navigator ran towards the only light he could see, and it led him here,’ said Astraeos, his breath hissing wetly between each word. ‘All creatures born in the light run towards it when they are afraid. Only vermin run into the shadows.’

Ahriman raised his eyebrows, and looked back to the stars. A dark mood had pervaded Astraeos since he had woken from his healing coma. Ahriman had caught snatches of bleak and clouded thoughts the few times that he had skimmed his apprentice’s mind. For a while Ahriman had thought it was fatalism, that the fate of his last two gene-brothers had broken Astraeos’s spirit, but it was not; it was resignation, a surrender to something cold and dark within.

‘This is the closest I have been to the Imperium since…’

‘Since you betrayed it,’ said Astraeos. Ahriman was silent for a second. He could recall every day with a precise clarity, but how long had passed since he had last broken the bounds of the Eye eluded him. Time in the Eye was not fixed; like a trick of perspective, it changed depending on where one stood, and for how long one looked.

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘What happened on the station? Why did my brother die?’

‘He died because I made a mistake.’

‘Just one?’

Ahriman held Astraeos’s gaze and nodded.

‘The daemon I summoned was already bound to do another’s will. My summoning drew it into existence, but once it was manifest I had no control over it.’

‘It was a trap,’

‘Someone predicted my actions, and acted first.’

‘Amon?’

‘I think so, but I have no shortage of enemies,’ shrugged Ahriman, and turned to look down the length of the
Titan Child
to the distant tip of its prow.

‘I want to wake Kadin,’ said Astraeos. Ahriman let out a slow breath. He knew it would come to this; it was one of the inevitable steps he would have to take if he wanted to move forward. He should have ordered Kadin dumped into a plasma furnace and the ashes vented into the void.

‘That would be unwise,’ he said after a moment.

‘It would be unwise to refuse,’ said Astraeos, his voice cold, but his thoughts growling with aggression. ‘You promised me salvation for Cadar, but you have only taken another brother from me.’ Then the emotions vanished and Astraeos’s thoughts were just the familiar hum of a well-shielded mind.

He is learning quickly,
thought Ahriman.

Ahriman stared back, his face still, his emotions balanced and masked by layers of subconscious baffles. He could annihilate Astraeos, and burn Kadin to nothing without allowing him to wake.

He could do these things, and lose what few allies he had.

Necessity is the father of error.

‘Very well,’ said Ahriman.

Astraeos watched him for a heartbeat then nodded. ‘Once he is awake we follow you, and you will fulfil your promise to me.’

Ahriman gave a crooked smile. ‘Is that a fresh oath?’

Astraeos’s mouth made a stiff line. ‘If you choose.’ He paused and glanced out at the distant light of Cadia. ‘You mean to continue, don’t you? After all this, you intend to find Amon.’