The Omnibus - John French Read online

  I am fate, come round at last. The words echoed in his mind, and he suddenly felt cold, as if he had looked into a dark doorway and seen eyes staring back.

  His helmet display cut back in, strobing with the flash of gunfire. Damage icons glowed red at the corners of his sight. He picked himself up from the deck and looked at the unfolding battle. A long chamber extended in front of and above him. Bronze plating covered its walls and ceiling, stained by verdigris. Starlight shone down in thin ropes from narrow windows high above. Twenty of the Harrowing and their slave beasts were advancing towards the high doors at the far end of the chamber. Fire bloomed around their silhouettes. In the distance, he could see the muzzle flash of bolters. As Ahriman watched, a cluster of rounds hit one of the Harrowing. The warrior fell, his chestplate cracked open, his hearts beating blood into the air.

  Karoz let out a howl from the middle of the pack and bounded forwards. Explosions traced his steps but the champion did not slow. Black coils of living smoke rose from his armour as he moved. Ahriman could taste the iron reek of it through his helmet seals. A Space Marine crouched behind the corpse of a dead slave beast, still firing as the champion charged. The rounds opened Karoz’s chest in a spray of meat and armour.

  Karoz did not stop. The Space Marine was still firing when Karoz leapt over the slave beast’s corpse and cut downwards. The Space Marine swayed to one side and the chainglaive’s teeth sprayed sparks from the deck. Blood fell from Karoz, smoking in the air. He straightened, and Ahriman could see his lacerated hearts still beating in the wet cavity of his chest. He reached up and peeled off his helm, and the face beneath had too many eyes and mouths for anything born a human.

  The Space Marine took a slow step back, dropping his bolter, and drew a blade from his waist. Karoz laughed with all the mouths of his changed face. He raised the glaive in mocking salute. The Space Marine lunged. Karoz punched the tip of the glaive into the Space Marine’s breastplate and rammed it forwards until the chain teeth chewed through the warrior’s chest.

  A flare of light hit Karoz from the side. It was so bright that it scored into Ahriman’s retinas and mind. Psy-fire. Karoz reeled, his armour and the skin of his face dribbling to the deck like tar. Ahriman looked again at the Space Marines, opened his senses and saw what he had missed before. A psyker, a battle psyker, with a mind so focused that it was like a blade. How had he not seen it before? It reminded him of something, something he had lost long ago. Something was about to happen, something that he could feel press against his mind even as he tried to shut it out. He started forwards.

  In front of him, Karoz’s pack charged after their champion. The psyker facing Karoz drew a blade and sliced Karoz from throat to hip. Ahriman could taste that blow: cold wind and bitter iron. The Harrowing initiate fell. The two remaining Space Marines flanked the psyker, firing into the charging pack. Two more of the Harrowing fell. Ahriman was a dozen paces away. He could feel it now, a rising beat in the warp like a monstrous heart pounding to life.

  Then Karoz stood. He lifted from the deck, as if pulled by strings. Black fluid fell from him in thick ropes. A mouth opened in the charred lump of his head. It grinned with needle teeth. Something pink and mucus-covered twitched in the open wound of his chest. An eye blinked open on the pulsing heart. Its iris was the blue of a noon sky.

  The creature that had been Karoz roared and a thousand mouths and eyes opened across its body. Its shadow spread across the floor, eating the thin starlight, as Karoz towered towards the ceiling. Ahriman felt the physical details of the chamber blur, as if fading into the background behind a growing fire. He could see frost clotting the blood on the deck. Some of the Harrowing kept running, but more dropped to the deck, their bodies spasming. Then the shadow met them and swallowed them down without a cry. The daemon that had been Karoz loomed over the chamber. Beneath it, the light of the psyker’s sword guttered out like a blown candle. He saw the psyker’s face, pale, surrounded by a psy-hood, his failing blade still gripped in his hand.

  The daemon turned towards Ahriman and looked at him with a thousand eyes.

  ‘Ahriman,’ it said, in a voice of whispers and laughter.

  No, cried a voice inside his mind. But the voice fell away as power rushed through him, carrying the colours of memories. He could smell the dust of the plain beneath the Tower of Magnus, could see his brothers in a thousand flickering glimpses: their flesh bursting from their armour, their bodies dissolving into liquid and hardening into nightmare. He saw Ohrmuzd, his true brother, lost long ago. Then he saw a face, a face he did not know, a face in a horned helm with eyes that burned like dying stars.

  Ahriman’s hand was rising, light dancing on his fingers. His mind ascended through patterns he had tried to forget.

  The daemon reached towards Ahriman.

  +No.+ A tongue of white flame burst from Ahriman’s hand. Dead words and occult formulae flickered at the fire’s edges like the flutter of wings. It cut through the daemon in a single bright line. For a second the daemon reeled, and then the flames leapt across its shadowed body. It shrieked and cried in voices from Ahriman’s memory: Ohrmuzd, Lemuel, Amon. The shrieks rose higher and higher as the shadow dissolved with a sound like the chuckle of wind blowing across a plain of dust.

  II

  TITAN CHILD

  Ahriman smelt what they had done to the prisoner before he saw it with his eyes. The stink of blood and raw meat had met his nose as soon as the cell door had opened. They had hung the prisoner by his skin. A wire-covered lamp soaked his dangling body in yellow light. Rusted hooks punctured his back and arms and the skin of his hands was gone. The exposed flesh wept pale fluid as it tried to heal. A bloodshot eye fixed on Ahriman as he stepped into the cell. They had taken the other eye, he noted. Blood streaked the right cheek under the empty eye socket, and two wounds clotted on the prisoner’s forehead. Ahriman saw two metal studs glinting on the spattered floor.

  Gzrel had given the prisoner and his brother Space Marines to Maroth. Clearly, the soothsayer had decided to try and break the Space Marine’s body before he started on his will. No doubt the skin of the prisoner’s hands now hung from Maroth’s armour.

  ‘Why did you come?’ asked the prisoner, his voice a rasping growl. For a moment Ahriman did not reply. Why had he come? Gzrel had been reluctant to let Ahriman near his latest prize, but Ahriman had persisted and Gzrel had relented. That had taken subtlety and was not without danger. Why had he taken that risk? He had thought it was to find out what the prisoner recalled of the battle. Looking into the Space Marine’s maimed and bloody face, he wondered if he had another motive.

  ‘What do you remember?’ asked Ahriman. After the daemonic manifestation, Gzrel and the rest of the Harrowing had descended on them. Some of the survivors of Karoz’s pack had told of the shadow that had taken the champion, and of the fire that had banished it. Gzrel had presumed that it had been the prisoner who had burned the daemon. That feat had impressed the lord of the Harrowing; he had decided to keep the prisoner and his brothers. He had asked the Space Marines to kneel to him, but they had remained unbowed. That defiance had led the prisoner to this chamber, and cost him an eye.

  The prisoner curled his lip, pale teeth glinting from bloodstained flesh.

  ‘I remember my brother dying. I remember his chest splitting. I remember the stink of the warp. I remember a shadow.’ Ahriman saw a glint in the prisoner’s eye; his aura was fury-bright, rage and power chained behind fraying will. ‘I remember, sorcerer.’

  Ahriman nodded.

  He knows, thought Ahriman. He saw and knows what I truly am. He had not brought a weapon, but that would not stop him silencing the prisoner. His fingers twitched, and he felt the thought find an echo in the warp. It would be so easy. No, he thought. His mind relaxed, and the warp settled.

  ‘My lord wishes your service. He senses great power in you.’

  ‘Is that why you are here, sorcerer?’ Again, Ahriman heard the hate in the words.

  ‘I ser
ve my lord,’ said Ahriman. ‘You are a psyker, trained for battle and destruction. He has a taste for the oaths of psykers, and you intrigue him much.’

  The prisoner stirred his bared muscles and the chains clinked. Fresh blood ran from where the hooks looped through the skin.

  ‘Your lord is a slave to lies and ignorance.’ Red-flecked spit came out with the words. ‘My oath is my own, and I will not give it to him.’

  ‘There are worse things.’

  ‘Are there? To you, sorcerer, perhaps. You fear the truth, I see that without needing to see your face or hear you say it. I do not fear truth, though it will kill me.’

  Words I would once have said myself, thought Ahriman. ‘Yet you live.’

  The prisoner heaved up a bloody laugh, which shook the chains. ‘Yes, I live. Your lie bought me that. Do you wish thanks for it?’

  Ahriman was silent for a moment, and then he reached up and pulled his helmet from his head. Blue eyes set in a face of smooth olive skin met the prisoner’s single eye and gouged socket.

  ‘My lord believes you are powerful, and you are,’ said Ahriman. Without his helm his voice was soft and resonant.

  ‘I am no traitor, and I will not serve your lord.’

  ‘You are no traitor, yet this is an outcast Imperial ship,’ said Ahriman, ‘and you have the mark of one who has already broken oaths.’ It was true the Titan Child at first glance was not a rotten renegade like the Blood Crescent, but it was no lost loyalist either.

  ‘I broke no oaths.’

  ‘But you are here, an outcast from the Imperium that created you. Is there a difference?’ asked Ahriman. The prisoner spat, the red-flecked phlegm hissing as it ate into the metal floor.

  ‘To you, sorcerer, maybe not.’ The prisoner let his head loll to his chest, his eyelids closed. Ahriman nodded; he would get nothing more. He turned and walked to the cell door, his hand rising to rap on the dark metal. He paused and turned back to look at the prisoner.

  ‘I am sorry for your brother,’ said Ahriman. ‘The other two live, though for how long I cannot say.’

  The prisoner looked up. Ahriman saw the hard angles of his aura blur for a second before it snapped back into its diamond-like lines. The prisoner gave a small nod.

  ‘What is your name, sorcerer?’

  Ahriman looked down at the black helm in his hand. Perhaps there were some that might still remember his name, but he was not Ahriman, and he would not be again.

  ‘I am Horkos,’ he said.

  The prisoner gave a laugh that turned into a racking cough. ‘Another lie. Do not worry. You saved my life. That is a bond I would not have, but one I will honour. I will not break your lie.’ The prisoner paused and took a breath. ‘My name is Astraeos, sorcerer, and I place my silence on your conscience.’

  Ahriman did not reply and left the prisoner hanging in the gloom.

  The Harrowing were making the Titan Child their own. Ahriman’s path back to his quarters led almost the entire six-kilometre length of the ship. With every step and turn he saw another sign of the Harrowing’s fangs sinking deeper into the vessel. They had struggled to wake the Titan Child’s systems, but that had not stopped them marking their claim to its soul. Servitors and whipped slave gangs had cleared the slaughter done by the battle, but only so that the Harrowing could replace it with more. The stink of charring flesh and soot was thick on the air. On the open decks and wider passageways, Ahriman came across packs of the Harrowing clustered around crude braziers and heaped fires of corpses. Flesh burned on those fires, and the Harrowing howled beside them as the fat and skin boiled and smoke spread in greasy clouds. They shouted guttural chants and poured dark liquid on the deck in libation.

  Ahriman skirted the baying packs, walking on the edge of the firelight, closing his ears to the howls and his eyes to the shapes which coiled in the pyre smoke. He changed his route through the ship, avoiding the hangars and cargo spaces where the Harrowing gathered. He wanted to clear his mind, to consider his words with Astraeos, to understand the half-formed inferences and fears that clustered on the margins of his thoughts. The mental disciplines that once were so much a part of him would have given him swift clarity, but they were tools he could not wield again. He would try and find quiet, and perhaps in that he would find peace.

  Peace eluded him. Even in the side passages and walkways he saw the signs of the Titan Child’s changing fortune. It seemed to have no truly living human crew, only servitors, and the Harrowing had marked all those that he saw. Those which still had human faces had been flayed of skin, so that they grinned at Ahriman with wet faces of sinew. Those without true faces had skins hammered over their visors so that their eye-sensors gazed from stretched eye-holes and gaping mouths. They had brought slaves from the Blood Crescent, too. They shambled past in long lines, pus weeping from the brands on their grey skin. Most had laboured on the Blood Crescent for their entire lives. Crammed into living spaces, breathing pollution-fogged air, never seeing the light of a true sun, they existed to toil. It was a pitiful life and one that would grow no lighter on the Titan Child. Already the mutant overseers stalked the walkways and lower decks, their beaten armour glistening with blood and hung with the skin of those who had in some way displeased their masters.

  Ahriman had seen such things many times, as if there were a limit to the imagination of atrocity. It was a truth he had observed time and time again in the fate of those who fell to the powers of the warp. The lowest and most basic natures surfaced first and most strongly, like impurities rising to the white-hot surface of a smelting crucible.

  And what of me? he thought, as he hurried through a column-lined hold. Pyres burned here too and chants cackled through the air. I have fallen as far as these wretches, further perhaps; how can I consider myself unchanged? I am no better than them; their spirits run with rage, mine with pride. We are the same, only the path of our fall was different.

  ‘Did you like my work?’ The voice purred from the shadows. Ahriman stopped, realising that he had allowed his awareness of where he was to wander. Maroth stepped out from beside a metal-sided column. The soothsayer was showing his filed teeth, but no one would have called the expression a smile. One of his hands rested on the pommel of a sheathed sword, the other ran a string of knucklebones through his fingers. The bones clicked against the armour of his gauntlet. Ahriman could smell power on him, rank and thick like the breath of a daemon.

  ‘Your work?’ said Ahriman, though he knew that Maroth meant Astraeos. The soothsayer smiled and again the bones clicked through his fingers.

  ‘I ate the eye,’ he said. ‘Did you know, Horkos, it was once thought that to eat an eye would grant wisdom?’ He shrugged, the tanned skins across his shoulders flapping against the plates of his armour. ‘We will have to see. Perhaps you should try the other, if we take it from him?’

  Ahriman remained silent, his head bowed in respect.

  The eating of an eye does not grant wisdom, you fool, he thought. The sacrificer of an eye is the one who gains the boon, not the taker.

  ‘Of the other two captives… Well, if they do not bow to us, then perhaps we can see what more than one eye will do.’

  Once I would have taught you the depths of your ignorance. The thought snarled inside Ahriman’s mind, and he had to struggle to suppress it. He was Horkos, the oathbreaker, the lowest of renegades; he did not have such thoughts.

  ‘Yes, master,’ he said. Maroth chuckled, the sound like the rattle of dry scales.

  ‘Good. Come with me. There is something else I wish you to appreciate.’

  Darkness folded around Ahriman as he followed Maroth. After a few minutes, Ahriman could tell they were making for the outer hull, as the passages got narrower and colder, and the blast doors thicker. Eventually the thin air gave way to hard vacuum, and they had to don their helmets. Ships like the Titan Child let parts of their outer hull drain of heat and atmosphere. Like layers of dead skin, these void-cold sections provided a buffer against damage and dre
w no power.

  It was as they walked down a lightless passage towards a sealed door that he felt his skin prickle and smelt an impossible copper tang in the helmet’s air. He stopped, his eyes fixed on the door ahead. There was something behind that door, something that radiated malevolence and hunger like heat from a forge.

  ‘You feel it?’ said Maroth, turning to look back at Ahriman. The front of Maroth’s helm was shaped into the muzzle of a hound, its eyes glowing in the gloom. Behind the hound’s snarl, Ahriman was sure Maroth was smiling.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Ahriman, without moving. He had begun to close off portions of his mind, armouring his spirit with passive layers of protection.

  ‘Come and see,’ said Maroth, and stepped towards the closed door. It was small, and reinforced with thick spars of metal. In the red light of Maroth’s eyes the surface of the door sparkled. Smeared marks covered it: eyes, spirals, toothed letters and hooked lines, all daubed in dark frozen liquid. To Ahriman they were little more than childish scrawl. Maroth raised a hand, activated the lock, and pulled the door open.

  Behind the door there was darkness so complete that it looked like a hole leading to oblivion. Ahriman could smell rotten flesh and dank water, the stench filling his mouth and nose though there was no air to convey it. Maroth looked back at him, raised a beckoning hand and stepped through. Ahriman paused. Every part of his being was screaming to run, to turn away from the waiting door, but he could not, he had to follow. Maroth would not let him escape this revelation. He stepped forwards and through the door.

  Blackness. For a second he could see nothing except the icons pulsing on the edge of his helmet display. Then shapes appeared, outlined in pale light, though there was no illumination. He saw Maroth, the soothsayer’s face turned towards him, eyes dim coals in an iron hound face. The other shape floated in space, its splayed limbs tethered by a web of chains to unseen walls. Rags covered its body, though he could still see the bulk of muscle and definition of a Space Marine’s frame. The skin of its face and hands was death-white and hairless. Crude stitches walked across its chest, closing a ragged fissure in muscle and bone. Strips of tanned skin hung from pins in its flesh, each crawling with burned marks that twisted as the eye caught them. Ahriman tasted bile in his mouth. The suspended figure stared back at him with black holes that had been eyes.