Ahriman: Sorcerer by John French

Author:John French
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Black Library
Published: 2014-10-17T16:00:00+00:00

XII

Broken

The inquisitor was there when Astraeos woke again.

‘Tell me what you remember,’ said the inquisitor.

Astraeos did not speak. In his mind he saw his brothers firing from parapets, the light of their burning home staining their armour. Silver-grey warriors walked through burning halls, haloed by warp light, cutting down all they found without a word. The towering form of a Dreadnought walked before the grey warriors, shaking the tiled floor with its tread. He saw Chapter Master Thidias take his cloak of office from his back as the pyre leaped higher.

‘What is a king when there is nothing left to rule?’ Thidias had asked.

‘Silence,’ said the inquisitor. ‘Do I take it that the memories of your treachery have returned to you?’

Astraeos felt the muscles of his jaw clench.

‘We broke no oaths,’ he said.

The inquisitor raised an eyebrow.

‘We? So you are a son of greater treachery, rather than a lone creature of heresy? Or perhaps you mean Ahriman, and the rest of his enslaved kind.’ The inquisitor waited. The tubes puncturing Astraeos’s flesh sucked and clicked in the silence. ‘You are not like him, are you? You are not one of the Thousand Sons, even though you serve one. Even amongst my fellow inquisitors there are few who could tell you this, but the Thousand Sons did break their oaths. They broke one after another until there was nothing to hold them back from the abyss. That is the truth.’ He watched Astraeos, the ghost of a frown on his face. ‘Do you remember your master? Do you remember Ahriman?’

Do you remember Ahriman…? The words echoed in his head. Pieces of things he did not understand, or had not realised were there, clustered around the words.

Remember Ahriman…

He saw Ahriman in battered armour the colour of rust and dried blood. He saw the sword glow as it severed his chains. He saw a million candles burning in the darkness of his mind. He saw his brothers: Cadar the instant before the chainblade opened his chest, Thidias standing in the airless dark of a dead void station, Kadin with his face a mass of blood-slicked scar tissue.

Ahriman…

‘He is not coming for you,’ said the inquisitor. ‘Not now, no matter what oath he swore. You are abandoned, Astraeos.’

I am a traitor, thought Astraeos. No matter what the cause, I have made the fallen my brothers.

‘What did he promise you? Power? Revenge?’

‘If there is a way to undo what has been done I will find it,’ Ahriman said in the stillness of his mind. ‘You have my oath.’

‘Hope,’ said Astraeos. He felt cold, as though something of the memory of the lonely human boy he had been bled into the present.

He has abandoned you… He is not coming… no matter what oaths he made.

‘Hope?’ The inquisitor shook his head slowly, and rubbed a hand over his eyes. ‘We make your breed so different, don’t we? Take a boy, cut away his future, his fear. Fill him with secrets that only the Emperor can truly understand, clad him in muscle and armour and surround him by war.

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