The Karsharat Abomination by George Mann

Author:George Mann
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2020-06-16T14:05:02+00:00

About the Author

George Mann is an author and editor based in the East Midlands. For Black Library, he is best known for his stories featuring the Raven Guard, which include the audio dramas Helion Rain and Labyrinth of Sorrows, the novella The Unkindness of Ravens, plus a number of short stories.

An extract from The Horusian Wars: Resurrection.

The daemon watched the lone warrior through stolen eyes. Walls of rock, smoothed over time by the passage of water, rose from the floor of the cave. Fingers of slime-covered crystal reached down from the roof. Water dripped from their tips, thick and pale with salts. A soft light rose from the pools of liquid caught in the ripple of the cave’s floor. Bones lay in clusters, some dry, some still clad in tatters of skin. The warrior moved through the gloom and past the pools, eyes moving steadily over the darkness beyond his sight. On his shoulder a weapon-machine pivoted and spun without cease. Crimson armour encased his chest, and a tome sat on his back, bound by locked chains. Lightning crawled down the blade in his hands, its flicker marking his hawk-like features with pale light.

The daemon watched as the warrior paused beside a luminous pool. It could see the fire of the human’s mind coiling in the realm beyond his flesh, bright with strength, threaded with the cobweb shadows of secrets. The daemon smiled, and felt its host’s lips pull back from its teeth.

‘You are Covenant,’ it said in the voice of its flesh prison.

The warrior remained still, but the weapon on his shoulder flicked around, barrel and targeting lens sweeping the dark.

‘I am glad you are here, boy,’ it said. ‘We have met before, but you would not remember.’

Covenant shifted the grip on his sword. On his shoulder the gun linked to his mind slowed its scanning, like a dog waiting for scent to come to it on the wind.

‘Of course,’ said the daemon. ‘That is a lie. I am not glad to see you. I have no soul to loathe or love you.’

Covenant took a step forwards, sword rising slightly, head turning to look to his side.

‘I am a creature that exists by theft. Everything we are, we take from you, our shapes from your nightmares, our words from your mouths, our existence from your weakness.’

The daemon paused. Its flesh shuddered in its wrapping of shadows. The fat, skin and sinew of its host would have rotted to nothing decades before, but the daemon’s presence sustained it, just as the flesh and the cold iron hammered into that flesh had held the daemon like a prison.

‘You know this, of course,’ it said. Covenant had stopped again. He was so close that the daemon could feel the life radiating from his soul. ‘You know what I am. You know that I speak to you because it is my nature, my ordained purpose in the courts of what you might call Chaos. You know I speak because I must. You know all this of me.

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