Ahriman: Exile by John French Page A

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