Read Ahriman: Exile for Free Online

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 hangar 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