Read Ahriman: Sorcerer for Free Online Page A

door sealed behind him.
    Maroth waited for him in the passage beyond. The broken and blind sorcerer was crouched on the floor, the tatters of his robes hanging over his dented armour. He raised his head as the door sealed.
    ‘The answers of silence are pleasing?’ chuckled Maroth. His hound-shaped helm tilted up as though to emphasise the question. Kadin did not bother to look at him or reply. Maroth always followed Kadin when he visited the daemon in its gaol, as though he liked to be close to it even if he was never allowed to see it.
    Kadin walked away from the silver door. His vox-link popped and crackled back into life as the door receded into darkness behind him; things were happening. It was as though the whole fleet had woken from sleep while he was not looking.
    ‘The war on fate, it is beginning, is it not, yes?’ breathed Maroth, as he scrambled to follow.
    ‘Yes,’ said Kadin. ‘Yes, I am afraid it is.’

III – Conclave
    III
    Conclave
    The seer was blind, and old, and shuffled at the centre of her web of chains. Two steps into the chamber she stumbled, and hung for several seconds. She spat on the floor.
    From her place on the lowest of the encircling tiers Iobel watched the thick yellow phlegm splatter on the flagstones. Candlelight glinted from the thick liquid. The seer gave a moan and tried to stand. Iobel blinked, and felt the muscles of her face tighten. The attendants holding the chains did not move, but just pulled the restraints tight, their slab muscles strained under their tattooed skin. The eye holes of their hoods did not turn towards their charge, in fact they did not move at all. The figures standing on the stone tiers shifted quietly, waiting. Eventually the seer found her balance and began to shuffle towards the centre of the chamber again.
    ‘This will be unpleasant,’ murmured Cavor, and Iobel could tell he was grinning. Across the chamber eyes flicked at Iobel and Cavor, then away. Without thinking she stabbed a mental rebuke at Cavor, only to feel the deadening effect of the null fields steal the thought. Instead she turned her head and favoured Cavor with a stare. Clad as she was in layered plasteel and leather, she was smaller than him by far. Dark hair folded and set by silver pins topped her pale face. She met the green glow of his bionic eyes with her own clouded, grey gaze. The rayed disk of the Solar cult tattooed on her left cheek twitched as she raised an eyebrow.
    ‘Sorry, my lady,’ said Cavor, and then tried a grin. The skin of his lips twisted to show the filed bronze of his teeth. The green light in his eyes widened. He took a step back, bandoliers of rounds and pistols clinking softly. Iobel gave a short shake of her head and turned away.
    After a second of silence she heard Cavor step back to his appointed place.
    I should have brought Linisa, she thought. Or even Horeg . The ex-gang boss might have the decorum of a dying grox, but at least without a tongue he would have been quiet. She pursed her lips as the seer came to a halt at the centre of the chamber.
    The chamber was the deepest in a fortress which sat under a blue sky, in the centre of a desert on a world that had been dead for centuries. The fortress was a spike of stone built into a mountain, which jutted from the dry plains like a rotten fang. Iobel had seen it from the lander as she had descended from orbit, and had walked through the dust-cloaked halls and passages on the way to the council chamber. It looked as though it had been made by human hands, but you could never be sure. Timeworn gargoyles had watched her pass, and the stones had last seen the tread of feet long ago.
    But of course it was not deserted – the servants of the Inquisition had claimed the dead fortress for this conclave. Thick trunks of cable snaked down the sides of corridors, and vanished down openings in the floor. Glow-globes hovered close to the high ceilings, suspensor fields buzzing in the dry air. Hooded serfs moved in