Ahriman: The Dead Oracle by John French Read Free Book Online Page A

cool.’ It grinned with a thousand mouths. ‘You are hunted. You and your master.’
    ‘I have no master.’
    Its laughter clattered out again, its flesh shivering beneath copper feathers.
    This is the way of daemons. Like predators of old Terra, they posture, growl and magnify their appearance to cover weakness. But, like the growl of the wolf and the snarl of the lion, it is bravado that breathes from between sharp teeth.
    ‘Everything has a master,’ it smiled a wide, sagging smile. ‘But you are not mine.’
    It had gone snake-still. I had to act now.
    It burst towards me.
    I began to form the thing’s name, reaching into the compartments of my mind to unlock, and combine each fragment.
    ‘Sah-sul’na’gu…’
    The syllables sprayed from my lips, but the daemon was already lunging at me, its body growing as it moved. Its skin tore, arms reaching from within its swelling form. Fingers stretched and became razors of bone. 
    ‘…th’nul’gu’shun-ignal…’
    The skin of the dream clogged and stretched as I spoke. Sounds of tearing skin and weeping cries stole the daemon’s roar.
    ‘…g’shu’theth…’
    Un-words poured from me. They burned in the idea of air. The daemon’s body began to crumble, skin and meat hissing to slime. Flesh stripped from its reaching claw. The last component of its name unlocked in my mind.
    ‘…ul’suth’kal!’ I spat the last piece of it.
    The daemon froze. Shivering in place, the edges shimmering to nothing.
    ‘You.’ The daemon’s voice hissed from its dissolving throat. ‘Are. Weak.’
    ‘Not yet,’ I said, and thrust it back into oblivion.
    I woke to the smell of burning flesh. It was my own. Thick ropes of oily smoke climbed above where the silvered manacles held my limbs in place. The alchemical feeds that had been dripping false sleep into my veins had melted, and hung in blackened tangles from the brass armatures above me.
    I tried to move my head. Some of the skin of my neck ripped away as I moved – it had fused to the metal loop beneath my chin. I could feel my flesh struggling to blot out the pain. Other warriors of the Adeptus Astartes would have shrugged off such sensations, but not me.
    I was old even then, and my flesh had withered on my bones. The strength of muscle and blood is just one thing that I have given up as payment for power. I could still wield a sword, though I preferred a staff, and I could shatter a skull between my fingers. But these are small things for our kind. They do not undo the truth that then, as now, my skin was a wrinkled mask over a frame of thinned bones and spindly limbs. Lank, white hair hung from the shrivelled root of my head. My pale eyes were just as they were when I was born, but fragments of emerald and gold had replaced my teeth. A kaleidoscope of inked sigils covered me from head to foot, hiding the scars beneath letters and pictograms from long dead languages. In body, as in soul, I was a memorial to my own mistakes.
    The room in which I hung, bound to a frame of silver and cold iron, was a cell. Warding marks and patterns were cut into its narrow walls and floor. Most of the wards had bled outwards, like wax blasted by a fusion torch. I knew the meaning of each symbol, and knew that they should have stopped the daemon manifesting in my dream, just as they had stopped me summoning aid from the warp. They, and the silver manacles, and the alchemically created coma, were supposed to hold me until I agreed to serve Amon, or until another end was found for me. I had refused to serve and so had lain, chained in sleep, in the heart of the ship Sycorax .
    Now the chains had fallen and I was awake.
    I moved my head again, and this time the pain came clear and bright. I let out a hissing breath.
    ‘Brother,’ said a voice from just out of sight.
    I froze. I knew the voice, but its presence was an impossibility. It simply could not be.
    I was very still. The pain of my burned limbs and the stink of the room said