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A Coin for the Carrion Thieves – Extract

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A COIN FOR THE CARRION THIEVES

By John French

‘All wealth begins with possessing what others lack.’

– ancient axiom of commerce

I am called Ctesias. I am a sorcerer. I am a peddler of lies and a breaker of oaths. I am a gene-son of Magnus the Red. I am a brother of fools and a destroyer of kingdoms, and I am old… Not just old in years, though thousands on thousands of years have passed since I was human. No… To be old is to see the universe clearly without the comfort of the falsehoods we drape over reality. The young see hope and possibility, but the old see only foolishness and inevitable ruin. The young see the chance for redemption, for renewal, but the old know that the sins of the past are always with us, sitting on our shoulder, a watching shadow that we can never look at. To be old is to know that the past is irredeemable, and that the future is damned. I know this; I have had it taught to me over and again. Yet still I persist, as I have for all the millennia of my stolen lives. I persist and follow fools, and so make myself the greatest fool of all.

And that is what I did when I chose to stay with Ahriman after the disaster of our return to the Planet of the Sorcerers. We had broken the banishment of Magnus to try and cast the Rubric for a second time. The purpose, just as with the first attempt, was to restore the Thousand Sons to what they had been – free of the mutation and restored to true life. Ahriman had been certain that this endeavour would work and so we, just as we had done the first time, followed him into failure.

We fled from the Planet of the Sorcerers, exiles again. Why the wrath of Magnus did not follow us, I do not know. Perhaps the creature who had once been our teacher and gene-sire had thought that our failure was punishment enough. Perhaps some greater, daemonic will had shackled his hand. This, like many truths, is one that I have no desire to know.

The power and might that Ahriman had assembled and wielded to make his attempt to cast the second Rubric had been vast. We had drawn the scattered exiles of the Thousand Sons to us, bound legions of daemons to us, and dragged with us a horde that wanted nothing more than to feed on the ascendant star of Ahriman’s power. In failure, all fled, save a few. The Circle and many of their vassals remained with a handful of ships. The rest, living and Neverborn alike, vanished. We were a wounded, ragged remnant trying to outrun the storm we feared followed us. I say we, because, like the fool that time has made me, I remained.

We came to rest, at last, beside the Weeping Crones. The laws of reality are not simply broken in the Eye; they are mocked. The Weeping Crones had been stars, each burning at the centre of its own system. Those worlds had once been part of the great and fallen realm of the alien aeldari, but the immaterium and the whims of lost dreams had withered the light of the stars and dragged them from their settings to spiral together. Now they danced together, the pull and clash of their gravities suspended. They wept ghost light, great long streamers of light the colour of pus seeping from a sore. Shapes moved in their pale faces, dead faces formed from curdling plasma and fading light. On the worlds that still circled them, there were tribes of three-eyed druids, who looked up at those blighted suns until they went blind, one eye at a time. While their eyes regrew, they etched accounts of what they had seen onto the shard remains of aeldari cities, which lay in great, flat plains: endless words of revelation in countless languages. All nonsense – take it from me. It was a vile place of slow entropy and pointless despair, but to us, wounded and bleeding and running, it was sanctuary.

+He has summoned you,+ Lycomedes sent. He stood by the entrance to my chambers. Fully armoured, his mind flaring and shifting like a crackling fire. +The Carrion Thieves have come.+

‘Use your voice,’ I replied softly, without looking up from the skull I was turning over in my hands. ‘There are things in here you do not want your thoughts to disturb.’

Smoke rose as the marks burnt into the skull’s surface rewrote themselves. The two daemons bound into it were fighting each other and against their bonds. They wanted to be free. I was not unsympathetic to their instincts.

I felt Lycomedes’ pride flare, the mingling of uncertainty and ambition battling against his control. He was one of Gaumata’s, one of the unclaimed, those whose powers and knowledge were modest at best before Ahriman had cast the Rubric but had somehow been spared the transmutation into Rubricae. Compared to the sorcerers, witches and psykers of other Legions, he was powerful, but amongst us his abilities were those of a child. An ambitious, vicious child, who deep down knew that he would likely never rise high, and so hungered all the more for ascendency. I despised him, and those like him, not because of his ambition, but because he embodied the blindness that had damned us in the first place. That may surprise you – after all, I am a sorcerer whose speciality is the binding and command of daemons, and I have pursued power and knowledge all my long life. I just have never thought it made me anything other than a broken and vile thing. Say what you like about me, and many have, but I rarely lie, even to myself.

‘Ahriman summons you.’

‘And he sent you, Lycomedes? What new sin have I committed that he should punish me so?’

I glanced at Lycomedes. He wore the blue lacquered armour that was common to our kind, and the gorget rose and curled behind his head like the caul of a cobra. Psycho-conductive crystals gleamed on the hood. His face was thin, and had that focused hardness about the brow, mouth and jaw. His eyes were green without white or pupil. Gold sigils wound across his temples. A long-hafted khopesh sat at his back.

‘Tell me,’ I said, still not rising from where I sat. ‘Do you consider it a punishment or an honour to be sent to me like a crow with a message in its beak?’

He did not answer, but another flare of anger and pride rose from his mind. He was not even trying to control the bleed of his thoughts. I felt some of my captives tug at their bindings – they could smell Lycomedes’ soul. A rope of finger bones and human hair rattled on its hook in the ceiling. Coals glowed from red to orange in a brazier in which a pitted bronze dagger sat. Frost formed on the surface of an obsidian mirror lying on a copper plinth. I spoke words in my mind and felt them soothe and lash the daemons in each object back to silence.

‘Careful,’ I said, and whispered more silent-words to the rune-marked skull as I placed it back in its cold-iron box. ‘I know that Gaumata does not value knowledge of the arts of summoning, binding, evocation and dismissal in his disciples, but I would hope that simple self-preservation would make you keep your emotions and thoughts in check.’

‘I do not follow exalted Gaumata,’ he said stiffly, and now I let my mind taste and hear more of the emotion that was spicing the ether around him. Shame – beneath the anger was a pearl of shame, hard and dark in his being.

‘I know,’ I said. ‘He broke your discipleship, and so now you find yourself a messenger without a master.’

I rose and looked around the chamber. It was a storeroom, or laboratory you might say if you wanted to drain it of all poetry. To this day, it is here I keep the Neverborn that I have tricked and trapped: things made from pain, or spite, or sorrow; things that burn and deceive and murder; things that leave parents weeping over small graves; and things that spool the last breath from the mouths of those who want to live. There are Neverborn here who would flay your mind a thought at a time over a thousand years and you would never realise it until your existence is someone you do not know calling a name you do not remember. Of course, it is not where I keep my greatest treasures – those prisons are stronger and far from tangible.

I picked up my staff and walked over to Lycomedes. The parchments pinned to my armour rustled.

‘We should go without more delay,’ I said. ‘I would hate to leave our betters waiting for our presence longer than necessary.’

‘I have delivered the summons,’ said Lycomedes. ‘I am not summoned to attend.’

‘Oh, but you are,’ I said. I think I may have even tried a smile. ‘Will you follow?’ I asked.

After a moment he made his choice and followed.

Ahriman, Lycomedes and I stood in the hangar of the Word of Hermes and watched as a bloated gunship settled onto the deck. Its skin was a patchwork of metals and repair methods worn with what struck me as pride. Behind the gunship, the open doors of the hangar bay framed a school of warships hanging in the void, the view shimmering behind void shield layers. Clouds of dust and debris gathered around their hulls, which gleamed like brushed steel or polished bone. A great swarm of lesser craft spun around them, moving like a murmuration of birds above a watering hole. Or a slaughter field.

Lycomedes stood at my side. His thoughts were controlled now, held in check by caution and uncertainty as to why he was here, beside myself and our ultimate lord, Ahzek Ahriman, to greet our guests.

The gunship’s doors unfolded and spilled a menagerie of metal and flesh into the light. There were towering things, hung with skeins of chain; figures in armour the colour of discoloured bronze; and things that limped, balancing their weight on powerblades taller than they were, things whose nature and provenance I could not divine.

They called themselves the Discordia, or sometimes the Faithful Followers of the False Concordance of All Things, but to all others they were the Carrion Thieves. In the ruthless war for resources in the Eye of Terror, they were scavenger-traders of lost ships, and that calling made them powerful. You see, in the Eye, where dreams can be real, the material is precious. I can sit at the heart of a cyclone of etheric power at the core of a lightless star and push my thoughts and wishes out until they swim through the night like bright fish through clear water. A soul with enough will can conjure cities that spiral between planets, worlds that are ribbons of gold and sunlight, chariots that can cross the gulf between endless false heavens. Some do just that, but these wonders are not real. Like the daemons that swim the Great Ocean, they drown in reality. The warp cannot really make anything. For those that wish to make war, they must have weapons made in cold reality. Such things are hard to come by in the Eye, and so we are all scavengers and wielders of the weapons of the past.

That is what Ahriman needed. We needed supplies. We needed weapons and ore, and metal and bullets, and we needed ships. We had left the Planet of the Sorcerers wounded and weakened, and there would be those who would come after us for vengeance or fortune. That was why we had come to the Weeping Crones: not just because we hoped that their poisonous nature would cloud our scent from anyone pursuing us, but because it was one of the places where the Carrion Thieves gathered and fished the depths of night for the carcasses of the Eye’s eternal wars.

A single figure broke from the herd of creatures and came forwards. It walked on legs of tarnished brass. A great mane of mechanical tentacles writhed from its back. Chains of broken weaponry and machinery hung from it. Bones of all shapes clinked on metal threads. I thought I recognised the lines of Legion warplate in its shape, but it lay so submerged under accretions of detritus that I could not be sure if it was its original form. I kept my will dimmed, but even brushing against its mind I could feel layers of hardened scarring and deliberate thought mutilation that felt like metal thorns. Only one emotion bled from between the cracks: hunger – raw, cold hunger, like the gaping mouth of a void between galaxies. A hooded cloak of scorched metal scales hid the bulk of its body, and it looked down at us with clusters of eye-lenses.

‘Ahriman…’ it said, and I confess I was surprised. The voice was deep, melodious, and almost human. ‘Son of the King Who is Crimson, Exiled and Returned, you have come to our harvesting ground and are welcome. I am called The First to Gather, and Bountiful Lord to those that are of my bond. I say again you are welcome.’

The thing called The First to Gather bowed then, tilting down and spreading its arms. It held the pose. I noticed that the arms were flesh rather than machine, and very long. The nails on the fingers were black and the length of knives.

Ahriman inclined his head.

‘You do us honour, and I see and know that those who are of your bond are right to call you bountiful.’ The First to Gather rose, its arms folding back into itself. ‘As is right for one who comes in friendship, I bring tokens to feed those who have need.’

Further down the hull of the Word of Hermes, cargo hold doors opened. Broken war machines tumbled into the void: the torn shells of Predators, gunships, Rhinos, and with them the corpses of mortals. Fragments of metal, shell casings and severed limbs tumbled over in the weak light of the Weeping Crones.

The First to Gather rose, extending in height as it watched the cascade of war wreckage spread out in the void. Its eyes rotated and lit with inner fire. A single, long-nailed hand appeared from under its cloak and made a sign in the air which set the wards inked on my skin itching.

‘It is well,’ said The First to Gather, compressing its form again. ‘Fresh from death. Still marked with the blood of both sides… A worthy giving.’ It turned and lights flashed in its eyes.

The crowd of creatures at the other side of the deck turned and scuttled into curious huddles. Out in the void I saw hundreds of small craft swarm forwards. Melta torches flared, portioning wreckage. Hooks and cables snagged pieces and hauled them away. Nets dragged through the void, catching fragments and body parts.

‘You may remain as our guests until you wish to resume your path.’ The First to Gather was turning away and scuttling after its companions as Ahriman spoke.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
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