Free Ahriman: Sorcerer by John French

mountain itself, held safe behind iron-bound doors. The fortress’s purpose was to dominate a world in the name of the Emperor. Hemellion looked back to where that Emperor’s servants now filled the night with strange stars.
    ‘Light the signal fires,’ he said, his breath misting in the cold air. ‘Send riders to the near holds.’
    ‘Yes, sire,’ said Helana, and he heard the question left unspoken at the end of her words.
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘Why do they come now?’
    ‘Who knows?’ he said with a shrug. ‘They come when they will.’
    ‘What do they want?’
    ‘The same as any ruler wants from his lands and vassals – they come for tribute. The records speak of them taking armies to serve in wars across the stars, or coming to cull those with the witch-sight.’
    ‘And we…?’
    He rubbed a hand across his face, feeling the stubble that had accumulated on the wrinkles of his face. He suddenly felt very tired. Forty years of life, twenty since his mother had died and left him the regency, and in all that time, in all the decisions and crises, nothing had made him feel as burdened as those small points of light shining in the sky.
    ‘We give them everything they ask for,’ he said. He was about to say something else when Helana gave a cry. He looked up. The stars were falling. As he watched they birthed smaller stars, until a net of fire fell through the night. Cries rose from the fortress, and more stars fell.
    Ignis began to count time after the first salvo. The numbers streamed through his mind, forming shapes and patterns in his consciousness. Triangles became pyramids, spheres became circles, and spirals danced in his awareness as time sliced into ever thinner slivers. Beneath his feet the Word of Hermes shook as its guns added to the second salvo. Fresh streaks of fire began to reach for the world laid out in front of his eyes. This salvo had begun seven hundred and twenty seconds after the first. Two hundred and forty tonnes of active agent filled the warheads in each salvo. There would be three salvos.
    The first shells would already be breaking apart in the lower atmosphere. The defoliant-agent would reach surface saturation within nine hours. Even if some of the other ships did not attain his level of precision it was still certain that every blade of grass, tree and leaf would be dust within twenty-seven hours. Once he would have considered that symbolism beautiful, or profound, or perfect. Now, watching the warheads begin to glow as they cut through the doomed planet’s atmosphere, he simply considered it a relief.
    Clusters of falling shells formed a pattern in his mind’s eye. His subconscious caught the pattern, and multiplied it into spreading designs of fire, each part of the whole identical to every other part. He felt the pattern slip into the warp, and continue to grow. He let it multiply to the point that he could no longer control it, and then blanked it from his mind. He took a deep, slow breath.
    Ahriman had commanded Ignis to engineer the planet’s end, but Ignis knew that the calculations of obliteration mattered little to his one-time brother. Only the result mattered to Ahriman, and Ignis could give him that. It was a simple task, and it let him touch the pattern even if only for a brief time. It was not much, but for now it was enough.
    He blinked, eyelids closing for five seconds while he followed the progress of his design one more time in his mind.
    He turned from the viewport, and found the blank mask of Credence staring at him.
    ‘All is well,’ Ignis said, and gave a small nod. The towering automaton clicked, and the gears in its shoulders cycled. Credence clacked another binaric query with its metal insect voice. Ignis thought that there might have been a tone of concern in the machine’s inquiry, but he knew that inferring genuine emotion to a capsule of silica in an armoured shell was madness. But then he did not understand expressions of emotion in humans either. He