Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero

by Graham McNeill

  'It's all gone,' said Niko Ashkali, bending to scoop a handful of the city's powdered remains. 'It is all dust.'

  'What?'

  'I said there is nothing left,' said Ashkali, standing and brushing her hands together. She glanced over her shoulder to where a single stripped-down Stormbird, so skeletal and reduced it really deserved another designation, settled in the ash behind them. 'I am not sure why we are here. Are your warriors not required to aid the evacuation efforts?' 'I've been wondering the same thing,' said Hathor Maat, appearing at Atharva's side and scanning their desolate, empty surroundings. 'Why are we here?'

  Atharva masked his irritation at Hathor Maat's loose tongue. He had not served with the warrior before now, but could read enough of his Pavoni aura to know he was vain even beyond most of that strutting Fellowship.

  Along with Atharva and Hathor Maat, four other legionaries had been assigned to this mission. They were all from different companies and squads, to better disguise that they were no longer with their units. This mission reeked of subterfuge and Atharva detested subterfuge.

  But the order came directly from his primarch.

  Magnus had halted Atharva moments before departing for Attar and given him alternative orders.

  'Return to Zharrukin,' said the primarch.

  'Zharrukin?' he had asked. 'The city is gone. There is nothing left of it.'

  Magnus shook his head, and the intensity of his gaze was unsettling. 'You are wrong, Atharva. There is more yet to discover, I know it.'

  'The storm will have taken whatever remained of the city.'

  'No, something lies beneath,' said Magnus. 'I did not have time to find it before, but you will if you go now.'

  'What am I to look for?'

  Magnus paused, as though turning his mind inwards.

  'Look for the sign of a feathered arrowhead,' he said at last. 'It will guide you.'

  'What does that mean?'

  Magnus grinned, and Atharva felt himself mirroring the gesture. 'I do not know, but you will get to discover something wondrous, my son. Truth be told, I am jealous.'

  Despite such a prospect, Atharva could not shake the notion they were doing something deceitful by being here, something that might have grave consequences. Was that Corvidae instinct or guilt at being here instead of helping with the planetary relief efforts?

  He did not know, and that troubled him.

  Atharva shook off his nagging feelings of unease and walked through the eerily quiet ruins, using the cracked foundations and sheared nubs of structural columns to form a mental map of the vanished city.

  'Spread out,' he said. 'Look for anything that could conceivably be a feathered arrowhead.'

  'What's that?' asked Hathor Maat.

  'Something that will guide us,' said Atharva. 'Now do it. And report in as soon as you see anything that matches that description.'

  Hathor Maat and the others set off in various directions, quartering the ruins and hunting for something whose meaning was beyond them. Atharva watched them go and turned to Ashkali.

  'Conservator Ashkali.'

  'Niko.'

  'Of course, I forgot,' said Atharva. 'Tell me, does a feathered arrowhead design have any particular cultural or symbolic resonance on Morningstar?'

  'Perhaps,' said Ashkali, bending to draw a circle in the dust with her fingertip. Then, with five quick strokes, she drew a star within it.

  'Tell me what you see,' she said.

  'The planetary sigil of Morningstar.'

  Ashkali swept away the left and right points of the star.

  'Just over thirty years ago, some agri-settlers in the Laveyan Grottos uncovered some artefacts that appeared to date from a time before Old Night.'

  'What kinds of artefacts?'

  'Just scraps, really,' said Ashkali, tapping a finger against her lip as she sorted through her memories. 'Partially decayed cloth that might have been uniforms, metal fragments and smashed pieces of machinery. But the best-preserved piece was what looked like the remains of a helmet.'

  'A warrior's helmet?'

  'I do not believe so. It appeared to be a primitive environment helmet from a void suit. Here, I'll show you.'

  Atharva leaned down as Ashkali produced a data-slate from her hip-pouch and began scrolling through grainy imagery pulled from an archived database.

  'Where are you…?' she said, flipping through scans of crumbling relics pulled from the earth of Morningstar. 'Ah, there it is.'

  The image quality was poor, the lousy atmospherics disrupting the connection, but Atharva felt a thrill of familiarity as he stared at the wavering image.

  The helm had once been bright yellow, but had faded with age and damage. A painted insignia above the cracked visor was still visible - faint, but unmistakably that of a vectored arrow encircled by a stylised ring and wreath that could easily be interpreted as feathers.

  'Some of the oldest settlers claim this was Morningstar's original sigil, that the others points of the star were added later,' said Ashkali.

  'They may very well be correct.'

  'You know this symbol?'

  'A variant form of it, yes.'

  'Where did you see it? On Terra?'

  'Yes. When the eastern ethnarchs fell, the Thousand Sons marched across the cindered remains of the Dragon Nations, preserving and learning all we could of that land's ancient history and culture. Much had already been lost in the fires of self-immolation, but in the ruins of Ba-Shu, we found the remains of a storage facility for rockets intended to bear atomic warheads. However, that did not appear to be its original designation - its true purpose was a launch station for trans-orbital craft, perhaps the first to breach the solar system. Some of the walls had a faded versions of this symbol painted on them.'

  'I see,' said Ashkali. 'But why would you send your men to look for such a symbol now?'

  'Because I have been told it will guide us.'

  'Guide us to what?'

  'I do not know,' said Atharva. 'My primarch believes this city yet keeps secrets from us. This symbol will guide us to them.'

  No sooner had the words left his lips than he felt a flare of emotion from Hathor Maat. The legionary's excitement was palpable, his Pavoni affiliations transmitting a measure of it to Atharva. He pushed himself into the fourth Enumeration to counter it with reason.

  +Atharva, you have to see this…+

  +What is it? What have you found?+

  +Best you come and see for yourself.+

  Ashkali saw the change in his body language and cocked her head to one side.

  'What is it?'

  'We've found something,' said Atharva.

  They set off through the dead city towards where Hathor Maat was waiting within the remains of a vast structure, easily capable of housing an entire vehicle regiment. Its roof was gone, and only the lower reaches of its reinforced walls remained intact.

  Hathor Maat stood at the edge of what looked like an elevator shaft for bringing vehicles up from a subterranean hangar. He turned as they approached, and his aura was alight with dancing colours: greens, golds and blues.

  'What is it?' asked Atharva, as he and Ashkali picked a path through the rubble towards him.

  Hathor Maat simply pointed downwards.

  Atharva reached the edge of the shaft and leaned over.

  Bare plascrete walls plunged hundreds of metres into the earth, and portions of a buckled metal stairwell were bolted around its perimeter. Cracked lumen globes stuttered, telling Atharva that power still flowed somewhere below.

  At the base of the shaft was a curved expanse of bare metal, formed of riveted iron sheets. Its surface was rusted after centuries or more spent beneath the ground, and at its centre was a gleaming hatch with an armourglass portal.

  'What is this?' began Ashkali.

  'Those are hull plates,' said Hathor Maat. 'Of a starship!,'

  'It is so much more than that,' said Atharva, seeing the icon from the damaged helmet emblazoned on the sealed hatch.<
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  'What do you mean?' asked Ashkali.

  'I mean, this is a Terran colony ship.'

  Magnus ran through the ruins of Attar like a hunting beast on the scent of its prey. He followed Konrad Vargha's psychic trace, a magnesium-bright lodestone burning its location into his mind.

  Traversing the city was a vision of torment.

  Wherever he looked he saw suffering: corpses scattered throughout the ruins with arms spread wide as though to welcome this armageddon; blinded survivors wandering the ruins in shock; men and women on their hands and knees, vainly trying to dig through the rubble of their homes. Truly, this was a vision of the underverse Russ had once spoken of in an unguarded moment, when they had taken shelter from sciomantic lightning on the Bugulma-Belebey Upplands.

  He moved at speed, letting nothing slow him; not towering piles of rubble that would have taken cohorts of bulk-servitors hours to remove, nor fires fuelled by endless reservoirs of promethium. The Great Ocean filled him with the power to smash aside debris, transmute steel to mist and render towering infernos into freezing rain.

  Like a god, he moved through the rubble of Attar, wreathed in light as he blazed a path through the devastation.

  And like any divine figure, he attracted followers.

  Some simply saw him as a way out, others as a worker of miracles. Yet more saw him as a saviour, an armoured warrior god come to lead them from this nightmare to safety.

  Singly and in tiny groups they came, stumbling and weeping in his wake as he forged a path through the ruins. That his course took him deeper into Attar seemed to matter not at all - that he moved with purpose and mystical light was all that counted. Magnus did not dissuade them; by following him they stood a better chance of surviving.

  By the time he finally reached the source of Konrad Vargha's mind trace, over a hundred desperate, bloodied souls and grief-maddened wretches had latched on to him. They followed in a ragged host, beseeching him with appeals to help find their loved ones, to dig their children from the rubble, to restore life to dead wives and husbands, to somehow reverse the catastrophe that had swallowed their city. As every one of their cries came to him, he vowed he would plumb the depths of the Great Ocean so that he would never have to hear such cries in vain again.

  Ahead was the smouldering wreck of the crushed Rhino, its red-painted hull buckled but still intact. It sat in the centre of a cratered roadway, half fallen into a spreading pool of shimmering oil and rainbow-sheened promethium leaking from the ruptured silos of the refinery.

  Magnus ran forwards, drawing the power of the Great Ocean into him and freezing the dangerously flammable liquid to ice. Webbed frost spread across the Rhino's hull, and Magnus altered the chemical composition of the air around the vehicle to eliminate the oxygen and keep any sparks from igniting the explosive vapours.

  A gentle kine barrier kept the wailing survivors from his back as he pulled open the Rhino's hull with his bare hands and threw the torn metal aside. The vehicle's interior was awash with blood.

  The Rhino's crew had been killed on impact, the hard edges of the interior structure smashing them apart as the vehicle rolled.

  Only Vaigha had survived thanks to his placement in the rear of the vehicle, the portion shielded from the worst of the crash by the engine block. The planetary governor was a broad-shouldered and powerful man, his patrician features the result of careful breeding. He lay sprawled across a vox-caster console that was somehow still functional, his shattered legs trapped by the crushed drive mechanism.

  Magnus wove an intricate pattern in the air, and the metal pinning the governor in place disassembled into its constituent parts. Hundreds of cogs, gears, spindles and panels floated into the air and fell away as Magnus unmade the machinery with a fractional expenditure of power.

  Vargha slumped as the weight pinning his legs was removed. Blood pumped from his torn flesh and he tried to scream, but there was no air to draw into his lungs. His eyes bulged in agony and from lack of oxygen. He glared at Magnus as he was lifted from the Rhino, as if the primarch were the source of his pain.

  The crowd gathered around Magnus dropped to their knees at the sight of the governor's rescue. Magnus walked through them, bearing Vargha in his arms as they raised their arms towards him. The governor's thigh bones had been shattered like glass, and the base of his spine was a pulped mass of marrow and bone. Blood soaked Magnus' chest as he eased his power into Vargha's ruined flesh.

  Aetheric energy raced throughout the governor's body, renewing torn blood vessels, restoring destroyed nerves and mending bones that were little better than powdered fragments. Vargha screamed as his nerves awoke to fire, both his femurs cracking as the bones regrew and were made whole The pain was too much, and his eyes rolled back in his head as unconsciousness claimed him. Magnus nodded, feeling the man's aura settle as swiftly growing flesh knitted over the wounds where, only moments before, splintered nubs of bone had jutted.

  He turned as he heard the rumble of engines, heavy-duty military grade. A wall of debris blocking the roadway collapsed as a colossal super-heavy tank equipped with a siege-grade dozer blade bludgeoned its way through.

  A Baneblade, a mobile battle fortress armed to the teeth with the deadliest weapons mankind had yet devised.

  An avalanche of rubble cascaded into the street as its enormous mass cleared a path for the smaller vehicles behind it - a mix of Rhinos, Chimeras and Executioners. All were painted in the colours of the Red Dragons, and Magnus nodded to himself. At least the survivors gathered around him had a means of escape now.

  The Baneblade slewed to a halt, and the cupola on its topside opened. A soldier in the tough canvas and leather of a tanker's tunic emerged, his face obscured by a visored helmet and rebreather apparatus. A golden pin depicting the encircled star that was this planet's sigil glittered at his lapel. Something in its orientation seemed strangely relevant to Magnus, though he could not say exactly why.

  'Get those vehicles over here,' he ordered. 'There are survivors that need transport to safety.'

  'Is that Governor Vargha?' asked the soldier, his voice muffled by the rebreather.

  'It is, but I will carry him out. Open your assault ramps and help these people.'

  The soldier touched his hand to the side of his helmet and nodded at whatever order he was being given. He dropped back inside the Baneblade and slammed the hatch shut behind him.

  Seconds later, the vehicles opened fire.

  Five

  RAPTURE • HAIL SHAITAN • WHAT DID YOU DO?

  Overlapping repulsor fields from the fleet of tugs holding station overhead were interfering with the operation of Ahriman's war-plate. He vented air from his gorget, easing the pressure within his helmet.

  Forty of the heavy-duty tugs, each little more than a servitor-cockpit bolted to a vastly powerful gravitic engine, strained like hounds on the leash, poised to haul the Lux Ferem's magnificent bulk into the air once its cargo bays were fully loaded. Once the mass-conveyor's own engines could bear its colossal weight, they would detach and return to the space port.

  Enormous ramps led from the ground to the Lux Ferem's cavernous embarkation decks, and thousands of people marched into its belly with their heads down. They bore all their worldly possessions on their backs, and every one of them turned for a last, fleeting look at their doomed home world.

  'This is the last batch for loading,' said Forrix, consulting a data-slate filled with names and numbers.

  'The balance sheet of survival,' said Ahriman. 'Those who will live to tell fond remembrances of their lost planet in the decades to come.'

  'They are the lucky ones,' said Forrix. 'They have fallen on the correct side of the equation and will get to live.'

  Casting his senses out over the refugees being guided up the ramps like livestock, Ahriman doubted any of them felt lucky, but refrained from pointing that out.

  'It all comes down to numbers with the Fourth, doesn't it?'

  'Of course,' said Forri
x. 'Any fool knows that is how wars are won, through superior logistics, planning and the proper assessment of risk.'

  'What of courage? What of honour and sacrifice? Do they not also play a part in winning wars?'

  'Some,' allowed Forrix. 'But far less than you would imagine. The greatest warrior of a Legion cannot shoot if his bolter is without ammunition. The deadliest super-heavy tank cannot crush the enemy beneath its tracks without oceans of fuel, and the heaviest artillery cannot pound fortifications without a constant supply of shells. The duty of an Iron Warrior is to win any war as quickly and efficiently as possible.'

  'I know you are correct, but to reduce war to numbers and equations feels like a mistake,' said Ahriman. 'When individual lives are no more than numbers, it becomes easier to forget that they are living beings. Yes, plan a war in this way, but do not fight it like that.'

  'You are sentimental, Ahzek,' said Forrix, his words coming out like a warning. 'So I hope you never have to face an enemy that thinks like my Legion. It would not go well for you.'

  Ahriman recoiled at the idea of taking arms against brother legionaries. That Forrix could even consider such a thing spoke volumes as to his Legion's outlook. What manner of debates must go on in the sanctums of the Iron Warriors?

  He put aside abhorrent thoughts of war between brothers, trying not to let the disturbing logic of Forrix's words take hold in his heart. The refugees filed past and he saw the same carved-in numbness on every face.

  'A pall of defeat hangs over them,' he said.

  'Understandable,' answered Forrix. 'There are more reports of random attacks in the streets. Violence is on the increase beyond the city limits and on the transit routes.'

  'Is there no more we can do to keep these people safe?'

  'There is, but at what cost?'

  'Surely no cost is too high?'

  'You forget we are against a ticking clock, Ahzek,' pointed out Forrix. 'Too much security at the city perimeter means fewer people escape Morningstar, whereas no security gets more people to the ships quicker, but increases the risk of hostile infiltration. Lord Perturabo has calculated the optimal balance between speed of entry and the risk of allowing hostiles through the outer cordons. This is it.'