The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

The blood was barely dry on Ahriman’s lips, made bitter by his unlooked-for bargain, yet rich with promise. At the instant of the sworn pledge, the oracular cavern vanished as though it had never existed.

  In a very real sense, it had not.

  Ahriman experienced a sense of falling, a rush of motion.

  He had a momentary glimpse of shattered display cabinets and a host of crowing darkness surrounding his fellow legionaries.

  They fought alone. Losing. Dying.

  The floor rushed up to meet him, though Ahriman understood he was not falling in any literal sense of the word. He felt the Iron Oculus, its looming presence like a leaden weight dragging a drowning man to his doom.

  They arrived with force enough to crater the floor. Ahriman knelt, slamming his ebon staff down with a psychic shock wave that scattered the darkness like wind-blown chaff.

  The floor ruptured, heaving into the air with wracking seismic violence. Giant slabs split like frosted glass and streamers of star-bright aetheric energy geysered in iridescent clouds.

  The Iron Oculus squatted at the centre of the crater like the blasphemous idol of a long-dead and unlamented empire. Sealed within that ghastly prison, the thing that called itself Aforgomon waited upon his word.

  Ahriman nodded, sealing their compact.

  ‘Do it,’ he said.

  A howling gale filled the chamber like booming laughter. It drew the seething clouds of aether to the canted form of the Iron Oculus, as though it took a vast and unending breath. Even as the voydes gathered their strength for another assault, the dread oracle of the Torquetum released that breath.

  It exploded outwards in a crackling ring of too-bright light, a halo of divine retribution. This was a light no shadow could evade and it burned the voydes to shrieking ash in the blink of an eye.

  Miniature dust devils of tarry ash fought to hold on to this reality, but their time here was over. The swordsman Lucius stood in the midst of the last, faded remnants of the creatures. They dissipated as the grinning killer watched with repugnant self-satisfaction, as though he had defeated the creatures single-handedly.

  Ahriman exhaled the tension from his lungs and rose to his feet. He closed his eyes and pushed his perceptions outwards, questing for the lives of his warriors.

  Every one of them was here, alive.

  Tolbek, Hathor Maat, Menkaura, Sanakht. Sobek…

  Ahriman’s eyes snapped open. ‘Flesh change!’ he shouted.

  He ran to Sobek. The rush of seersight misted Ahriman’s eyes with throbbing pain. His Practicus stood unmoving, resplendent in crimson and silver, as magnificent as the sculptures that once graced the pyramids of Tizca.

  Stuttering across that image was a grating aether-spectre, a future echo of Sobek’s fate. It thrashed in the midst of a hideous transformation. Ghostly battleplate burst open like shattered eggshell and cancerous flesh erupted in a riot of uncontrolled mutation and malignant growths.

  ‘Hathor Maat!’ he shouted. ‘To me!’

  Ahriman’s senses reached out, feeling the dreadful ambition of Sobek’s flesh. The Emperor’s miracle unravelling, the sword hanging over every warrior of the Thousand Sons.

  ‘Help. Me,’ said Sobek through gritted teeth, his locked expression one of abject horror. Only once before had Ahriman seen such naked fear in the face of a Legion brother. Knowing your own body was rebelling, seeking to throw off its perfect form and assume some new and horrific aspect, was surely a terror unlike any other.

  ‘What happened?’ he demanded as Hathor Maat pushed past him to place a palm on the back of Sobek’s shaven skull. ‘What did this to him?’

  ‘The damn fool did it to himself,’ said Hathor Maat. A nimbus of light gathered behind the Pavoni adept’s eyes as he sought to quell the gathering horde of mutations.

  ‘He saved us,’ said Sanakht, appearing behind Ahriman.

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘The Voydes of Drekhye,’ said Sanakht. ‘Sobek called them from the abyss to slay the Tartaruchi.’

  ‘And then they turned on us,’ grunted Hathor Maat, his breath like glacial mist.

  Ahriman shook his head. ‘The Sign of Amaterasu?’

  ‘We had no notion what he was conjuring until it was too late,’ said Sanakht.

  ‘He broke the mandala on his own,’ said Hathor Maat.

  A frosted caul bloomed in Sobek’s eyes, his skin losing its mottled hue as Hathor Maat’s powers spread through him, shock-freezing his flesh.

  ‘Will that stop it?’ asked Sanakht.

  Hathor Maat let his ice-rimed hand fall from Sobek’s frozen solidity. His eyes were too blue, too webbed with frost.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘This is a delaying tactic at best. It will not stop the oncoming flesh change, but will slow it.’

  ‘Perhaps enough to return our brother to the Planet of the Sorcerers,’ said Ahriman.

  ‘Perhaps not,’ said Hathor Maat, turning on Ahriman. ‘For all your cunning, and after all your researches and theories, you are no nearer to ending the curse.’

  The curse.

  The secret never spoken aloud for fear of awakening the traitor within their own flesh. Like so many other terrible flaws hidden deep within the Legions, flaws none dared admit.

  The phantoms haunting the skeletal pyramids rusting beneath the nine suns gibbered of such things, but only the maddened beast packs listened to their whispers.

  ‘I can save you,’ Ahriman promised Sobek. ‘I will save you.’

  Lucius circled behind Sobek, captivated by what Hathor Maat had done. His voyeuristic fascination revolted Ahriman.

  ‘How?’

  Ahriman turned. Menkaura’s question was simple, yet Ahriman had no easy answer for him. The seer’s body was bitterly wounded, an arm hooked across Tolbek’s shoulder guard all that was keeping him upright.

  ‘You know how,’ said Ahriman.

  Menkaura shook his head. ‘No, the Crimson King forbade it.’

  ‘So I am to just let him die?’ said Ahriman, turning to face each of his brothers in turn. ‘What if this happens to you, Sanakht? Or you, Hathor Maat? Should I let you all die? Any of you? And you, Menkaura? Your aura is fading. Your life hangs by a thread. Imagine I were an Apothecary, but the Crimson King forbade me from using my skills to save you.’

  ‘It is not the same,’ said Menkaura. ‘You risk–’

  ‘It is exactly the same,’ snapped Ahriman. ‘I would hold the means to save your life, but misplaced faith and a stricture that makes no sense would condemn you to an agonising death. Have you forgotten Phosis T’Kar? Have you? You remember the monster he became? Or Hegazha? Or Khaphed? Hastar?’

  ‘I remember them all,’ said Menkaura through a mouthful of blood. ‘I also remember Astennu. I remember how your arrogance saw him perish in fiery agony.’

  ‘Yes, he died,’ said Ahriman. ‘But at least I tried. If the change takes you, would you be willing to die rather than have me try to save you?’

  ‘When the change comes for me, you must kill me as Russ killed Hastar – swiftly and without mercy.’

  Meaning was veiled in Menkaura’s words – it always was – but had his brother’s seersight glimpsed a measure of his fate? A destiny where death was preferable to life?

  ‘Enough,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘I cannot hold Sobek’s flesh forever. We have to get him to the Khemet and take him home.’

  Ahriman rounded on Hathor Maat.

  ‘The World of the Nine Suns is not our home.’

  Three

  Unnameable

  Brothers

  Aforgomon

  The planet was stubborn.

  Thus far, it had resisted every attempt to graft a name upon it. Some called it the World of the Nine Suns, but the lambent stars circling overhead defied that title by capriciously dividing or vanishing. Others gave it names from dead
languages, but these were swiftly forgotten.

  A few sought to match the protean character of the world to ancient gods from myth and legend as the stargazers of old had once done. No sooner had they settled on a name than whatever planetary aspect they sought to echo swiftly changed, rendering their choice meaningless.

  In the end there was only one possible way to know it.

  Lucius had mocked its brazen literalness, but even he had to concede its apposite nature.

  The Planet of the Sorcerers.

  A titanic pyramid of bronzed clockwork drifted in a tempest of iridescent clouds. A gilded cathedral afloat in an ocean of colours that had never existed and would never be seen again.

  The pyramid’s grinding, ratcheting faces coruscated with traceries of aether lightning, and spectral warp fiends gorged on the psy-vortices of its wake.

  Thousands-strong shoals of razor-winged creatures flocked to the pyramid, drawn by the reflected light of distant stars. Like bejewelled manta rays, they swooped over its sides and basked in its radiant energies with songs of haunting beauty.

  Amon watched them from a projecting balcony, finding mystical significance in the spiralling patterns they made. Sentient zephyrs blew into his alchemical workshop, chattering and yammering as they explored its secret spaces. The winds tasted caustic, of the prelude to a storm and its aftermath.

  ‘Everything of this world is contradictory,’ said Amon, peering into the clouds. ‘Its soul is inchoate.’

  The sky offered no reply, but the grey-skinned golems behind Amon wept as the spiteful winds passed through their flesh to fleetingly unlock walled-away memories.

  ‘It is birthed anew in every breath,’ he said, turning over hands stained arterial-red, the soul sighing into the warp like smoke. ‘Perhaps that is the problem.’

  Another divination failed.

  Another window into the future shattered.

  Every astrological clock, every aether-infused flect, every diseased liver, every burned heart, every unpeeled eye was bereft of meaning. The Corvidae were blinded – their power at its lowest ebb while the witless Pyrae gloried in the primarch’s light.

  Amon’s painstakingly calculated celestial charts were worse than useless, the motion of the heavens speaking in riddles he could not decipher.

  At terrible cost, he had collected sand from the daemon-haunted wastelands of Tizca to craft the finest scrying lenses. No sooner had he aimed them at Terra than the glass shattered, leaving him all but blind in one eye. A lesser scholar might have counted that a favourable omen, but Amon sought nothing less than the truth.

  His every effort had been for nothing. The stars were occluded by a radiance to the east, a newborn god in mortal form. Or so the patterns in the fire claimed, but any fool knew flames were not to be trusted.

  Amon lifted his mind into the third enumeration, seeking clarity he knew he would never find. Not now. Not here.

  Not alone.

  He sought answers the Legion needed to survive. Answers his sire could find in a heartbeat, but chose not to. Ahriman railed against that refusal to act, but even after Prospero, Amon trusted Magnus to know better than any of them.

  Even Ahzek Ahriman.

  Especially Ahzek Ahriman.

  Magnus spoke of the Chief Librarian’s success beyond the edges of reality. Amon took no solace in Ahriman’s imminent return, needing no augurs to see that the differing paths they trod could only lead to bloodshed.

  A pack of glittering manta-creatures swooped over the balcony, their pallid underbellies alive with wet blisters that rolled over into myriad eyes or burst as gibbering mouths. Their song teased at Amon’s senses, as though great and terrible secrets could be learned if only he knew how to listen.

  Far below the equerry’s airborne pyramid, the broken landscape of the planet spread to its infinite horizons. No two vistas were the same and, as far as he knew, none were ever repeated. Amon’s great instruments of farseeing had catalogued restless oceans of diamond breaking in dazzling rainbows against vast islands of fossilised gods, twisting labyrinths plunging vertiginously through the planet’s heart and waterfalls of screaming faces that cascaded into the sky.

  With a thought, he directed his pyramid lower, breaking through the clouds and revealing the lunatic geography of the world to which Magnus had brought them.

  Skies of striated aether storms, inverted lightning and a world in eternal flux. Where every breath was rich with potential, every exhalation an act of power. Black mountains, iron deserts, rivers of metal and gibbering forests where the shadows told tales of ancient gods to the stones.

  Here and there were fluted towers of silver and gold, crystal and stone, steel and glass puncturing the landscape, cyclopean spires raised by psychic might and will. Never in the same place twice and never quite the same as they were remembered.

  Some delved the planet’s bedrock as deep as they pierced the heavens. Others drifted on waves of light and yet more were impossible constructions that could only exist where the dominion of natural laws meant less than nothing.

  These were the sorcerous towers of his brothers, all that remained of the once proud XV Legion in the wake of the Wolf King’s assault.

  No, not quite all…

  The remains of Tizca glittered beneath ashen clouds in a wasteland of nightmares given life and the flesh-changed monsters who escaped the cleansing flames of Pavoni zealots. The pyramids of the Five Fellowships were rusted skeletons of corroded steel and shattered glass. Forks of baleful lightning danced through the gutted structures, shimmering on the billions of mirror fragments scattered among the ruins.

  Familiar anger burned hot in Amon’s heart.

  ‘You will pay for what you did to us,’ he said as he saw the one constant of this world.

  A windowless tower of obsidian, taller than any in the galaxy. Stark and brutal against the tortured sky, empyreal tides slicked its surface with invisible light.

  The Tower of the Cyclops.

  Lair of Magnus the Red.

  ‘Library’ was too small a word for the Gallery of Pergamum.

  Illuminated walls stretched far and wide, beyond anything conventional geometry could allow. Gold-and-silver shelves brimmed with grimoires, crystalline wafers, wood-print blocks, scrimshawed bone and cord-tied parchments.

  The light of the planet’s myriad suns pooled in its polished galleries like mercury, glittering from heroic statues of goddesses bearing copper scrolls and iridescent quills.

  Had there ever existed a mortal heaven, this would have been its library. And walking its gilded halls were two numinous giants that might have brought such a thing into being.

  They conversed as old friends might upon a chance encounter, but nothing of this meeting owed a debt to chance. Veiled in corposant, neither was truly flesh and blood. Their bodies were light and mist, fire made flesh. Their spirits given form by sheer will and shared desire.

  Magnus the Red had cast off his corporeal shell on Prospero, and was now, by any credible definition, a self-created god. Veiled in imagined robes of palest blue, he yet retained his ruddy complexion, scarlet hair and cyclopean countenance.

  But in every other aspect, he was renewed.

  Magnus the warrior was gone; only the scholar remained.

  In contrast, Lorgar Aurelian was a king of battle, armoured in crimson and scriptural gold made vivid by the light of many suns. He bore a long-hafted mace with a flanged head that had tasted the blood of his brothers and hungered for more. His bearing was martial, but the delight in his eyes at the vast scale of knowledge surrounding him was entirely genuine.

  ‘Hard to believe you saved so much…’ he said.

  ‘This?’ said Magnus, with regret that would consume him if he let it. ‘The Gallery of Pergamum houses around sixty million remembered volumes, and it represents a fraction of just one Tizcan library
. The accumulated wisdom we lost to the Wolves was many orders of magnitude greater than this.’

  ‘But you have others? Other libraries, I mean.’

  ‘I hope we will.’

  ‘You hope you will?’

  ‘I have learned a great deal of this world, but I have yet to fathom all its secrets,’ said Magnus.

  Lorgar halted, shocked at his brother’s words. ‘I don’t think I have ever heard you say that.’

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘That there is something you don’t know.’

  Magnus smiled ruefully and continued walking. ‘Times have changed, brother. I have changed.’

  Lorgar followed him, and Magnus felt his brother’s careful scrutiny. The primarch of the Word Bearers had changed too, though Magnus doubted he truly understood quite how much. The self-righteous fanatic that Magnus had spoken with on the Fidelitas Lex was still there, but he had been tempered by loss and made mighty by victory.

  His brother paused to pluck a book from a golden shelf.

  ‘The Amber Regent. I don’t know this one.’

  ‘Careful, brother,’ said Magnus. ‘It is a cursed tale within a tale. Legend tells it will drive a man to madness simply by reading its opening line.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Who can say? I have never tried to read it.’

  ‘Then why save it?’ replied Lorgar.

  ‘Because I could, and because I must,’ replied Magnus, his voice assuming the reflective tones of a teacher. ‘Knowledge is a continuum, brother, and it is my duty to ensure that continuum remains unbroken for those who come after me.’

  ‘A grand vision, but why bother with a book that cannot be read?’ said Lorgar, placing it back on the shelf.

  Magnus sighed regretfully. ‘I fear the Covenant ruined the joy of knowledge for you. Books have always been fearful things to priesthoods, things to be policed and secured from the populace – dangerous with radical new ideas and innumerable possibilities. I see things differently. I see books as repositories of knowledge to be savoured in and of themselves. Possession of a book is its own reward, and a worthy tale confers its own merit upon the reader.’