The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  ‘Always the tutor,’ said Lorgar, though Magnus saw the truth of his instruction was lost on his brother.

  He turned from Lorgar and moved onwards through the gallery, lambent fingertips trailing over the spines of his books and experiencing their contents as he went. The sublime poetry of Gallabros, the celestial mechanics of Sidereus Nuncius, the works of the great dramaturges of Albyon, histories of long-dead lands, lineages of kings and emperors. His features relaxed as knowledge filled him. He paused at the works of the great tragedian and his face fell as a portion of the Twisted Queen’s soliloquy echoed within him. Magnus whispered its words, knowing them, yet feeling them fly from his lips as though freshly written.

  ‘Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

  By prophecies, libels, and dreams,

  To set my brother and the king in deadly hate,

  The one against the other…’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Lorgar.

  ‘A quote. From a play I saw many years ago.’

  ‘You don’t sound entirely sure about that.’

  ‘No,’ said Magnus, letting his hand fall to his side. ‘I do remember. The stage was set before the Pyramid of Photep. Daylight was fading. A single lamp illuminated the stage. Coraline Aseneca played the Twisted Queen, and her performance was extraordinary.’

  The memory was a good one, a reminder of better times.

  So why did it feel like something he had learned, instead of something he had experienced?

  ‘A pity she was assigned to the Phoenician’s fleet,’ Lorgar murmured. ‘His warriors have become unkind to mortals.’

  ‘And yours have not?’ countered Magnus, shaking off the sensation.

  ‘You have changed,’ said Lorgar with a grin, ignoring Magnus’ question. ‘Your mien was always inconstant, as much a product of the viewer as the viewed, but now you seem somehow… incomplete.’

  Magnus nodded. How easy it was to forget that beneath Lorgar’s zealous fire and endless apocalyptic pronouncements, his brother had a keen eye for the hidden truth of things. But Magnus had no wish to explore his momentary lapse.

  ‘Prospero’s doom stripped me of the desire to continually reinvent myself,’ he said by way of explanation.

  ‘Some might call that perverse.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘In that you deny your true nature. That on a world of infinite possibilities, you choose to cling to a single aspect and turn from the truth of your very existence.’

  ‘Preaching again, brother?’

  ‘No. Simply reminding you of what you already know.’

  Lorgar paused to marshal the same, tired argument he had brought to the Obsidian Tower time and time again.

  ‘The Pantheon can help you,’ he said. ‘The Primordial Annihilator is all-powerful and its victory is inevitable. You of all of us must see that? I have ventured farther than any in this realm. I have seen the truth of the universe and it almost cost me my life. I know you have seen it too, brother, so why cling to this world when the one beyond has so much more to offer? You and I? We are heralds of the neverborn kings, Magnus. We are gods in waiting.’

  Magnus kept walking. He had heard this and variations thereof, on numerous occasions, but denial only served to spur the zealot to greater heights of proselytising. He paused when he realised he had left Lorgar behind. He turned to see his brother standing in a shaft of silver light, his armour shimmering wetly in the light of false stars. He held Illuminarum out before him, the sceptre-mace crafted by Ferrus Manus coruscating with power.

  ‘Horus is reborn!’ said Lorgar, as though from a pulpit. ‘He passed into the realm of the gods and they raised him up. He has ascended and you can too. I see the cracks in your soul and I know what seeps from them. Russ smote you a mighty blow, brother. He wounded you deeper than any realise, but I see it.’

  Magnus retraced his steps to stand before Lorgar, his single eye cauled with aetheric phosphorescence.

  ‘You see what they let you see,’ said Magnus, pinning Lorgar with his lucent gaze. ‘I felt Horus’ rebirth, yes. This world sang of his newfound powers and the heavens split with joy at his return from the immortal realm. But none of us will ever know what price he paid for that power, the horror of what he so lightly bargained away.’

  Magnus turned his back on Lorgar and walked towards a newly formed crystal arch, through which yet more arcs of bright shelves were visible. His brother came after him, hooking the mace across his back as they passed beneath the archway.

  He heard Lorgar’s breath catch in his throat, his senses fighting to process the scale of the colossal space in which he found himself – a vault of such immensity it was impossible to believe it was an internal space. Its uttermost walls were lost in a misty haze of distance, and the gentle curve of its domed roof was a map bright with distant galaxies.

  Lorgar sank to his knees and placed his palms flat on the mirrored floor as though afraid to let go. Magnus rested his hand on Lorgar’s back, and when he lifted it away a sinuous cord of bright silver light, like spun thread, came with it.

  ‘What do you see?’ he asked, drawing more of the silver thread from Lorgar’s form.

  ‘So many stars…’ said Lorgar, breathless at the infinite depths of the celestial vault. ‘I feel as though I might lose my grip and never stop falling.’

  ‘And I might let you fall,’ said Magnus as he pulled the silver cord tight. ‘I have not yet decided.’

  Lorgar cried out, and Magnus relished his understanding at what was being drawn from him. He was struggling to reel his soul back into his impossibly distant body, but Magnus shook his head and lifted a silver-wrapped fist.

  ‘No, brother, you do not flee my dominion until you listen, really listen, to what I have to say.’

  ‘Brother, what are you doing?’ whispered Lorgar, his eyes fixed on the ever-expanding firmament.

  Magnus walked clockwise around Lorgar, drawing ever more of the silver thread from his brother’s spirit and using it to cast a clavis argentum circle about him. No longer was he a teacher, but a master berating a failed student.

  ‘You look pale, Lorgar. No longer “the Golden One”.’

  ‘Magnus, you are making a mistake.’

  ‘No, brother, it is you who are mistaken. About everything. You make a single, blundering pilgrimage into the warp and believe you alone can grasp its infinite complexities? You glimpse the dark heart of the universe and naively name it the Primordial Annihilator, as if that could explain even a fraction of its cosmic malevolence.’

  ‘I come to you as a brother. As a friend.’

  ‘You come looking to sway me to Horus’ banner.’

  ‘Aye, that too. Was I wrong?’ snapped Lorgar. ‘The Emperor betrayed you, put His executioner’s blade to your neck and burned your world. Why do you even hesitate? You would sit at Horus’ right hand, a prince of the Pantheon.’

  Magnus laughed. ‘You offer to make me a prince? I am already a king.’

  ‘A king of what?’ cried Lorgar. ‘A world where your soul is bleeding to death, where your wealth of knowledge will turn to dust before you. The Pantheon can restore you and make you a god! It can undo the curse that blights your sons and bring your Legion back from the edge of extinction!’

  ‘You barter what is not yours to offer, so listen well, brother,’ said Magnus. ‘Your soul is here only at my sufferance, borne over unimaginable distances and bound to your flesh by the slenderest of threads. You are like a child with a new toy, wielding powers you barely understand. Did you care that you cast your bloodied soul into an ocean of predators? You are prey to creatures of such rage and hunger that even the Red Angel would tremble before their might.’

  Magnus looked up as his words summoned bleeding-edged wraiths of insatiable appetite. They pressed their inhuman essences into the gallery. Blind things with wet-meat faces a
nd fang-filled maws. The light filling the gallery fled, the lustre of once pristine marble falling to the age-wearied ruins of a dead race drowned in its own blood.

  Lorgar watched the feasters from afar descend, helpless to do anything other than listen. Magnus lifted the silver thread linking spirit and flesh, leaning down to whisper in his brother’s ear.

  ‘If I cut this, they will tear your soul apart.’

  ‘Magnus, no,’ said Lorgar. ‘Don’t.’

  ‘I will spare you, Lorgar, but you are no longer welcome on my world,’ said Magnus, looking up at the stars beyond the voracious entities and seeing a filial convergence. ‘My favoured son returns to me, and I have better things to do than waste time with the Warmaster’s envoy.’

  Magnus released his grip on the silver thread and the argentum circle unravelled at the speed of thought. Lorgar’s spirit form faded as it fled across space and time to reunite with his body, and the predatory wraiths bawled at being denied so unique a feast.

  ‘Return to Horus,’ said Magnus. ‘He may call himself a god, but I place no faith in him.’

  A storm greeted the Khemet’s return to the Planet of the Sorcerers. Ahriman crouched at the edge of a starboard embarkation deck and watched it burn the horizon around the Obsidian Tower. Emerald flames consumed thousands of the glittering manta-creatures and their ashes fell in a cascading borealis of released power, ready to be remade in some new form.

  Such was this world’s eternal cycle of death and renewal.

  ‘One life ends and gives birth to the next,’ said Ahriman.

  Magnus had taught him that extinction was not to be feared, that it was simply an opportunity for something else to exist.

  Cold comfort to a dying Legion.

  A Thunderhawk sat on launch rails behind Ahriman, raptor-prowed and with the swept wings of a prey hunter. The aircraft had not been built that way, but names had power and not even machines could resist the planet’s transformative energies.

  Lucius and Sanakht had already departed the Khemet, leaping from the embarkation deck to ride the singing manta-creatures to the surface. They made for Sanakht’s blaze-topped tower, to hone their swordplay in preparation for the day when they would try to kill one another.

  No sooner had they disappeared into the clouds than Hathor Maat entered the deck. He wore the power of this world well. Almost too well.

  It made him taller, more vibrant. More dangerous.

  A dozen servitors followed the Pavoni, bearing a pair of glass caskets between them in which lay the stasis-locked forms of Sobek and Menkaura.

  Hathor Maat joined Ahriman at the edge of the deck, his eyes inevitably drawn to the primarch’s tower.

  ‘You’re sure you want to go alone?’ asked Hathor Maat.

  He made it sound like concern for Ahriman, but it was a poor attempt to conceal a burning desire to be close to the primarch and bathe in his powerful resplendence.

  ‘I am sure,’ said Ahriman. ‘Take Sobek and Menkaura to my tower. Keep Sobek in stasis, and send for Penthu to attend upon Menkaura.’

  ‘Anything else? Do you want me to… prepare?’

  ‘No. We will begin when I return from the Crimson King.’

  Hathor Maat nodded, moving his mind into the fourth enumeration as his fingers evoked the symbol of Thothmes.

  ‘Do you believe what you said to Menkaura? Do you really think you can save Sobek?’

  Ahriman heard self-interest in the Pavoni adept’s voice, and hated that it mirrored his own. Having seen Ohrmuzd consumed by the flesh change, Ahriman dreaded the curse that lay upon them more than death.

  ‘I do not know, but I have to try.’

  ‘Even after our father forbade it?’

  Ahriman thought back to Temelucha, the warning she had given on the climb to the Iron Oculus. Was this defiance of his gene-sire’s command the first step on a road that could have but one ending?

  ‘Yes, for if I do not, who else will?’

  Hathor Maat nodded, and the relief in his aura was palpable.

  ‘Do you travel down with me?’ asked Ahriman.

  ‘No, I will make my own way to the surface,’ said Hathor Maat, reaching out and extending his will into a nearby shoal of manta-creatures drawn to the Khemet’s void flare.

  Their song changed as immaterial bones cracked and opalescent flesh was distorted like clay in the hands of a deranged sculptor. Scores of the creatures were unmade to base matter in moments, as though a spiteful god had chosen to reshape his creations in a fit of pique.

  Hathor Maat’s power alloyed the raw stuff of the clouds with the substance of the flying creatures to craft an enormous gilded palanquin of flesh and bone. Ostentatious and ridiculously flamboyant, but second nature to a Pavoni.

  ‘Do you remember what I told you on Shrike?’ said Ahriman.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘Of course I remember,’ sighed Hathor Maat. ‘Legiones Astartes first, psykers second.’

  ‘We forget that at our peril,’ said Ahriman.

  ‘You still caution restraint, Ahzek?’ said Hathor Maat.

  ‘On this world, after all that has befallen us? More than ever,’ said Ahriman. ‘Do not be blinded by this world’s seductions. Yes, its potential is all but limitless, but it can turn on you as the Wolves turned on us. You have seen what it can do to any one of us, the horrors of corrupt flesh we are forced to destroy. Is that what you want?’

  ‘No, but I have faith you will save us all, brother,’ said Hathor Maat, following the servitors and glass caskets onto his living palanquin. He nodded towards the Thunderhawk as he began his descent to the planet’s surface.

  ‘You cling to the old ways, Ahzek,’ said Hathor Maat, ‘but the old ways are gone.’

  The old ways are gone…

  Hathor Maat revelled in spite, and Ahriman was used to his tiresome petulance, but that last casual barb lodged in his soul. He climbed inside the Thunderhawk, its troop compartment bearing war trophies taken from the Torquetum.

  Few now were the days this craft would be laden with battle-brothers. The inner panels of the fuselage were knife-carved with script, an old custom of the Legion. Thousands of cantrips copied from personal grimoires by warriors en route to battle.

  The Iron Oculus stood upright in the centre of the crew compartment, secured in a web of tension wires. Nearer the prow, a dozen golden-skinned servitors and three yokai sat immobile in armoured bucket seats. The servitors stared sightlessly at the opposite bulkhead, the yokai at nothing at all. Their heads hung down over their chests, the sigils of invocatus dull and lifeless.

  Ahriman still wasn’t sure why he had brought the automata from the Torquetum. Without the animus of the warp entities they were useless, little better than armoured shells.

  Ahriman put aside his unease at the sight of the Iron Oculus and made his way to the cockpit. The craft spooled up quickly, eager to be aloft on the aetheric winds. Its nose dipped as the launch rails elevated its engines and aimed it towards the opening in the Khemet’s flank.

  Ahriman pushed out the throttle and the Thunderhawk leapt into the void, banking sharply downwards and executing a half-turn to clear projecting warp vanes and passive auspex arrays. The horizons rolled queasily, reminding him of the Torquetum’s dizzying perspectives.

  He pulled away from the Khemet, indulging himself for a moment as he matched the Thunderhawk’s flight profile to the starship’s vector.

  A Nova-class frigate ornamented in filigree of gold and ivory, the Khemet bore the distinctive flourishes of Saturnian shipwrights, raked-back dorsal architecture and a narrower cross section than other Legion vessels. Its twin blade prows were curved in the manner of khopesh swords to either side of the ray-shielded barrel of its lance weapon.

  It possessed a sleek grace few other Legion vessels could match, and boaste
d half a dozen specialised libraries of irreplaceable texts. Those libraries were now bare, emptied to fill the repositories of the Obsidian Tower, and sadness touched him at the notion of the Khemet bereft of wisdom.

  Ahriman pulled away from the frigate as it sailed for the low-atmosphere berths where the paltry fleet assets left to the Thousand Sons were anchored. He eased the stick down, guiding the Thunderhawk through the clouds and pushed his senses out into the sky.

  Who knew how the lay of the land had changed in his absence?

  The ever-shifting boundaries between the sorcerers’ towers made any descent to the surface perilous. The divisions between the Fellowships had always been sharply defined, but with Magnus withdrawing to his tower they had become fiercely territorial. With the waxing of fiery currents in the Great Ocean, the Pyrae had drawn close to the Obsidian Tower, and aggressively protected their newfound stature.

  Ahriman felt the tug of the Thunderhawk’s machine-spirit through the control column, an insistent urge to race skywards and punch the engines. The gunship could fly itself to the Crimson King, a loosed hawk returning to its master’s hand, but Ahriman kept his grip firm on the controls as the planet’s surface came into view.

  Dominating the skyline was the Obsidian Tower, but the earth and sky were dreamscapes that made any perception of distance meaningless. Upon checking the avionics panel, Ahriman would look up to see the black spire filling the canopy. At other times, a black cleft on a shimmering horizon was the only sign of it. As it always did, Magnus’ abode would allow him ingress at a time of its own choosing.

  Ahriman turned his attention to the volatile ground beneath the gunship. The plunging valleys and rocky hinterlands of the planet teemed with inhabitants, living flotsam and jetsam washed ashore by the psychic aftershocks still ravaging Prospero. Nor were refugees of his burned home world the only mortal inhabitants of the Planet of the Sorcerers.

  The presence of Magnus was a lodestone to the galaxy’s outcasts: the wretched, the betrayed, the abandoned, the lost and the damned. Every day brought fresh arrivals from places and times unknown.

  A pack of lumbering ochre giants marched over the horizon, titanic god-engines with atomic hearts who had picked the locks of their very souls and thought themselves alive. Braying war-horns echoed mournfully over the wastelands, and were answered by the beasts that walked as men.