The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  Monstrous brutes of fur and fang, the bestial creatures dwelled in a giant menhir city vomited up from the depths of the planet like the toppled ruins of the Ramesseum. Armoured in scavenged metal, they beat their breasts with clawed fists in honour of the god-machines, aping the nameless legionaries brooding in the basalt keep high above their rude city.

  No one knew who these warriors were or from whence they had come. They had marched from a storm of terrifying power in their hundreds and raised a black fortress in the lightning-rich uplands. Scrying revealed them to be legionaries, but the myriad blazons flying upon their ragged banners and battle-scarred pauldrons were unknown.

  Ahriman put the Thunderhawk into an arcing turn to port, seeing Amon’s tower drift from the fractal fog. In truth, tower was a misnomer, for the primarch’s equerry had crafted an immense clockwork pyramid, its peak crowned with crystalline vanes, arcing oculus lens arrays and intricate timepieces.

  Like Ahriman, the primarch’s equerry was Corvidae, and his frustrations at the waning of his seersight had driven him to explore ever more elaborate means of divination.

  HE WASTES HIS TIME. YOU MUST KNOW THAT.

  The Iron Oculus had remained silent on the return voyage from the Torquetum, but Ahriman sensed that was at an end.

  ‘Few things to which Amon bends his power can be counted as a waste,’ said Ahriman. Though he and Amon disagreed more and more often, he disliked the mocking tone of the captured seer.

  AMON? YOU MEAN NAHUM?

  ‘No,’ said Ahriman, already regretting naming his brother.

  Grating laughter echoed within the sarcophagus.

  THE MARQUIS OF HELL. I KNOW HIS NAME, EVEN IF YOU DO NOT.

  Ahriman said nothing as Amon’s floating pyramid passed from sight and the variegated clouds parted to reveal a vast plateau of volcanic rock. Baleful orange light seethed below its crazed surface, like a subterranean ocean of magma.

  The Obsidian Tower rose from the centre of the plateau, a slender peak, monstrous and magnificent in equal measure. Molten light slithered wetly across its substance. Ahriman pulled back on the stick, spiralling up and around his sire’s peak. No point of entry immediately revealed itself, so he circled until the awesome mind inside consented to allow him within. The tower had an unfinished quality to it, like a flint spearhead hacked from a riverbed.

  DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHY YOU BRING ME TO HIM?

  ‘Of course.’

  TELL ME.

  ‘For knowledge,’ said Ahriman.

  AND WHAT KNOWLEDGE DO YOU BELIEVE I POSSESS?

  ‘That is for the primarch to discover,’ said Ahriman. ‘The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.’

  DO YOU TRULY BELIEVE THAT?

  ‘I do.’

  THEN YOU ARE AS BLIND AS YOUR SIRE, FOR NOT ALL KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD. A BETRAYAL REVEALED CAUSES PAIN. A MORE EFFECTIVE MEANS OF TORTURE HAS NO PURPOSE BUT EVIL. THE TECHNOLOGY OF EXTERMINATION EXISTS ONLY TO MURDER. HOW CAN SUCH THINGS BE COUNTED GOOD?

  ‘Knowledge is a tool and it is power,’ said Ahriman. ‘The power to harm or to heal. Any evil resides in those who wield it for selfish purposes.’

  YOU SPEAK AS AN ARROGANT CHILD, AHZEK AHRIMAN. SOME KNOWLEDGE IS NOT GOOD, AND ONCE LEARNED CANNOT BE FORGOTTEN. REMEMBER THAT WHEN THE SECRETS I KEEP ARE REVEALED.

  ‘Whatever secrets you keep will soon belong to Magnus. He will empty you and when he has learned all there is to know, he will cast you back to the warp.’

  JUST AS HE WILL DISCARD HIS SONS, WHEN HE IS DONE WITH YOU.

  Ahriman laughed. ‘At least cloak your lies with a grain of truth, daemon. Magnus all but died to save us from the ravages of the Wolf King’s abominations, and you say he will abandon us?’

  ALL BUT DIED…? HOW GREAT YOU BELIEVE YOUR UNDERSTANDING, BUT HOW LITTLE YOU COMPREHEND.

  ‘I know my father.’

  NO SON EVER TRULY KNOWS HIS FATHER. JUST ASK HORUS.

  ‘I am done listening to you,’ said Ahriman. ‘Your kind are lies given life, spite revelling in seductive falsehoods to deceive and manipulate. The galaxy will be well rid of you.’

  THE GALAXY WILL NEVER BE RID OF ME.

  Ahriman laughed. ‘And you call me arrogant?’

  WE ARE BOUND, YOU AND I. A SOUL YOU PROMISED, AND A SOUL I SHALL CLAIM.

  Ahriman was spared from answering as he saw slabs of black basalt unfold from a gnarled outgrowth of the primarch’s tower to form a crooked stair. He brought the gunship around and killed thrust from the engines to hover by the final step.

  ‘We are here,’ he said. ‘All that you are now belongs to the Crimson King.’

  Four

  Hall of Amun Re

  One apiece

  Perturbations

  Inconstancy was the Obsidian Tower’s only true constant. Ahriman had stood within his father’s halls many times, and never had he seen the same interior twice. Stepping through a triangular split in the volcanic face of the tower’s exterior, he felt the geomantic order of the world flex.

  In the blink of an eye he was elsewhere.

  The Planet of the Sorcerers was gone.

  Now Ahriman stood in what had once been a vast processional antechamber of orange stone. The structure was a ruin, its roof and most of its walls lost to the ravages of time and wars. Splintered obelisks and enormous columns of sun-baked limestone towered on either side, their bases heaped in drifts of sand. Visible between them, undulant desert stretched to the horizon, and blazing equatorial sunlight beat down from a sky of remorseless blue.

  The structure’s few remaining walls were fashioned from titanic blocks of pale stone and carved with eroded hieroglyphics that told of kingly deeds. Ebon statues stood upon pedestals of jade and marble – jackal-headed deities and androgyne god-kings with elaborate deshret crowns.

  ‘Al-Uqṣur,’ said Ahriman, recognising the great hypostyle hall within the Precinct of Amun Re.

  Hot winds, freighted with the whispering secrets of a lost pillared city of the deep desert, gusted between the statues. Dust devils of sand scratched at his armour.

  He turned to check the golden-servitors were still with him. They bore the dead weight of the Iron Oculus upon their shoulders as though bearing a fallen warrior to his rest. Wisps of aether sighed from its welded seams and clung to the metal in a glimmering haze.

  Ahriman turned and marched along the hall. The dust devils followed him, whispering of the great secrets they knew. He ignored their babble, for such knowledge was fool’s gold.

  The servitors followed his steps, and the harsh sunlight gave their skin an otherworldly sheen. Ahriman removed his helm and took a breath of hot air. It tasted of spices, exotic meats, burned bread and rich waters from a fertile delta.

  He saw many doors as he pressed onwards, some of banded timber, others of anachronistic silver-steel. They swung open at his approach and a voice issued from each one, a sound calculated to pierce the very heart of him.

  The voice of Magnus the Red.

  At first, each incarnation of the primarch’s words invited him to enter with honeyed blandishments, but quickly resorted to strident demands. Yet more begged him to enter, offering profane wonders and alchymical formulae, but like the dust devils, what they promised was worthless. Still more berated him for ignoring them, demanding he obey his sire’s command.

  Some simply wept.

  Ahriman knew this was not truly Magnus, not really. Echoes of the primarch’s vast presence within the tower or perhaps simple aether ghosts skilled in mimicry. Though he paid their entreaties no heed, he could not help but glance through each door as it opened.

  Beyond one churned a howling maelstrom of doomed stars, and Ahriman felt the terror of every soul as their far-distant galaxy perished. Another door opened onto a crumbling library, scorched black by an invader’s torches. Cindered books fell from splin
tered shelves, gold leaf and cured hide falling to ash as he watched.

  Another was an empty library where blank pages billowed like a snowstorm. Words screamed as ink bled from the pages like smoke. A final room resembled the primarch’s chambers within the Pyramid of Photep, its bloodied floor covered in shards of broken glass, each reflecting an unblinking eye.

  The last doors before he reached the hypostyle’s terminus were lightless adamantium, sealed with chained locks of cold iron and warded with sigils cut from a living copy of Arbatel de Magia Veterum.

  Things monstrous and insane slammed against these doors, but what was imprisoned within, Ahriman could not tell.

  For once, a mystery he was happy to leave unknown.

  Flanking the entrance to the Hall of Amun Re stood two identical statues of jet depicting a god with a crocodilian skull. Creeping verdigris stained the bronze of their armour and black dust poured from cracks in the carved stone. A tremor of unease worked its way down Ahriman’s spine at their pertinence.

  He raised his heqa staff as he felt gathering power and a warrior stepped from the shadows between the twinned idols.

  ‘Brother Ahzek,’ said the figure.

  ‘Amon,’ said Ahriman, recognising his fellow Corvidae by the apotropaic flare of his aura. Clad in crimson war-plate, Amon stood ramrod straight and held a silver staff topped with a serpentine sun out before him, as though to bar Ahriman entry.

  With patrician features that had endured even the rigours of the legionary’s transformation, Amon was hawk-nosed with oil-dark eyes and close-cropped hair of slate-grey. The very image of a regal praetor or consul.

  Amon had been – and remained – the primarch’s equerry, though Ahriman’s former role as Chief Librarian was commonly held to be senior. Whether such distinctions of rank still carried any weight was something neither had yet fully tested.

  ‘I bring a trophy for the primarch,’ said Ahriman when Amon did not move to allow him entry to the Hall of Amun Re.

  ‘So I see,’ said Amon with a nod, passing him to examine the tomb of the Iron Oculus. He rapped his staff against the metal, and the echoes lingered too loud and too long.

  ‘What is it? Another aether-bloated corpse? More books?’

  ‘A seer,’ said Ahriman. ‘Don’t you already know?’

  Amon turned and fixed him with his gaze, so like that of a deep-water predator.

  ‘Your eyes,’ said Ahriman.

  ‘My eyes? What about them?’

  ‘Have they always been that dark? I cannot remember.’

  ‘They are as they have always been.’

  ‘No,’ said Ahriman, closing the gap between them. ‘Once they saw further than any in the Corvidae. Once they unweaved skeins of fate and fortune even I could not. How galling it must be to have the Pyrae in ascendance, to have your seersight hobbled like a mud-blind mortal.’

  ‘You are as blind as I,’ snapped Amon.

  Ahriman smiled and stepped back. ‘Not so, brother. I see a great deal. Like how you cling to the primarch’s coat-tails like an errant son, how you fear to leave his side.’

  ‘It is not fear,’ said Amon. ‘The primarch needs me.’

  ‘Then tell me, brother,’ said Ahriman, ‘why have you not travelled the Great Ocean in your subtle body since we came here? Is it because you are afraid of what you might see?’

  Now it was Amon’s turn to smile.

  ‘How great you believe your understanding, Ahzek,’ he said. ‘But how little you comprehend. So blinded by conceit that you do not see what is right in front of you.’

  Ahriman flinched at the echo of recently heard words as Amon stood aside.

  ‘Enter,’ said Amon. ‘The primarch awaits your return.’

  Without its roof, the Hall of Amun Re was now more of an open plaza than the grand reading room it had once been. Spread at random across its red marble floor, now bleached pink by the eternal sun, were hundreds of wide tables stacked with parchment. A hooded scribe sat at each table, feverishly scratching line after line of text.

  None looked up as Ahriman and Amon entered.

  At the centre of the reading room was a majestic figure englobed by a thousand floating books, their pages completely blank but filling more swiftly than any mortal could possibly be writing.

  But Magnus the Red was no mortal wordsmith.

  Clad in flowing robes of palest blue and gold, the Crimson King was simultaneously bathed in sunlight and radiating illumination.

  His hair bound by a bronze circlet, Magnus’ outflung arms looped and spun like a conductor’s in the midst of a grand concerto. As each book was filled, it slammed shut and vanished before another appeared in its stead.

  ‘My lord,’ said Ahriman.

  Magnus looked up and the scratching of quills ceased instantly. The floating sphere of books exploded outwards in a flare of magnesium light, and Ahriman felt a pang of loss at their sudden absence.

  ‘Ahzek, my son,’ said Magnus. ‘You return to us successful.’

  Ahriman nodded and struggled to find his voice as Amon took position at the primarch’s side. After time in the material universe, to stand in Magnus’ presence was intoxicating.

  ‘We were,’ he said at last, beckoning the servitors forwards. They lowered the Iron Oculus to the flagstones and stood the irregular sarcophagus upright. Black droplets ran in rivulets down the metal, but the power within was cowed to silence before the awesome might of the Crimson King.

  Magnus approached the prize wrested from the Tartaruchi.

  ‘This is the Iron Oculus?’ he said, circling the sarcophagus and examining it as a lanista might once have examined a gladiator’s physique. ‘As spoken of in Schøyen’s Arcana?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Magnus grinned. ‘It is not as impressive as Schøyen led us to believe, is it?’

  ‘No,’ agreed Ahriman. ‘But its power is great.’

  Magnus looked up, intrigued.

  ‘And you know this how?’

  ‘The Torquetum’s inhabitants resisted our taking of their seer,’ said Ahriman. ‘They fought with aether powers, and would have killed us but for Sobek evoking the Voydes of Drekhye.’

  ‘A complex rapture for a mere Practicus,’ said Amon.

  ‘The tides of the Great Ocean waxed strong within the Torquetum,’ said Ahriman, addressing his answer to Magnus. ‘It was… seductive.’

  ‘How does Sobek’s conjuration equate to your knowledge of the Iron Oculus and its power?’ asked Magnus.

  ‘Sobek lost control of his invocatus and the voydes turned on him, my lord,’ said Ahriman. ‘The daemon within the sarcophagus augmented my casting of the Sign of Amaterasu to cast them back to the Great Ocean.’

  ‘A daemon helped you?’ said Amon. ‘Why?’

  ‘I do not know,’ said Ahriman, the lie falling lightly from his lips. He was reluctant to say more lest his tongue betray him and reveal the bargain he had struck.

  ‘Intriguing,’ said Magnus, leaning in to place his cheek against the sarcophagus. ‘And unexpected.’

  He closed his eye and a slow smile spread across his features as his hands caressed the beaten metal. Ahriman felt the daemon inside recoil, a whipped cur recognising the hand of a new and powerful master.

  ‘Aforgomon?’ whispered Magnus with a wry chuckle. ‘Very well, that will suffice for now.’

  Magnus stepped back from the Iron Oculus and returned his attention to Ahriman.

  ‘Voydes are fiends without mercy,’ said Magnus. ‘Does Sobek yet live?’

  ‘He does, my lord, but he and Menkaura were gravely injured during the fighting.’

  ‘Where are they now?’

  Ahriman hesitated before answering.

  ‘Hathor Maat bears them both to my tower.’

  Magnus cocked his head to one side, and Ahriman fel
t him cast his mind over the world like a net. Where before all his intellect had been directed inwards, now it raced across the surface of the Planet of the Sorcerers.

  ‘The flesh change came upon Sobek,’ said Magnus, his skin darkening and his scholarly robes transforming into crimson armour edged in ivory and silver. A horned breastplate carved with writhing serpents encircling an unwavering flame girdled his torso, hung with a kilt of boiled leather strips. A golden khopesh hung at his hip on a hand-tooled belt, alongside a chained grimoire of ancient magicks.

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ said Ahriman, forcing himself to look away from the Book of Magnus.

  ‘And what do you intend for poor Sobek?’

  To lie would be impossible, so Ahriman spoke the truth.

  ‘I will try to save him.’

  Magnus sighed, disappointed. ‘You remember my command to you, Ahzek?’ he said. ‘The words I spoke to you atop this very tower? The warning of my great displeasure should you go against me in this matter?’

  Ahriman felt his gene-sire’s power swell, looming over him as a heel might over an insect. It had been childishly naive to think he could keep Sobek’s fate hidden.

  ‘I remember, my lord.’

  ‘Not well enough, it seems,’ said Amon.

  Magnus placed a paternal hand on Ahriman’s shoulder, guiding him towards the rows of tables and silent scribes. Amon followed five steps behind.

  ‘My son,’ he said, ‘you rail against my ruling, believing I am wrong and thinking you can save Sobek. You think you can save all those who fall, but you cannot. You would damn them more grievously than they are already cursed.’

  ‘I cannot just give up on my brothers,’ said Ahriman.

  ‘Trust me, Ahzek, a bullet in the head will be a mercy to Sobek. Long ago, I all but destroyed myself seeking to repair the flaw in our making, but every cure was worse than the disease. Even what I believed to be salvation was but a doom an eternity in the making.’