The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  ‘You were deceived, my son,’ said Magnus the Red.

  And suddenly he was there, the Crimson King in all his wisdom, resplendent in golden robes and feathered cloak. Red of skin and keen of eye, Magnus was clad as he had been in the moments before Prospero’s razing.

  Ahriman knew he should kneel, should prostrate himself on the floor and beg for mercy. Instead, he remained standing. What use was humility in the face of his primarch’s wrath? Success would have vindicated his actions, but failure had damned him as surely as it had Sobek.

  ‘My lord,’ he said.

  ‘Ahzek,’ said Magnus. ‘You disobeyed me.’

  ‘My lord, we were so close, we almost–’

  ‘Silence!’ roared Magnus, and the walls of the tower were torn away with the force of his fury. Storm clouds filled the sky to the horizon, the primarch’s rage made manifest in the heavens. ‘I should strike you down where you stand for this betrayal.’

  ‘If it is betrayal to try to save my brothers’ lives when you leave them to die, then yes, name me traitor,’ said Ahriman, made bold by having nothing left to lose. ‘Do with me as you will.’

  He felt the limitless power of Magnus surround him, power that could crush him from existence in the blink of an eye.

  ‘You will pay for Sobek’s life another time, Ahzek,’ warned Magnus, ‘but for now, Amon requires this cabal of yours.’

  Ahriman let out a breath as he understood he was not to die at his father’s hands this day. He felt the killing power of the Great Ocean bleed away and nodded.

  ‘By your command,’ he said. ‘We go to the Obsidian Tower.’

  ‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘Amon is not there.’

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘Go to the ruins of Tizca,’ said Magnus. ‘To the last moments of Prospero’s doom.’

  The Thunderhawk touched down in a graveyard of black ash.

  Its skids kicked up powdered bone and woke the whisperers that slumbered beneath the arching spires of Tizca’s rusted pyramids. Blue-hot engines grumbled and strained in their housings, keen to bear the gunship aloft.

  The Thunderhawk had no wish to be here.

  Nor did Ahriman, but what choice did he have?

  His inability to halt Sobek’s flesh change weighed heavily upon him – less for the death of his Practicus, more that he had failed when the curse appeared to have been removed.

  What had he done wrong? What could he have done differently?

  No answers presented themselves, no matter how many times he relived the grim spectacle of Sobek reduced to inert dust. He had followed every clue within the Book of Magnus, applied every iota of what he had learned from the mutant bodies of those fallen prey to the curse.

  There had to be something he had forgotten, some crucial factor he was overlooking. A tiny error introduced to his fundamental understanding that grossly affected the final outcome.

  Whatever it was, it would have to wait.

  The assault ramp lowered reluctantly, and hot, gritty winds blew inside. Ahriman tasted the lightning duelling in the gloaming twilight, the smell of burned metal and the dry taste of human ashes.

  His chest tightened at the sight of ruined Tizca.

  The rusted pyramids of the Fellowships lay like corpses in a storm-wracked wasteland of black dust, forlorn ruins haunted by the memory of their doom. Transposed from Tizca, their orientation and proximity to one another had changed. Each had once occupied its own district, but here they gathered close, as if to lie side by side in death.

  Towering over them all was the Pyramid of Photep.

  Even in ruins it was magnificent.

  Two kilometres in height, its bare steel structure was twisted and buckled by the violence of its transition from Prospero. Remarkably, a profusion of glass remained intact, glittering blades fused to the frame that reflected sick shimmers of trapped light.

  Other buildings had come with the pyramids, but the ash buried them beneath moaning cinders, all of them obscured but for weathered stumps of jutting marble.

  Ahriman pictured Tizca as it had been, his mind’s eye conjuring a sunlit metropolis of polished stone and glass, a city of enlightenment and prosperity. Home to tens of thousands of educated, healthy and contented people. He recalled the food markets filling Occullum Square and the smells of roasted meats, produce fresh from the mountainsides, honeyed teas and a smorgasbord of hand-picked spices from Prospero’s equatorial belt.

  A flash flood of memories returned to him.

  Sharing fresh-baked pastries with Lemuel at Voisanne’s on the Street of a Thousand Lions.

  Browsing the dusty shelves of an antiquarian bookseller on Zanoni Mews, each title a gateway to new understanding, each page offering the experience of a different universe.

  Evening sunlight glinting from the ocean as he meditated in the great park of Fiorento.

  Developing the latent powers of Tizca’s citizenry, offering insights and developing mutual trust. Elevating others to see beyond their mundane senses.

  All gone. Laid to waste by Fenrisian executioners.

  ‘It appears we are not the only ones summoned,’ said Menkaura, marching down the gunship’s assault ramp to stand at his side.

  The vision of lost Tizca faded, and Ahriman pushed aside the grief threatening to overwhelm him. He nodded and scanned the windswept ground between the pyramids, now seeing a host of Thunderhawks and Stormbirds scattered throughout the ruins.

  ‘A veritable conclave,’ said Ahriman. ‘Do you know why we are here?’

  ‘I do not,’ said Menkaura with just enough of a pause to make Ahriman wary. ‘But no good can come of returning to Tizca. Our Legion died here, but rather than leave the grief behind, we bear it like a millstone around our necks.’

  The seer’s armour gleamed like new and the wound dealt to him on the Torquetum had healed, but Ahriman sensed great melancholy upon him, a resignation to a fate he dearly wished to avoid.

  ‘Then why are we here?’ asked Tolbek, fitting his helmet down onto his gorget. Hathor Maat and Sanakht came with him, the former’s aura bitter at their shared failure.

  ‘The Crimson King commands and we obey,’ replied Sanakht. ‘What other reason do we need?’

  ‘Spoken like a true believer,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘Do you ever tire of such slavish devotion?’

  ‘Do you ever tire of your childishness?’

  ‘What happened to your scarred fencing master?’ said Hathor Maat. ‘Have you learned all you can from him?’

  ‘Lucius is not my master,’ snapped Sanakht. ‘But perhaps I will tell him that you impugned his skill and watch as he cuts you to pieces.’

  ‘He could try,’ answered Hathor Maat.

  ‘Cease your bickering,’ warned Menkaura. ‘The spirits haunting these ruins feed on discord.’

  ‘Where do we go?’ asked Tolbek.

  ‘There,’ said Ahriman as a beacon of aether fire blazed in the gloom at the foot of the Pyramid of Photep. With great reluctance, he stepped from the Thunderhawk’s ramp, knowing he trod on the bones of dead brothers. The others followed him into the clouds of dark ash whipping around the pyramids.

  Voices chattered on the wind, scratching at the edge of hearing – muttered curses, echoing cries, valedictions and sobbing laments.

  Glass crunched underfoot, and scattered in the dust were reminders of that terrible day: broken shards of armour, dust-clogged weaponry, bent khopesh blades and wolf-paw talismans. Spiteful winds exposed cracked skulls from the dust. Balefire smouldered in empty eye sockets and mocking voices made sport in sagging jaws.

  Ahriman kept his gaze fixed straight ahead, trudging through the knee-deep ash and billowing clouds towards the shimmering beacon. The ground trembled as towering shapes moved somewhere in the darkness with booming hammer-blow strides.

  ‘The god-engines a
re on the march,’ said Tolbek.

  ‘Preferably away from us,’ answered Ahriman.

  ‘On our left,’ said Sanakht.

  Tolbek’s fists glittered with fire. ‘And the right.’

  Ahriman’s grip tightened on his heqa staff as he saw the dust-hazed outlines of Legion warriors in their hundreds. The clouds of ash obscured them, but there was no mistaking the suspicion in their auras.

  Then the ash lifted and removed all doubt.

  Their fellow Thousand Sons came not in ordered ranks, but in sullen warbands of many sizes. They marched beneath unknown totems and sigil banners never seen on Prospero.

  They marched towards a broken arch that once led within the Pyramid of Photep, beneath which Amon floated five metres above the cracked marble. The primarch’s equerry was wreathed in fire, his body the beacon that had drawn this warrior host.

  Nine Terminators of the Scarab Occult stood below him, the right lenses of their helms bisected with a vertical scar in honour of Magnus. Each bore a fire-bladed polearm and an opened book from which they recited complex evocatus of their own devising. Once, these warriors had been Ahriman’s to command, but now they answered only to the primarch.

  ‘How long since the Legion ever gathered in such numbers?’ asked Hathor Maat.

  ‘Not since Prospero,’ said Ahriman, letting his perceptions range further afield as he tasted something other nearby, something hostile.

  ‘This does not feel like a gathering of brothers,’ said Tolbek, the fire wreathing his gauntlets burning hotter.

  ‘Perceptive,’ said Menkaura.

  ‘Try not to sound too surprised.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Ahriman. ‘This feels more like warring kings gathered under a banner of parley with their swords half drawn.’

  The assembled Thousand Sons, three hundred at least, formed an arcing line before the broken arch, and the clash of belligerent auras set Ahriman’s teeth on edge. The wind’s moaning dropped as Amon raised his hands above his head.

  ‘Brothers,’ he said, his noble voice easily carrying over the muttering carried by the dust. ‘It gladdens my heart to see so many of you heed this call. Know that only grave tidings would compel our gene-sire to summon you back to this terrible charnel house.’

  Ahriman felt Amon’s meaningless platitudes wash over him as something else tugged at his perceptions.

  Something familiar and yet wholly alien.

  ‘Where is Magnus?’ shouted a warlord from the host and Ahriman looked away from Amon. The speaker was clad in intricately etched Terminator armour and stood at the head of a warband whose placement within the arcing line offered the most auspicious positioning should events turn hostile. Not only that, but the geometric arrangement of each of his warriors would considerably augment their aether powers.

  Ignis, the self-anointed Master of Ruin.

  ‘Well?’ said Ignis, when Amon did not respond.

  ‘The Crimson King works tirelessly to save all that was lost when the Fenrisian savages put our great libraries to the torch,’ said Amon. ‘As he has done during every moment since we came to this cursed world.’

  ‘The summons came from the primarch,’ said a warrior named Memunim, his aura blunt and pugnacious. Though he bore the title of Seal Keeper of the Fifth House of Prospero, Ahriman knew him by his bellicose reputation only. ‘He should suffer this place as we do.’

  Amon’s fire blazed brighter and Ahriman saw the equerry restrain his anger only with the greatest effort. The Scarab Occult lowered their blades, following the equerry’s lead.

  ‘Your master suffers like you cannot imagine, Memunim,’ said Amon. ‘Do you think he escaped Prospero unscathed? He did not. Leman Russ broke him. The Wolf King shattered his soul into splintered shards and every one of them is dying.’

  A shock wave of horror passed through the Thousand Sons, as they read truth in Amon’s aura. Ahriman felt the ashes of Tizca respond, a tremor in the rock like the distant echo of a coming storm.

  Amon ignored the many questions shouted up to him. Glowing cinders spun through the air, spiralling through the spars of ruined pyramids.

  ‘The Crimson King bleeds himself white as he restores Prospero’s legacy,’ he cried. ‘Every tale, every manuscript, every scroll – all the learning since first we put quill to parchment. His mind draws them from the warp and weft of the Great Ocean and imprints them on the crude matter of this material world.’

  Amon burned brighter at every utterance, his grief spreading from warrior to warrior as they understood the enormity of what their primarch attempted and what it cost him. Again, the dust of Tizca’s dead stirred, enflamed by the potency of emotion building among the legionaries.

  ‘But the means by which he preserves that knowledge is flawed,’ continued Amon, oblivious or uncaring of the effect his words were having on his surroundings. ‘Everything he creates lessens him. The slivered shards of his soul burn brightly in remembrance of lore, but as their illumination fades, so too does he.’

  Cries of denial rose from the assembled Thousand Sons, mixed with fresh anger at the warriors of Leman Russ. Somewhere, the howl of a wolf echoed through the ruins. Ahriman felt vast power stir in the dust, dark memories and darker horrors.

  ‘He knows this will destroy him,’ said Amon, drifting towards the restless dust and lowering his voice. ‘He knows it better than any of us, but what choice does he have? To remain trapped here for all eternity and allow all we once knew to fade from memory? He will not let that happen. Our father seeks to restore our lost greatness, but to continue as he does will destroy him a piece at a time.’

  Ahriman saw tears glisten on Amon’s cheeks, the equerry’s voice straining as he sought to convey the immense sacrifice their gene-sire willingly made for them all.

  ‘We cannot let that happen,’ said Amon, his hands clenching to fists. ‘The Thousand Sons must not let that happen.’

  ‘What must we do?’ shouted a warrior Ahriman did not recognise – one of the Athanaeans by his emanations.

  Ahriman looked back and at last saw the gleam in Amon’s eye.

  He recognised it for what it was: proffered hope.

  Ahriman stepped forwards and raised his heqa staff.

  ‘But he has a plan,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t he?’

  ‘He does, Chief Librarian,’ said Amon, as the howling of wolves came again from all around. ‘But it will require great sacrifice from his sons.’

  ‘Just spit it out, Amon,’ said Memunim.

  ‘We must all lift the veil of grief,’ said Amon as the Scarab Occult closed ranks around him. ‘To make whole the Crimson King, we must relive the day Prospero burned.’

  And the wolves of ash and fire roared from the dust.

  Six

  Daemons in the dust

  Shards

  Dissipative systems

  Ahriman pushed himself into the eighth enumeration as the graveyard of Tizca erupted. Beast packs of scabbed volcanic rock and molten blood exploded from below. Scorched monsters with an unslaked thirst for slaughter that bled toxic fumes.

  A score of Thousand Sons legionaries were dragged down in the first moments of the attack. Blackened claws tore limbs from sockets and basalt fangs split battleplate with ease. Their screams were devoured by the wind and added to its hellish chorus.

  Ahriman gagged on cinders heady with transhuman meat-stink.

  Swirling ash made it impossible to see the creatures clearly. Some were powerful quadrupeds with hooked spines and tapered, lupine skulls. Others walked like men, but their eyes were reddened coals and embers smouldered between fangs of smoke. They were part beast, part man, and Ahriman saw a memory of Legion form in their transhuman bulk.

  ‘What are they?’ said Sanakht, both swords already drawn.

  ‘The Wolves,’ snarled Ahriman, facing down the ashen ghosts of those wh
o had ended his world. ‘Come to kill us again.’

  Aether-bolts and gunshots criss-crossed the ruins of Tizca in torrents of fire. Psychic detonations blasted craters in the dust, and flocks of the glitter-skinned manta-creatures circled overhead like carrion feeders.

  Ignis walked calmly through the carnage, following a precise path only he and his fellow Masters of Ruin could fathom. The sacred geometries cut into his armour and inked on the skin beneath were taut with the effort of reading this fight’s variables. Its parameters changed swiftly, but, to him, predictably. Power threaded him, racing through his flesh as each new pattern formed before him.

  Raptora warriors crushed ashen wolf-things with kine blows stronger than thunder hammers. Pavoni adepts froze the molten heat of the daemons’ host forms.

  With their strength waxing on the tides of the Great Ocean, the Pyrae were masters of this battlefield. They vaporised daemon wolves or suffocated the fires within them, leaving the fused statues for others to smash apart.

  The Athanaeans were all but powerless here. These daemon wolves were avatars of hunger and death. What thoughts they had were brazen in their intent. Only the Corvidae fought with a modicum of art, even with their seersight blunted.

  ‘All so untidy,’ he whispered to himself, lifting his combi-bolter and blasting the head from a loping ash-wolf. It exploded in a welter of rock fragments and empyreal fire. He watched its remains spin away in perfect parabolas.

  Ignis turned as a beast with a magma heart blazing within a cage of scorched ribs towered over him. He caught its clawed hand in his power fist as it swung at its head. He crushed the beast’s limb and rammed the twin barrels of his combi-bolter between its blackened ribs.

  Five shells carved a precise pattern through its body, breaking the daemon’s power to hold its form. The beast crumbled instantly to dust and Ignis took three steps to the right. A vast spar of rusted adamantium slammed down where he had been standing, ten metres thick and half that again in width.

  A blaze of warp lightning split the sky, and Ignis craned his neck as far his armour’s gorget would allow. Continental-scale thunderheads, complete with soaring cliffs of cloud, depthless valleys and sheer escarpments bore down on the battle as every warband fought to reach the safety of their gunships.