The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  ‘That’s a big gate, and you are only small,’ Bjarki called out to her. ‘Do you want some help?’

  She ignored him and stood unmoving for several seconds until a bass rumble sounded from the alcoves to either side of the gate. A deafening bray of horns, like a huntsman’s call, shook the dust from the upper reaches of the chamber.

  ‘Fenrys hjolda!’ cried Gierlothnir Helblind, bringing his shield to bear as the statues stepped forwards with booming strides. The Wolves ran to their Rune Priest, though they could surely do nothing against such giants.

  ‘God-engines,’ said Bjarki in amazement.

  The Arethusa’s automata and iron thrall-warriors shrank from these apex beasts, cowed by their majesty.

  ‘Warhounds,’ said Promus.

  The two Titans growled in hostile binaric, venting plumes of hot petrochemical exhaust. Their enormous weapons were kill-ready and scented oils drizzled from the bronzed plates of their armour like baptismal rain.

  They turned to the gate and bent their shoulders, legs bracing and colossal servo-motors straining as they matched their strength against its weight.

  At first it seemed as though its mass would defeat them.

  Then, with a groan of grinding stone, a thin seam of light appeared at the centre of the gate. Concussive shocks travelled the walls as the Warhounds pushed the gate wider, millimetre by millimetre.

  ‘Something’s amiss,’ said Olgyr Widdowsyn, tearing off his helm and dropping to one knee.

  ‘What is he doing?’ said Promus as the Wolf closed his one good eye and placed an ear to the ground, palms flat to either side of his shaven, tattooed skull.

  Bjarki held up his hand. ‘Olgyr Widdowsyn knows better than any dowser when land roots grow soft.’

  ‘Land roots?’

  ‘Ja, when Fenris chooses to drag land down into the World-forge beneath the oceans.’

  Promus had only a vague idea what that meant, but sensed trouble as Yasu Nagasena ran back towards them, one hand pressed to his ear, the other clutching the hilt of his sword.

  Olgyr Widdowsyn pushed himself to his feet.

  ‘What say you?’ said Bjarki.

  ‘This place was struck,’ said the Wolf. ‘From without.’

  ‘Struck?’ said Promus as his helm-vox crackled with the distorted, simulacra-voice of Magos Umwelt Uexküll.

  ‘Prom…ano…r vess…l is… in…d!’

  ‘Say again, Uexküll,’ ordered Promus. ‘I repeat, say again.’

  The static fell away, and this time there was no mistaking the master of the Arethusa’s warning.

  ‘Promus, another vessel is inbound!’

  Nagasena read the change in Promus’ body language.

  ‘You heard?’ he asked.

  Promus nodded. ‘Another vessel.’

  ‘It’s them,’ said Bjarki. ‘It’s the red sorcerers.’

  ‘Hit it again,’ ordered Ignis, sending a precision firing solution to the empowered lance battery in the Khemet’s prow. The oculus bay flashed with actinic light and an explosion bloomed on the orbital gaol’s flank, exactly where Ignis expected.

  A geyser of blue flame ejected from the breach, quickly snuffed out by hard vacuum. A mist of debris hundreds of kilometres in diameter mushroomed from the impact site. A pair of branching towers, like leafless trees in winter, spiralled into the void.

  Ignis sat in the Khemet’s command throne, eyes locked on the oculus bay and drinking in bewilderingly swift data-flows: ordnance trajectories, attack intercepts, thrust vectors and angles of deflection. Woven so densely as to be unintelligible to anyone other than an adept versed in the calcularcana of the Order of Ruin, but supremely beautiful to Ignis.

  A perfect synergy of mathematical convergences and statistical certainties, void-war fought under the aegis of Ruin was, to Ignis, simply a matter of manipulating numerologically significant equations of breathtaking elegance. He parsed endless streams of numbers without error, distributing aspect corrections, course changes and firing solutions to the crew with breathtaking speed and clarity.

  ‘Portside manoeuvring arrays, thirty-six per cent thrust for two point seven seconds. Reciprocal compensation to starboard on cessation. On my mark. Mark.’

  The Khemet responded to his command like a trained colt, sliding through the darkness with the verve and aggression of a much smaller vessel.

  The flagstones vibrated to volleys of macro-cannon fire from the broadside batteries far below. Mere distraction fire – explosive bluster to keep the two vessels at high anchor on the ventral aspect of Kamiti Sona wary.

  Forward lance array primed and charged,+ sent Tolbek from the prow gun deck. The Pyrae adepts were down there, bleeding the heat build-up that normally restricted such a powerful weapon’s rate of discharge and empowering its beam with the fire of the Great Ocean.

  Weapon release only on my mark,+ he sent. +Solution Ignis three-nine-six, if you please.+

  We can hit them now!+ sent Tolbek, and Ignis winced at the blunt forcefulness of his brother’s urge to shoot.

  On my mark only.+

  We’re sliding out of our angle of deflection!+

  On my mark only.+

  Ignis, in the name of–+

  Mark.+

  A searing, cerulean beam of light stabbed from the Khemet’s prow and carved the topside of Kamiti Sona like a butcher removing a layer of fat from a carcass. Silent explosions marched across the exposed underbelly of flensed hull-plates as they peeled back. The Great Ocean flooded within as aetheric discharge exploded into space like Mechanicum Borealis over a rad-soaked forge world.

  Ignis smiled, his fingers steepled before him.

  Lord Ahriman?+ he sent to the embarkation deck.

  Is it done?+

  As promised,+ said Ignis. +You have your way in.+

  Warning klaxons blared. Emergency lights strobed as fresh impacts rocked the prison. A powerful charge filled Kamiti Sona, as if some vital element of atmospheric composition had been forcefully restored. Its inmates stood blinking and amazed, drawing in great lungfuls of potency, staring at the world through newly unveiled eyes.

  Lemuel felt a growing clarity as the environment changed, becoming more tactile and real with every breath. The collar around his neck was smoking as though plucked from a furnace, but its touch was icy and pale patterns of frost webbed its surfaces.

  ‘What happened?’ he said as the chamber fell into anarchy.

  ‘Nothing good,’ said Camille, dragging him and Chaiya to the relative safety of projecting stone steps. ‘We need to keep out of the way.’

  No sooner had she spoken than a pack of servo-skulls fitted with underslung lascarbines and shock-calipers zipped through the air towards them.

  ‘Get down!’ she yelled.

  Lemuel threw himself flat next to Chaiya.

  A blizzard of las-fire burned the air. He looked over his shoulder. A group of inmates were screaming. Las-burn set their smocks ablaze and they flailed like madmen until pain overcame them. One man remained standing, oblivious to the killing flames consuming him. He laughed and hurled the fire back at the skulls in a blazing stream that shattered them into bony splinters.

  A dozen more fixed on the burning man and he vanished in a storm of liqnite and electro-flame until his screaming laughter was abruptly ended.

  Hard bangs Lemuel recognised as bolter-fire added to the deafening cacophony. Forking blasts of what looked like horizontal lightning flashed from somewhere above them. Inchoate laughter echoed in his skull. He tasted blood and sour bile, the sensation of biting on metal.

  The collar was painfully cold around his neck. Frost flaked from it like cinders and drifted in curious spirals.

  ‘Stay together,’ said Chaiya, pressed tight to the steps and her eyes tight shut as she held Camille. ‘Together, yes, that’s Prospero’s w
ay.’

  Prospero?

  Lemuel gasped as the name lodged in his mind like a knife in the ribs. His body shuddered as he saw a dreaming city of white marble, tree-lined boulevards and the scent of far-off lands carried over the open ocean.

  Tears welled in his eyes for no reason he could articulate.

  ‘Tizca?’ he said, remembering the sight of the city from the air as he left, believing he would never see it again, yet knowing, with improbable certainty, that he would.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Chaiya, her dark eyes swimming with memory. ‘Say it again.’

  ‘Tizca,’ said Lemuel. ‘We were there, weren’t we?’

  ‘Yes, Lemuel, yes! You’re right, we were,’ said Chaiya, tears streaming down her gaunt cheeks. ‘It… it is my home…? I live there!’

  ‘No, Throne, no…’ said Lemuel as snatches of things overheard while he bled and sweated in earthen pits that reeked of wild animals returned to him. ‘Tizca’s gone… The Wolves, they burned it… to get to… Magnus.’

  All three of them flinched as the name left his lips, its syllables a key that unlocked a yammering host of competing memories. None of them could speak, too overwhelmed by the flood of painful thoughts of things lost and things endured.

  Acrid vapours stung Lemuel’s eyes and the smell of roasting meat made his mouth hatefully moist. Las-fire and streams of promethium scorched the air, and fatty smoke billowed from living pyres. Despite the flames, the air felt blisteringly cold in Lemuel’s lungs.

  Newly empowered, the inmates of Kamiti Sona gave free rein to their abilities. Nightmares clawed the air and hurricane winds twisted smoke into chattering spectres with sharp teeth and pitiless eyes. Mortal bodies swelled with power, becoming monstrous and insane. Flesh warped and minds cracked as immaterial vampyres claimed eager victims and remade possessed flesh in their own image. Hurricanes of psychic energy roared like dark laughter and muttering shadows dragged men and women into the walls and floor.

  Warriors armoured in bronze and with plumes of red and white marched undaunted into the madness. They were moments of stillness within the storms of unleashed witchery, but they were few. Hunting in ad hoc squads, the warriors’ shoulder-locked weapons executed with every trigger pull.

  ‘They’re killing everyone,’ wept Chaiya.

  Hundreds of prisoners crawled through pools of blood to find safety or hunkered down behind shredded barricades of the dead. Lemuel saw Medea and her son wrapped in each other’s arms, a squad of the Silent Sisters armed with flamers advancing towards them.

  ‘We have to help them,’ said Camille.

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Camille,’ cried Lemuel, grabbing her wrist and pulling her back. ‘Do you want to get killed?’

  She fought him, but fear for her life gave Lemuel strength.

  ‘You can’t let them die!’

  ‘Better them than you,’ said Lemuel, horrified and ashamed that he meant every word. The depth of disappointment in Camille’s eyes cut to the heart of him. She released the fabric of his smock in her fist and recoiled, clutching her hand as though burned. She cried out, eyes wide in horror and misted with visions only she could see.

  ‘Are you hurt?’ screamed Chaiya. ‘Did they hit you?’

  Camille shook her head, staring at Lemuel as if seeing him for the first time and being repulsed by what was revealed.

  ‘What is it?’ he said.

  ‘He slit the throats of innocents and drank their blood,’ said Camille. ‘He murdered seers to steal what they saw.’

  ‘What? No!’ cried Lemuel. ‘I didn’t!’

  ‘Not you,’ wept Camille. ‘The last man…’

  ‘What last man?’

  ‘Who wore that smock before you,’ she said.

  ‘How can you know that?’ he asked, but as soon as he asked the question, he knew. The frosted collar around his neck shattered into blackened fragments of ice.

  And the fog deadening his thoughts these last five years blew out in the face of inrushing psychic energy.

  He knew exactly how Camille could know that.

  Psychometry, the power to know the history of an object through touch alone. Just as he knew that Chaiya was a low-level telepath and that they had first met on Prospero, when he’d come to tell Camille a psychic predator had laid its eggs in her skull.

  Just as he knew he was a reader of auras, a diviner of truths who had been taught to harness that power by…

  A roar of ear-bursting war-horns buckled the air and Lemuel felt the abrasive presence of vast, bellicose auras wedded to predatory machine souls. They were pushing the towering gates at the far end of the chamber open, and they would kill everything before them in a storm of fire and fury.

  ‘Got to get off the main floor,’ said Lemuel as the gate opened yet farther. ‘Got to get back to our cells.’

  Camille nodded, gasping for breath and keeping her fingers laced together for fear of touching anything else. The horrors of this place were myriad and she had no wish for even the least of them to touch her.

  ‘Come on,’ said Lemuel, easing around the bottom of the stone steps. Fused bodies, melded, bent and elongated by means mortal anatomy was never meant to employ, lay twisted at their base. He crawled over undulant flesh that bubbled with suckered mouths and blinking eyes. He wept as he climbed, keeping Kallista’s ashes held in the crook of his arm.

  They climbed from the madness and the screams, away from the gunshots, the storms of lightning and cackling monsters guised in human meat. Lemuel reached an upper landing when a dreadful sense of premonition made him look back into the chaos below.

  Standing at the epicentre of the bloodshed and surrounded by a ring of howling warp lunatics was Prinn, miraculously untouched save by his own hand. Wild-eyed, he clawed his skin with bloodied fingernails, the king of the madmen.

  ‘They’re here!’ he screamed with wild exultation. ‘Please take me! I’ve done all you asked! I’m one of you now!’

  And, finally, Prinn’s pleas were answered.

  With each lacerated strip of skin he tore away, sick light poured out, his inner workings radiant and blood divine.

  The change working upon him intensified, skin, arteries and muscle unravelling like fraying thread. Organs burst and blood aerosolised around the man, coagulating and orbiting his flesh in a grotesque scarlet orrery. Prinn’s form was lost in the maelstrom of his unmaking, yet his screams went undiminished.

  The red mist of his remains hung in a veil.

  Hulking shapes moved within.

  Lemuel’s bowels clenched as a warrior stepped through what Prinn’s death had wrought, an angel of death plated in gleaming crimson and bloodied ivory.

  A legionary, and behind him many more.

  They spread out, wet with Prinn’s transformation. Every one of them was radiant, haloed by a blazing aura of infinite complexity.

  The warrior leading them burned brightest of all.

  ‘Ahzek…?’

  Ten

  Unleashed

  Inconceivable

  Unthinkable

  Ahriman knew this place.

  He had never before set foot on Kamiti Sona. Its name was unknown to him, as was its very existence. And yet he knew it as soon as he emerged from the porta rubrum Hathor Maat had opened through the blazing siren-seer.

  An inhuman gaol, aether-hostile and cold. A place unknown to him, but awash with pain and guilt. And a singular hatred.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is where they would take Kallimakus.’

  Ahriman tasted the blood coating his armour, the sum of a life wasted filling him in an instant.

  Luděk Prinn. A mortal whose soul-fire could never be entirely hidden from those with eyes to see it, not even by a hateful place like this.

  What might a mind like his have achieved with the proper tutelage? What glori
es could he have known? No one would ever know, his potential wasted by an Imperium that feared and persecuted that which it did not understand. Ahriman grieved for Prinn’s lost potential even as he felt the man’s soul torn apart by the Great Ocean’s predators.

  Then Prinn was gone, and the furious battle raging around Ahriman surged into his awareness. Gunshots and screams. Fire and madness. Warp phantoms scratched at the wards vouchsafing his auto-senses, crackling though his visor with gibbering voices and static. Everywhere Ahriman looked, he saw the madness of unchecked aether powers, the inmates like lunatic children let loose in an armoury.

  Shimmering bodies hung suspended in the air, incandescent with fire as their powers consumed them. Flaming skulls flew with las-bolts and lightning blazing from underslung weapons. Tar-black smoke coiled obscenely and storms of lightning forked from the outstretched hands of mass murderers.

  A mirror-faced man knelt in a pool of his own glistening viscera as a hurricane of dust pulled him apart organ by organ, limb by limb.

  Then Ahriman nodded. ‘I saw this place in the ruins of the Pyramid of Photep,’ he said, one hand on the Book of Magnus. Scarab Occult marched from the red mist, polearms lowered, blades leaping with white flame. Their leader, Onuris Hex, known as the Sky Bearer, gave Ahriman a caustic stare.

  ‘This is where we will find a shard of the Crimson King?’

  ‘The primarch has led us here.’

  ‘How do we find it?’ demanded Hex, turning to unleash a blazing spear of fire from his polearm. It incinerated a pack of inmates with bodies twisted into scaled, ape-like monsters.

  ‘I do not know for certain, but finding Mahavastu Kallimakus will be a good start.’

  Hex gave him another of the withering looks that had given rise to a moniker only ever whispered behind his back.

  ‘The primarch’s scribe? He is here?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘You believe so? That’s what you brought us here with?’

  ‘We are here because Magnus’ soul wants to be whole again,’ said Ahriman as more of the Thousand Sons passed through the porta rubrum: the Feathered Ones of Nycteus, the Sun Scarabs of Kiu and the Ankharu Blades of Memunim. Bolters immediately locked into fire sectors, and disciplined volleys cleared the immediate space around the Thousand Sons.