The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  Menkaura came through with Sanakht and Lucius. The Emperor’s Children swordsman had kept himself in seclusion for most of the voyage, but his aura was profoundly altered – resplendent and, if such a thing were possible, more arrogant than before. He and Sanakht flanked the tattoo-cut form of Aforgomon, and the bound daemon’s aura shimmered in delight.

  ‘Such wonders worked before us,’ it said.

  Real space groaned at the seams as the Great Ocean made sport of the malleable flesh within.

  ‘This place is going to tear itself apart,’ said Memunim, his cult warriors forming a sacred mandala around him. More volleys of bolter-fire kept maddened inmates at bay.

  ‘Let it,’ said Kiu. ‘You all felt what this place was, what our enemies did here. The sooner it is in ruins the better.’

  ‘We find what we came for and kill everything else,’ said Memunim. ‘Ahriman?’

  Ahriman pressed a hand to the Book of Magnus. Its power was unimaginable, each precise scratch of ink on its pages significant and potent. The soul-shard was here. He could feel his father’s presence like a hesitant ghost, a fleetingly glimpsed impression scratching at the corner of the eye.

  ‘Where are you?’ he whispered. ‘Show me…’

  The power in the book needed no other invitation. Ahriman’s awareness exploded through the structure of Kamiti Sona. He felt every hurt, every wrong, every humiliation and every pain. He felt old souls and new, the blind, the mad. Souls unknown and souls he knew…

  Ahriman’s gaze snapped to an upper gallery, where three figures – a man and two women – were climbing out of the chaos. They bore the mark of Prospero, a boon all travellers to its once fair shores took away with them. The man leading looked back, and recognition hit Ahriman like a blow.

  ‘Lemuel…?’

  Two giants were adrift in the void.

  Like the first spacewalkers, they moved with gelid grace, but these were no soft-bodied mortals encased in life-sustaining suits of absurd fragility.

  A Reaver and a Warhound, god-engines whose princeps were now indivisible from the machinery within. Insane sentiences from the worst nightmares of the earliest pioneers of thinking machines. Once loyalist war machines of Tempestus, now servants of much darker masters.

  Hercules Furens and Zalgolyssa crossed the darkness towards Kamiti Sona, guided by kine-choirs of Raptora aboard the Khemet. In their wake came a makeshift flotilla of pressurised fuel tanks, boxy cargo containers and anything that could be sealed from the hard vacuum.

  They arced towards the vast breach torn in the prison’s topside on trajectories mapped by the Order of Ruin.

  The Warhound Hercules Furens landed first, slamming down on buckled deck-plates at Kamiti Sona’s midsection. The much heavier Zalgolyssa landed moments later, its splay-clawed legs flexing and war-horn growling. The Warhound immediately stalked into the depths of the prison without pause, like a hunting beast scenting blood for its more deadly kin.

  This section had explosively decompressed, but the Pavoni adepts had rendered its atmospheric composition breathable.

  Not for the Titans’ benefit, but the following forces.

  With the Titans on the hunt, the first of the cargo containers slammed into the breach. They skidded through the spinning morass of debris before magnetic clamps secured them to deck-plates and retrofitted support stanchions.

  Explosive bolts dropped the sealed sides of the containers, and the dregs of the Planet of the Sorcerers poured out: packs of slavering beasts herded from the toppled menhir city and bloodsworn renegades beyond all hope of redemption.

  The Khemet’s lance fire had been precisely calibrated to not interfere with Kamiti Sona’s spin, and thus its artificial gravity was unaffected by the vast opening in its hull.

  The breach point selected by Ignis was precisely three point six kilometres from Ahriman and his cabal, a strike to capture the orbital’s embarkation facilities.

  Or so it appeared.

  ‘Dorsal manoeuvring array, three second burst, starboard prow array, seventy degree down angle,’ said Ignis. ‘Bring us up over the breach. I want those ships bracketed.’

  Data streams cascaded down the glyph columns, too fast for even the augmented thralls to process. Though crewing a starship was usually a mortal task, Athanaean legionaries on the bridge streamed the information to him at the speed of thought. Ignis spread his consciousness between enumerations to parse each variable instantaneously.

  Space around the orbital gaol burned with warhead detonations and burning atomic vortices. Ghost images of the combatants flickered in the e-mag distortion. Glittering ablation cascades sparkled like diamond dust and ordnance tracks of frozen exhaust contrails snaked through the void like silver thread.

  The mathematical beauty of it all made Ignis want to weep.

  ‘Portside battery to fire in five seconds,’ said Ignis. ‘Six volleys of void shredders. Two of hull penetrators.’

  He switched to thought form.

  Tolbek, prow lance to fire on my mark, solution Ignis nine-five-eight.+

  What am I firing at?+ asked Tolbek.

  The second ship, the corvette.+

  What corvette?+

  Ignis sighed. So much easier to work with adepts from the Order of Ruin.

  Quadrant eleven, you feeble–’+

  Ignis felt a jolt of shock as he looked back to the oculus bay. Tracking enemy movements within a volatile engagement volume was a discipline all of its own, and his treatises on tactical combat responses and meta-decision-making had never yet failed to exactly predict enemy movements in a void battle.

  Until now.

  A series of punishing impacts raked the Khemet from prow to stern. The control obelisks flared with critical damage glyphs and the oculus bay flared as the voids blew out. Servitors and thralls cried as repercussive feedback seared the insides of their skulls black.

  ‘Inconceivable,’ said Ignis, admiration warring with disbelief at this enemy’s virtuosity. To have blindsided an adept of Ruin was a feat of misdirection worthy of the greatest void-warriors of the Legions.

  The Khemet had been blind to the corvette’s presence, its shields somehow reflecting any detectable emissions inwards and rendering it all but invisible.

  Only its firing had unmasked it.

  In the moments he had left, Ignis cast his mind over the gulf of space, seeking to know the mind at the helm of the vessel that had killed them.

  Thoughts swathed in night, trained to find shadows where none existed. A practitioner of the artes.

  ‘Nineteenth Legion,’ said Ignis, knowing what must come next: relentless, unending broadsides unleashed by highly disciplined gun crews.

  As if on cue, multiple torpedo impacts slammed into the Khemet’s ventral armour. Deep-penetrating warheads punched into the frigate’s guts before detonating in firestorms of atomic light.

  Disembowelling strikes.

  Ship killers.

  ‘Stop!’ ordered Sister Caesaria, stepping away from the giant gate, one hand pressed to the vox-bead in her ear. ‘Seal the door. Seal it now!’

  The Warhounds growled in anger at this reversal, but halted their efforts to open the gate. They hauled the berthing chains taut in enormous fists. A cold sensation of wrongness travelled Promus’ spine at the thought of the gate sealing.

  ‘Wait, what are you doing?’ said Nagasena. ‘We need to get in there immediately.’

  Caesaria shot him a hostile glare.

  ‘Kamiti Sona is under attack,’ she said. ‘Our embarkation decks are swarming with beasts and traitors. The enemy brings battle-engines and these ones are needed to fight them.’

  ‘Open the gate first,’ said Promus. ‘Then send them.’

  ‘There is no time and my order is final.’

  ‘The boarding action is a feint,’ said Bjarki, his eyes f
rosted with cloud. ‘The scent of maleficarum lies within.’

  ‘What else do you expect within a psykana-gaol?’ sneered Caesaria, but Bjarki shook his head.

  ‘I know the spoor of Prospero’s maleficarum,’ he said, his voice a low, animal growl. ‘Now open the andskoti door before I make you open it!’

  Caesaria’s fellow Sisters bristled at the naked threat in Bjarki’s words, and the Kastelans’ weapon arms spooled up to fire on the word of their mistress.

  ‘You do not command here, Wolf,’ she said.

  ‘He does not,’ agreed Nagasena, with a deep bow of respect to Caesaria, ‘but nor is he wrong. The prisoners we came for are within. The enemy knows this and seeks to draw us away.’

  Caesaria considered Nagasena’s words and nodded.

  ‘Very well,’ she said, ‘but I can spare no warriors save for those already within.’

  Bjarki laughed. It was a low, wet growl.

  ‘Fear not,’ he said. ‘We know how to destroy maleficarum.’

  Breathless and shocked, Lemuel staggered onto the chamber’s upper level. The steps were in the centre of this gallery of cells, and fifty dark doorways stretched both left and right.

  Lemuel sank to his knees as fear gripped his limbs with paralysing intensity. He put his face in his hands. His heart was hammering too fast and too loud, like gunshots right by his ear. He tried to shut out the awful sounds coming from below – howling nightmare beasts in stolen flesh, the manic laughter of madmen and sickening noise of people being devoured by monsters.

  ‘Come on!’ shouted Camille as strobing firelight reflected from the smooth walls of stone. ‘Get up!’

  ‘Why is he here?’ sobbed Lemuel. ‘What does it mean?’

  His entire body was shaking. Ahzek Ahriman was here!

  Were they never to know peace from the Thousand Sons?

  Chaiya knelt beside him. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, and Lemuel wasn’t sure what she was answering – the questions he’d asked or the one he’d thought.

  She pressed her hand to the back of his neck and gently squeezed. Almost immediately, Lemuel’s panic eased and he took a juddering breath of hot, greasy-tasting air.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ said Camille, standing over him with her hands on her hips. ‘It’s just coincidence.’

  Lemuel shook his head. ‘There are no coincidences. He taught me that. It was one of his first lessons.’

  ‘You think he’s here for us?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I don’t want to find out.’

  ‘Then let’s get moving.’

  ‘Where can we go?’ snapped Lemuel.

  ‘Anywhere but here,’ said Chaiya, looking over his shoulder in terror. This time he let her help him to his feet and turned to see what she had seen.

  Figures in blood-soaked prison smocks were racing up the steps. They paused in their ascent and lifted their heads as if hunting a scent. Lemuel’s stomach lurched in horror at their hideously disfigured faces.

  Ragged flaps of torn-off flesh hung from bloodied skulls, peeled away by clawed fingernails. Blind faces wet with glutinous tears. Ruptured sacs of gouged eyes.

  A word Ahriman had once let slip returned to him: daemon.

  ‘Go,’ he whispered, and they set off down the gallery, all the while knowing there was nowhere to hide. Camille ducked inside a cell towards the end of the gallery. Lemuel and Chaiya followed her, skidding to a halt.

  They were not the cell’s only occupants.

  Hunched in the corner on a filthy mattress were Medea and Pheres. Relief made mother and son go limp at the sight of them, until the natural hostility Kamiti Sona bred in every inmate hardened Medea’s face to granite.

  ‘Get out!’ cried Pheres. ‘The monsters will follow you and they’ll kill us.’

  Lemuel heard the wet, animal sounds of the mutilated inmates behind them and shook his head.

  ‘No time,’ he said. ‘We’ve nowhere left to go.’

  ‘Get out!’ cried the boy, before burying his face in his mother’s neck. Lemuel met Medea’s gaze, her face a ruin of tears and regret.

  ‘Please don’t,’ she said. ‘He’s all I have. I forgave him.’

  Lemuel didn’t know what she meant, so didn’t reply.

  Camille and Chaiya crouched in the corner next to Medea and Pheres. Sounds of the faceless, eyeless creatures pursuing them came from farther back along the corridor, like the grunts of swine with their snouts pressed in loamy earth.

  Panic filled Lemuel’s belly with sour bile, but as he listened to Camille and Chaiya speak comforting words to one another, he saw the naked fear in their auras diminish.

  Lemuel knelt beside them and took both women’s hands as fresh memories bubbled to the surface. One of the first lessons Ahriman had taught him concerned the forces inimical to life that dwelled within the Great Ocean. How they fed, what drew them.

  And how they hunted.

  ‘They’re coming to kill us,’ said Lemuel. ‘But if you listen to me, they might not find us.’

  ‘How?’ said Chaiya.

  ‘They don’t have eyes,’ said Lemuel, the words spilling out of him in a rush. ‘They don’t need them. I think they sense our fear, the… dark light in our auras… I think he said it draws them like blood in the water. If we can control that fear, they might not find us.’

  ‘Sorry to spoil your plan, Lem,’ said Camille, ‘but I don’t think I’m going to get any less terrified.’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ said Lemuel as the sound of bare footsteps slapping on stone approached. ‘Remember what I can do? My power? Remember the guard at Tizca’s docks, how I made him doubt the Selene’s manifest to let us all aboard?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Chaiya. ‘I remember! You can do this.’

  ‘You can keep the monsters away?’ said Medea.

  He nodded. ‘Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. I’m going to try.’

  Lemuel took a deep breath. His memories of Ahriman’s tutelage were still fragmentary and only slowly reassembling within his mind, but his skill with auras had been with him all his life. All Ahriman had done was provide focus.

  He pushed his mind into a higher mode of… enumerations?

  And in the blink of an eye, it was like being made whole again, like breaking the surface of a stagnant lake or breathing unpolluted air at the topmost spire of a hive.

  It felt wondrous, seeing the ebb and flow of emotion through others. Lemuel saw the azure and purple of Camille’s brazen courage – a shield against the ochre yellow of her fears and insecurities – interwoven with Chaiya’s warm umber of maternal instincts that only ever sought to protect those around her.

  Working against that were Medea and Pheres’ auras.

  The bilious green of old resentment at being forced to bear away a cursed child, black bitterness at the unfairness of a cosmos that cared nothing for the wants of the mortals who dwelled within it. His hands moved over them like a mountebank faith-healer at work, drawing courage from Camille and the urge to protect from Chaiya.

  He wove it around them and saw the tension in their faces ease. And with that ease the fear became more manageable as it drained like water spiralling away into a sluice.

  Lemuel heard grunting, bovine sounds and knew the killers were at the door. He slowly turned his head, biting his lip to keep from crying out in revulsion.

  Two of the eyeless, rip-faced monsters stood in the opening to the cell, hunched over, bloodied teeth chattering and flensed skulls twitching from side to side. Their inmate smocks were stained black, as if something toxic were seeping from within their possessed flesh. They mewled in confusion, like spoiled children denied something sweet.

  Lemuel held his breath as one of them stepped into the cell.

  Its mutilated skull swayed from side to side as it drew nearer. Ropes of black saliva dro
oled from its ravaged mouth.

  A suckered tongue slid from a lipless mouth.

  It tasted the air for fear, but found nothing.

  The creature hissed in frustration and turned its back.

  Lemuel let out a silent exhalation.

  Then Pheres began to cry.

  The monster in the doorway stopped.

  And Lemuel did the only thing he could to save them.

  Fire and nightmares lashed the Imperial warriors.

  Immaterial energies burned in every breath and corposant flared from every scream of a thread cut.

  Flickering witch-fire leapt from madman to madman in the unnatural darkness. Horned silhouettes danced and skeletal shadows clawed out of the walls.

  Four Vorax were smouldering wreckage. Two fallen Ursarax lay in pools of an oil-blood mix that stank of mortuary fluids.

  The inmates of Kamiti Sona were powerful, yes, but they were untrained – without discipline, without unity.

  Lambs to the slaughterman’s blade.

  Promus rammed his skull-topped staff into the chest of a man whose eyes were afire. Ribs and spine shattered. Shock trauma pulped internal organs. A psychic pulse destroyed the warp-thing within. Its scream blackened the metal of Promus’ vambrace, scorching out a protective sigil inscribed by Ptolemy himself in a brighter age.

  Hundreds of inmates with cindered skin and magma veins pressed them, fighting to escape the tempest-filled chamber as the legionaries fought to enter. They screamed with inhuman bloodlust, vessels for puppeting entities of atavistic hunger and insatiable soul-thirst.

  None of the mortals wore the faces of those Nagasena sought: a stocky man and slender woman with equatorial-dark skin, a second woman with soft features and heterochromic eyes.

  Promus dropped a dozen with head shots. Caustic blood sprayed. He went in hard against the others, shoulder low, staff splitting bodies left and right. Making space. He flowed into those spaces, killing and making yet more space. He fought five steps ahead, as though he had run a thousand theoreticals of this moment in the sparring cages.