The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  ‘I will cut out your heart,’ the legionary said, taking another step and reaching for the curved khopesh knife belted at his hip. ‘And you are going to watch every bloody cut through my eyes.’

  Nagasena held his breath, fingers tightening on the leather-wound grip of Shoujiki. His focus narrowed, picturing the path his blade must take.

  He let the Thousand Sons legionary take another step.

  Nagasena made a quarter-turn, his sword rising then slashing down in a perfect sayu men strike.

  The blade split the sorcerer’s skull from crown to jawbone. Nagasena flexed his hands together in the shibori, an instant of flexion to slide his blade free. The Thousand Sons legionary half turned, his one remaining eye filled with confusion and his mouth struggling to speak a valediction.

  But his last words went unsaid as Olgyr Widdowsyn wrapped an arm around his throat and snapped his neck.

  ‘You don’t let them speak,’ said the Wolf. ‘Even in death.’

  The blizzard stilled. Stone and ice fragments fell in a glittering rain. Memunim’s few remaining Ankharu Blades finally overcame the Rune Priest’s ferocity and raised the kine barrier between them. Sanakht and Lucius stood facing off against the wavering forms pacing on the other side. They rolled their shoulders, poised to fight again.

  Ahriman felt the Fenrisian psyker’s phenomenal power tearing at the barrier like a wild animal, drawing strength from his warriors in a way the Thousand Sons never could.

  ‘Had circumstances been different, think what you might have learned from one another,’ said Aforgomon. ‘Imagine it – the fury and power of Fenris alloyed to the discipline and craft of Prospero.’

  ‘Such a thing can never be,’ said Ahriman.

  The cut-skinned yokai shook its head. ‘I thought you knew better than to deal in absolutes, Ahzek?’

  ‘I once attempted such a rapprochement,’ said Ahriman, elaborating only reluctantly. ‘But some things, once put asunder, can never be reunited entirely.’

  ‘If you will forgive the term, I pray you are wrong,’ said Menkaura, nodding towards the terrified mortals behind Ahriman and Aforgomon. The daemon maintained a low-level kine shield around them, but the raptures were dissipating almost as soon as they formed for reasons Ahriman could not understand.

  ‘Apologies, brother,’ he said, crouching as the vaporised remains of a solid slug hissed against the metal of his shoulder guard. ‘Fighting the Wolves again has brought my melancholic humour to the fore.’

  ‘Strange,’ said Menkaura.

  ‘How so?’

  ‘The choleric humour waxes strong in our brothers, yet I see the opposite in you.’

  ‘The tides of the Great Ocean break differently upon each soul,’ said Ahriman. ‘And it breaks hard against this place, as though it seeks to destroy that which has kept it at bay for so long.’

  ‘You attribute malice to a realm without sentience,’ said Menkaura.

  ‘Mere poetic license.’

  ‘How naive you both are,’ said Aforgomon, tapping a finger to its spiral-carved chest, where burned the black light of its essence. ‘Since the first rock was raised to cave in a skull, humanity has seeded the warp with malice and sentience in abundance.’

  Ahriman resisted the urge to grab the daemon-yokai and hurl it from the gallery. It felt his hate and laughed, practically daring him to act.

  Pencil-thin beams of volkite energy punched into the stonework overhead, and Ahriman shifted position as molten gobbets of rock dribbled from the impact points. He risked a glance towards the crumbling parapet where the Feathered Ones and the Sun Scarabs fought a host of iron-skinned foes: hook-limbed automata with bulbous, insectile skulls and flying cyberform warrior-thralls.

  Short-life kine shields and pockets of superheated oxygen distorted the air like a desert mirage. Bolter shells, high-charge volkite beams and arcing forks of lightning blazed back and forth like a raging firefight between two hive-blocks.

  Behind them, Onuris Hex and the Scarab Occult cut through the gallery floor with glowing kine-blades. Eleven of the Thousand Sons were dead, cut down in the initial violent spasms of contact or in the ongoing firefight. More would likely die before this venture was done.

  ‘Anything from Ignis?’ asked Menkaura.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then we fight?’ said Aforgomon.

  ‘No, we escape.’

  ‘You hold every advantage,’ said the daemon. ‘Numbers and warp-craft. You can kill every living thing within this place and you know it.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ said Ahriman, ‘but do you imagine these mortals will be alive at the end of it? We did not find Kallimakus, but we have a link in the chain, and I will not sacrifice it on the altar of war-lust and vengeance.’

  Menkaura nodded. ‘Then we–’

  He never got to finish his sentence.

  A thunderclap of displaced air exploded as the Ankharu Blades’ kine shield collapsed. A blizzard of freezing mist shrieked down the gallery. Feral shapes followed in its wake.

  Savage killers with the coldest hearts in the world.

  A howling surge of aggression and the raw redness of wolf minds staggered Sanakht with its ferocity. He shielded his visor with a raised arm as a blitzing storm of diamond-hard ice swept over him and Lucius.

  They stepped apart, giving each other room to fight.

  Howls and bounding shapes flew at them on the wings of the storm, dark grey, blue and flame-red. No individual minds, only a snarling pack mentality united in hate.

  They came in a rush, too many even for him.

  A thing of reeking fur and foamed jaws threw itself at him. Sanakht ducked and slashed his hawk-head sword through its throat. His blade parted only ice and smoke, sending him momentarily off balance.

  A black-and-red-eyed shade came at him from behind.

  He lowered his shoulder and thrust his jackal blade under his arm. The shadow broke apart in howling laughter. Searing pain lanced into his side as a jag-toothed spear ripped open his flank.

  ‘Fight in the open, damn you!’ he yelled, struggling to hold to the enumerations and pinpoint a single mind in the tempest.

  Howling ululated on the wind. Was the storm mocking him?

  ‘Like you do, sorcerer?’ said a voice at his shoulder.

  Sanakht spun on his heel, swords scissoring.

  He struck nothing, his mind awash with howling.

  A heavy shape barrelled into Sanakht as he tore off his helm. They landed hard. Sanakht punched with the quillons of his jackal sword, drawing a bestial grunt and a satisfying crack. A fist cracked against his cheek in return, hard enough to split bone.

  A face loomed before him. Maned and bearded with tar-black hair held in braids by rings of bone and iron. The Wolf’s face was more beast than man. Lips drawn back over jagged teeth foamed with red saliva; one eye bionic, the other flecked copper with pupils so dilated as to be almost entirely black.

  Sanakht slammed his forehead into the warrior’s face.

  ‘Balegyr’s skull is solid like the Aett,’ laughed the Wolf as he launched his own headbutt. ‘But a warlock’s head is soft.’

  Blinding light exploded before Sanakht; it felt as if a portion of his skull were suddenly concave. He gasped at the paralysing sharpness of the pain, both swords falling from his grip and helpless as the Wolf throttled the life out of him with its bare hands.

  He stared into the eyes of his killer, unable to comprehend how this base savage had beaten him. He was the best swordsman of the Legions, a warrior beyond compare. The sheer banality of this death struck Sanakht as monstrously unjust.

  Then a crack like lightning, and the Wolf’s grin vanished.

  His head jerked back like a cur on a leash.

  Balegyr’s mortal eye bulged, and Sanakht saw the serpentine coil of a whip around his neck. The Wolf cla
wed at the noose as it tightened with hideously undulant motions. Blood welled between his fingers as it chewed the meat of his throat.

  A figure without a helm appeared behind the Wolf like something from a dream, beautiful beyond words. Sanakht recognised the patrician features and bleach-white hair, but the impossibility of his being here was surely proof of Sanakht’s imminent demise. What else could explain the presence of Fulgrim himself?

  The most perfect specimen of the Legions moved with the fluid economy of a seasoned killer.

  A killer Sanakht knew.

  ‘You don’t get to kill this one,’ said Fulgrim with the voice of Lucius, jerking the whip taut. ‘He’s mine.’

  The Wolf spun to his feet, drawing and firing a fetish-hung pistol in one movement. Lucius kicked off the wall and his sword sliced like a guillotine blade. Balegyr’s arm fell away from his body at the elbow.

  Lucius struck again before he landed in a crouch, sword angled away from his body, one hand outstretched.

  The Wolf dropped to his knees with the dome of his skull missing above his brow. He reached for Lucius, but crashed forwards with his brains spilling onto the gallery.

  ‘Always such wasteful theatrics,’ rasped Sanakht.

  ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’ countered Lucius.

  Sanakht conceded the point and pushed himself up onto his elbow. He stared at the transformed Lucius, registering gunfire, clashing steel and aetheric backlash from somewhere behind him.

  ‘Your face…?’ he said.

  ‘You like it?’ grinned Lucius. ‘I had been hoping for a more dramatic unveiling, but one of these damned wolves actually got close enough to put a dent in my helmet.’

  Sanakht was about to reply when a sudden stab of psychic pain snapped his head up. He felt the bright presence of a murderer’s mind. A mind utterly unlike the savagery of the wolves. One taken to the brink of ruination by years of grief and abuse, then honed to a lethal edge by ascetic discipline to match that of Legion training.

  ‘On your left!’ cried Sanakht, thrusting his hand out with what power was left to him as a curved blade arced into the fractional gap at the beautiful swordsman’s gorget.

  Legion reflexes were inhumanly fast, but this was a master’s cut, travelling the shortest route to its target.

  Even Lucius couldn’t avoid it.

  Concussed and without enumerations, Sanakht’s kine-push was weak and unfocused, a neophyte’s effort.

  It altered the blade’s course by a mere three millimetres.

  But instead of flesh, it sliced a sparking groove across Lucius’ gorget. The swordsman’s eyes went wide and Sanakht saw frustration at an answer denied in his expression.

  Lucius danced away from a swift reverse cut, his sword flashing up to block a stunning chain of life-ending strikes. He circled, parrying and blocking, now relishing the contest.

  The mist cleared and Sanakht saw who dared face Lucius.

  A mortal of the Dragon Nations, wearing loose-fitting robes well suited for swordplay. He wore no armour – further proof he was utterly insane – and fought with a blade of near-perfect balance and curvature.

  ‘This one has skill!’ said Lucius, deflecting precision blows that would have left a lesser man in pieces.

  ‘Kill him and be done with it.’

  ‘Not till I teach him a lesson or three.’

  As the trauma of his injury began to fade, Sanakht pushed his mind into the higher enumerations. He stabbed a psychic barb into the mortal’s mind.

  The man staggered, only just managing to turn aside a thundering blow that ought to have cut him in two.

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ cried Lucius, shooting Sanakht a venomous glare. ‘Don’t you dare touch him. He’s mine.’

  Sanakht withdrew the barb. He had already seen enough.

  Yasu Nagasena. An agent of the Emperor.

  Sent here by the Sigillite on the word of…

  Sanakht swung onto one knee. Both swords leapt to his hands.

  Lucius switched his grip with a beatific smile, matching the mortal’s angular two-handed posture. They traded blows for a handful of seconds – an eternity longer than most would have lasted against Lucius.

  But no matter their skill or heart, a duel between a mortal and a legionary could end in only one way.

  Lucius parried a perfectly executed thrust and rolled his wrists to trap Nagasena’s blade in the crook of his elbow. He twisted his arm and the gleaming blade snapped cleanly in two.

  The look of pain on the mortal’s face suggested he’d lost a firstborn son.

  Lucius laughed at Nagasena’s horror and stepped in close to haul him from his feet. He held him close as if studying an idiot savant.

  ‘You’re good,’ he said, ‘but you’re no little raven.’

  Nagasena struggled in the swordsman’s grip, but Lucius was already bored of him. Rather than honour his foe with a clean death, Lucius simply hurled him from the gallery.

  Another shape emerged from the icy mist, but this was no gifted mortal. This was a legionary plated in brushed steel that could barely contain the awesome power he commanded.

  ‘Perhaps I will offer more of a challenge?’ said Dio Promus.

  His psychic hood blazed with aether power and Sanakht felt the unbreakable mental architecture of Ultramar’s teachings.

  ‘Run,’ said Sanakht.

  A psy-blizzard engulfed the Scarab Occult as howling Wolves battered against them like barbarians of antiquity facing the legions of the Romanii. Bolts caromed explosively from battleplate as ice-wreathed axes hacked at the silver-steel hafts of Sekhmet psy-blades.

  Gunfire stitched along the gallery and grenade explosions sent jagged fragments of hot steel flying. Its width denied the Thousand Sons weight of numbers, but they had other, greater advantages.

  Or so Ahriman had thought.

  Aether lightning sparked harmlessly and firestorms guttered in the teeth of the Fenrisian snowstorm. Raptures to boil the blood dissipated, and power to draw forth lethal nightmares vanished like mist.

  The Feathered Ones and Sun Scarabs fought the screeching automata to their rear and flank as Memunim’s few Ankharu Blades swatted leaping Mechanicum warrior-thralls from the air with kine blows and bolter rounds.

  The structure shook with seismic force as broadsides from the enemy warships in the void pummelled it with mass drivers and macro-cannons. A braying war-horn echoed with lunatic fury. Impossible to know whether it was near or far, friend or foe.

  Ahriman kept his body between the flying shrapnel and the mortals he had come to find. All three were bleeding freely from scores of cuts, and they were the least wounded.

  Four of the Scarab Occult were already dead.

  Because Onuris Hex led them as he always did, wielding lethal fusions of aether powers: seersight to guide their blows, kine fields for added protection, biomancy to sustain them and channelled Pyrae fires to scorch the earth.

  But their enemies were not undefended. The frosted plates of their armour were cut with marks of aversion and hung with wolf-paw fetishes, furred talismans and beaded charms such as a woad-smeared shaman might craft.

  Crude defences, but effective for a while.

  Ever the Thousand Sons forgot Ahriman’s first principle.

  Legionaries first, psykers second!+

  Onuris Hex assimilated Ahriman’s command instantly, eschewing his psychic mastery in favour of his warrior skills. He spun the hooked end of his weapon around a Wolf’s leg and pulled him off balance. The warrior to his left thrust for the Wolf’s exposed throat. One of his Fenrisian brothers caught the descending blade and rammed it into the floor. He fired a mass-reactive into the Sekhmet warrior’s faceplate.

  The metal deformed under the impact, but held firm.

  A momentary gap opened.

  A Wolf with a bod
y and limbs forged in bare steel saw it and threw himself forwards like a battering ram. The Scarab Occult reeled before the hammer-blow of his charge.

  It was all the Wolves needed. A howling madman leapt into the gap, swinging a twin-bladed felling axe as though it weighed nothing at all. Cold lightning flickered as its edge clove metal and the rest of the Wolves followed him.

  One with a saw-toothed harpoon spear and another with an ice-bladed sword forced a wedge into the shield-wall, turning the battle into a swirling free-for-all.

  Ahriman saw the storm-wreathed leader of the Wolves, a warrior whose helm was painted with a skull icon he had seen before. He nodded in recognition of an equal.

  The Wolf pointed to Ahriman, as though claiming a kill.

  I see you, Ahzek Ahriman,+ sent the Rune Priest.

  His voice echoed like dry winds over bleak tundra.

  Flakes of snow fell between them with infinite slowness as they conversed at the speed of thought, the warriors around them fighting as if in a dream.

  How is it you know me?+

  I see your wyrd. It ends badly.+

  Who are you?+

  Bödvar Bjarki, Rune Priest to Jarl Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot of Tra, blood-brother of Ulvurul Heoroth, called Longfang.’

  Rune Priest,+ sneered Ahriman. +I met one of your kind. His name was Othere Wyrdmake. He too spoke of wyrd, but now he sleeps on the red snow of Prospero.+

  I felt you unmake his thread that day,+ said Bjarki. +I wonder if you know what that cost you?+

  Ahriman’s eyes darted to his heqa staff. Once it had been blue and gold, but moments after Wyrdmake’s death it had darkened to ebon black.

  I will do the same to you,+ promised Ahriman.

  No, that is not my wyrd.+

  Before Ahriman could reply, booming impacts rang out like the pealing of the mighty division bell summoning the Council of Terra to the Hegemon. The shout of an insane god-engine filled the chamber, and the link between Ahriman and Bjarki was abruptly severed.

  Zalgolyssa smashed its way inside, and the combat on the gallery paused at the sight of it. The Reaver’s carapace bled rust-coloured oil and vented poisonous fumes in labouring breaths. Like an apex carnivore of antediluvian times, it loosed a thunderous roar and lifted its left arm. A length of berthing chain hung from its clawed fist, and at its end was the severed head of a bronze-armoured Warhound.