The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  With the pain under control, Amon’s warp sight pierced the psychic conflagration Magnus had unleashed.

  The Crimson King had vanished.

  Amon was utterly alone.

  And the things in the darkness fell upon him.

  Peace of a sort had fallen on Kamiti Sona. The battle was over and the tally of the dead was being made. Yasu Nagasena stood alone in the ruins of the main gallery, surrounded by blackened corpses of its former inmates. The Vorax swept the chamber searching for signs of life, ending any who still had breath in their lungs. The reek of burning bodies clung to him like a shroud.

  The Thousand Sons were gone, borne away on the back of the monstrous god-machine, but what had become of them was yet a mystery. A storm of witchery prevented any immediate pursuit, but Araxe and his Ursarax were even now sweeping the upper levels of the prison for signs of the red sorcerers.

  Nagasena stood over the first man he had killed this day. He dropped to his knees like a devotee in a fane, ready to prostrate himself before his god. He grunted in pain. His side was a fiery mass of bruising and cracked ribs, but that was a small price to pay for his life.

  The beautiful swordsman with the likeness of the primarch Fulgrim had thrown him contemptuously from the upper gallery, but a leaping Ursarax caught him and bore him to the ground.

  Nagasena had lived, but Shoujiki had not.

  He lifted the broken sword, its blade ending in a clean break a handspan above the circular guard. Lifting it to his lips, he kissed the length of gleaming steel before turning and ramming it into the corpse.

  ‘Your name is Shoujiki, which means honesty,’ he said, bowing to the embedded blade. ‘You were my virtue and my burden. You saved my soul and my life. For this I thank you.’

  Nagasena clasped his hands before him, letting the sounds of burning corpses and the crackle of flames wash over him.

  ‘Before you came to me, I was a fool and a braggart, a man of low morals and wicked temperament. But when Master Nagamitsu united us, your truth became part of me. I have never spoken falsely or dishonoured your name since.’

  Nagasena lifted his head and sang softly in the tongue of his homeland, the words lilting.

  ‘Broken blade, lie you there,

  Deep buried in a vanquished foe.

  As I draw new steel from sheath,

  Look you now on a setting sun,

  Sharp shearer on this field of death.

  Your time of rust and rest is here.

  Now repose, my lightning blade,

  Who raised kings and cast them down.

  Brother to my worthless hand,

  Farewell, truth-bearing sword!’

  With the words spoken, Nagasena felt another piece unravel from his soul, a lock placed around the wickedness of his old life crumble to dust. The oath he’d laid upon Shoujiki’s blade had been his anchor, his moral compass when such things were the most prized gifts of all.

  He felt the presence of someone standing behind him, someone with sense enough not to interrupt his ritual. From the warning hackles rising on his neck, he knew it to be Bödvar Bjarki.

  Nagasena stood in one fluid motion, turning on his heel and leaving Shoujiki embedded in the corpse. The Rune Priest cast his gaze around the carnage with the dispassionate eye of a man utterly unfazed by such bloodletting.

  ‘Can you repair it?’ asked Bjarki, nodding towards the broken sword.

  ‘Can you bring your fallen brother back to life?’ snapped Nagasena, instantly regretting it. Bjarki bared his fangs, and but for the authority Nagasena carried, he would already be dead for speaking such thoughtless words.

  ‘I can’t,’ said Bjarki, ‘but a weapon is not alive.’

  ‘Forgive me, Bödvar,’ said Nagasena, clasping his hands before him. ‘Grief makes me speak without thinking. I just… I just thought you would understand what Shoujiki meant to me.’

  ‘That blade was the work of a master,’ agreed Bjarki, placing a giant hand on Nagasena’s shoulder. ‘Forged with craft and heart from the sharpest steel and dragon’s breath. And I know exactly what it was to you. But even so, such things can be remade.’

  ‘Not Shoujiki,’ said Nagasena.

  ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ said Bjarki. ‘Just do not mistake the blade for the man. One can break, but the other will endure.’

  ‘I hope you are right, my friend.’

  ‘That is for wyrd to know,’ said Bjarki, turning away.

  ‘I am sorry for the loss of Harr Balegyr,’ said Nagasena.

  Bjarki paused and nodded without turning back.

  ‘It was his time,’ he said with a fatalistic shrug. ‘We will give him his sending when we are far from this place.’

  ‘Sending?’

  ‘A farewell of sorts. As you gave to your blade,’ said Bjarki. ‘He should be returned to Fenris, but if our threads do not lead back to Asaheim, then somewhere with an ocean will do. His tribe were Vattja, hunters of the many-armed ones of the vatterdark. Harr should go down into the ocean.’

  ‘May I be present for his sending?’

  Bjarki looked back over his shoulder.

  ‘No,’ he said, striding away. ‘Come.’

  Nagasena followed the Rune Priest.

  ‘Have you received any word from Sister Caesaria?’ he asked.

  ‘No, which is bad, but she is not our responsibility.’

  The Space Wolves were gathered around a pyre of burning bodies. Thick smoke hid the worst of their deformities, but not enough to make it easy to look upon them. The pack turned at their approach. Their yellow eyes were sullen and hostile with suppressed aggression.

  ‘Let me kill this one,’ said Svafnir Rackwulf before Bjarki could speak. ‘He needs to walk with Harr Balegyr’s shade. A warrior should know the reason why the wyrd cuts his thread.’

  Nagasena looked past Rackwulf to where Olgyr Widdowsyn held the chain-leash of a painfully thin man of Nordafrik whose legs were clearly broken in several places. He clutched a chipped ceramic urn to his chest with his one remaining arm, and the lower half of his skull was enclosed by a brank’s bridle of knotted leather. His eyes were wide with terror at the sight of the Wolf pack, and Nagasena knew exactly why.

  ‘Lemuel Gaumon,’ he said, and the man looked at him with a pleading look of desperate hope. The remembrancer’s face as familiar to Nagasena as his own after so long spent studying his records. Five years in Kamiti Sona had aged him thrice that and melted the fat from his previously rotund frame.

  Nagasena knelt beside Lemuel and reached up to unbuckle the mask gagging the man.

  ‘That is not wise,’ said Bjarki. ‘You said this man was Ahriman’s apprentice. He is likely maleficarum.’

  ‘We can’t question him if he is gagged.’

  Bjarki grinned. ‘I can rip the truth out of him without needing to hear corrupt words,’ he promised, and the man whimpered in fear, struggling to push himself away even over the agony of two shattered legs.

  ‘I must, Bödvar,’ said Nagasena.

  Bjarki shrugged and took the chain-leash from Widdowsyn. He yanked Lemuel’s face upwards.

  ‘We will remove the brank, remembrancer,’ he said. ‘But know this. You die if I smell even a fart of sorcery from you.’

  Lemuel nodded and Bjarki dropped the chain. The splintered ends of broken bones in Lemuel’s legs ground together and he cried out in muffled pain through the mask.

  Nagasena looked Lemuel straight in the eye.

  ‘My name is Yasu Nagasena,’ he said. ‘I am going to remove this device so you can answer my questions. Speak truthfully and your injuries will be healed, but you should know it will be extremely dangerous to lie. Nod if you understand what I have said.’

  Lemuel did so and Nagasena carefully unbuckled the straps holding the leatherwork brank in place. Lemuel sucked in a juddering
breath as it was pulled clear, eyes wide with pain, skin slick with fear.

  ‘They took Camille,’ he said, the words coming out in a rush. ‘Please, you have to get her back. And Chaiya, she’s in one of the upper cells. The servitor-thing, it hit her. Maybe it killed her. I don’t know. Please can you look? Help her.’

  Nagasena held up a hand and Lemuel’s babble ceased.

  ‘The Thousand Sons took Mistress Shivani?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Mahavastu Kallimakus? They took him too?’

  Lemuel’s eyes flicked warily towards Bjarki, and Nagasena saw his terror of giving an answer that might see him killed.

  ‘No.’

  ‘They did not take him?’

  ‘He was never here.’

  Nagasena rocked back onto his haunches, processing this new information. He looked up at Bjarki, then returned his attention to Lemuel.

  ‘These are the facts as I understand them,’ he said. ‘You, Mistress Shivani and Mahavastu Kallimakus were aboard the Cypria Selene. A mass-conveyor intercepted by the Hrafnkel at the system Mandeville point. Are my facts in error?’

  Lemuel nodded. ‘Yes. No. I mean, not exactly. Chaiya was there with us too.’

  ‘Who is Chaiya?’

  ‘A native of Prospero,’ said Lemuel, and the Space Wolves spat at the mention of their enemy’s home world. ‘She and Camille were lovers. She left with us. She’s up in the gallery – you have to help her. Please.’

  ‘If you tell me what I need to know,’ said Nagasena. ‘Where is Kallimakus? Was he aboard the Cypria Selene?’

  ‘Yes, Mahavastu was with us on the Selene,’ gasped Lemuel, his face taut with ever-increasing pain. ‘But I don’t know what happened to him. I swear it. We were split up. They questioned us with our faces pressed to the dirt, mouths and eyes clogged with red earth. Men like him in leather masks with yellow eyes and knives of ice.’

  Lemuel wept uncontrollably. ‘They cut us into pieces, broke open our minds and ripped out every secret thought. Made us scream. Made us beg to die. And when they were done, they left us here in the dark. I swear by the Throne I don’t know what happened to Mahavastu. I never saw him in this place.’

  Nagasena looked into Lemuel Gaumon’s pain-filled eyes, searching for deception, but finding none. He took a breath and came to a decision.

  ‘If Chaiya is alive, I will bring her to you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ whispered Lemuel, his chest wracked with sobs.

  ‘And in return for your life and hers, you are going to help us find Ahzek Ahriman.’

  ‘What?’ cried Lemuel, the hope in his eyes retreating. ‘No! Please, not again. Don’t take me anywhere near those monsters. I beg you, please. Kill me if you must, but please don’t make me face Ahriman again.’

  Bjarki grunted with impatience and knelt at Lemuel’s side. He bared his fangs with a feral grin, one brow cocked. Lemuel cringed in terror from the giant Wolf.

  ‘I am called Bödvar Bjarki, Rune Priest to Jarl Ogvai Ogvai Helmschrot of Tra, blood-brother of Ulvurul Heoroth, called Longfang,’ said Bjarki. ‘Tell me, mortal, who do you fear most right now? Me or Ahzek Ahriman?’

  ‘You.’

  ‘But which of us do you hate more?’

  ‘Him,’ said Lemuel without pause.

  ‘And you want him dead, ja?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Bjarki grinned. ‘Good, then it’s settled. You’ll tell us all you know about the red sorcerers and how to find them. Then you’ll tell me why they risked so much to free you.’

  ‘But I don’t know anything.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Bjarki, standing and spitting again, as though just talking to Lemuel had somehow sullied him. The Rune Priest turned to Olgyr Widdowsyn.

  ‘You know something of mortal flesh,’ he said. ‘Make sure he doesn’t die and bring him aboard the Doramaar.’

  ‘I’ll see it done,’ said Widdowsyn, reaching down and all but throwing Lemuel over his shoulder. The remembrancer screamed in pain as he was carried away.

  ‘Was he telling the truth?’ asked Nagasena.

  ‘Yes, or at least he thinks he is.’

  ‘You believe his mind could have been tampered with?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be the first time they tried it,’ said Bjarki, tapping a finger to his blood-streaked forehead. ‘Sorcerers are tricky like that. Perhaps none who spend any time with the sons of Magnus are to be trusted.’

  ‘I sincerely hope you are wrong,’ said Nagasena. ‘For he is our best hope of finding the Thousand Sons.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ said an exhausted voice behind them.

  Bjarki snarled as he caught a familiar scent and spun on his heel, one hand reaching for his weapon, the other pistoning out before him. A pale nimbus of light wreathed his gauntlet.

  Nagasena followed the Rune Priest’s lead and reached for Shoujiki, but found his scabbard empty. The volkite was gone too, but then he saw he would have no need of weapons.

  Dio Promus dragged an unconscious warrior armoured in crimson plate whose crumpled face was a mask of blood.

  ‘His name is Menkaura.’

  Amon sucked in a breath of furnace-hot air. It scorched his lungs with aetheric power. His eyes snapped open and he stared into the dark heart of an enormous warp storm raging over the Obsidian Tower. The eye of the storm seethed with power. Forking bolts of lightning exploded around him. Broken spires fell from the tower in cascades of vitrified stone.

  Pain surged through Amon, almost blinding him with its intensity. He screamed at the memory of nightmare claws and terrible fangs tearing his subtle body, feral warp-things feasting on him in frenzied packs.

  Too many to fight; he’d barely escaped back to his body.

  He tried to rise, but couldn’t move.

  Amon remembered the golden support throne enclosing his crippled body. After the limitless freedom he’d so recently known, immobility was a fresh terror discovered anew.

  ‘Father!’ he screamed, but the storm only laughed at him.

  He twisted his head, seeing no sign of his primarch.

  Veins bulged at his throat as he struggled to move, feeling ghosts of sensation in his limbs. How long had they been flying the Great Ocean? How much had his body healed in his spirit’s absence?

  Not enough.

  The storm was growing bolder. Thunder boomed, echoing from towering mountain ranges that had not existed when Amon last looked from this summit. Hurricane winds battered the Obsidian Tower and enormous chunks of rock fell from its sides like ice calving from a glacier.

  Amon forced himself into the lower enumerations, imposing calm where only disorder ruled. His body was yet ruined, but it was still his to command. If not by biological means, then by psychic ones.

  The wind howled with aether power and Amon drew it into his flesh, screaming as his abused body started to come undone from the inside. He forced kine power into his bones, willing himself to stand as the Obsidian Tower shook itself apart.

  Slowly, so slowly, every millimetre upright a battle, Amon rose from the throne.

  ‘Magnus the Red!’ he yelled into the storm’s teeth. ‘Show yourself!’

  Each step was agony, as though his bones were made of slowly fracturing glass. He forced the pain aside and walked to the centre of the swaying tower. He forced himself to kneel, placing a hand flat against its sigil-etched surface as he sought some trace of his gene-sire within.

  There was nothing.

  The Obsidian Tower was abandoned.

  Amon stood with a grunt of pain, knowing that no artes of the Pavoni could undo the damage he was doing to himself. He sent a psychic summons into the storm and limped to the tower’s crumbling edges.

  Firestorms painted every horizon in red. The Planet of the Sorcerers burned in chaotic flux. Amon felt the wildness of the w
orld slipping beyond all hope of control, its unfettered power of creation released from the dominance of intellect.

  ‘Where did you go?’ said Amon.

  No answer was forthcoming, but Amon could yet feel his father’s presence, distant, faint and so terribly lost.

  ‘A mind without purpose will wander in dark places,’ he said, as a roaring blast of turbines cut through the deafening sound of cracking stone.

  Amon looked up as his Stormbird swooped from the storm like the phoenix on its way to the last fire. It circled the tower once before hovering in front of Amon and lowering its assault ramp.

  He stepped onto the aircraft just as the Obsidian Tower collapsed in an avalanche of inert rock and soulless glass. It slumped into a pyramid of glittering black shards, a dark mockery of all they had lost.

  The Stormbird turned from the ruin of the Crimson King’s tower, and Amon swept his gaze out over the maddened world in search of the primarch.

  ‘I will bring you home, father,’ he said.

  Though the battle for Kamiti Sona was over, violent spasms still smouldered in its collapsing depths. Vengeful Sisters of Silence hunted packs of hooting, grunting beasts in vicious skirmishes throughout the monolithic vaults of the orbital prison.

  True to his word, Yasu Nagasena located a woman that matched Lemuel Gaumon’s description in the upper cells. She lived, but had suffered a fractured jaw and was badly concussed. With most of the inmates dead and the captives secure, Kamiti Sona was being abandoned. Promus, Nagasena and Bjarki led the Imperial forces through the destruction left in the traitor Reaver’s wake.

  They made their way back to the embarkation decks through smashed gateways and ruined hallways of crushed stonework. Muttering wraiths lingered in the shadows, and Bjarki was heard to speak words of warding against new-birthed wights of the Underverse.

  At length, Dio Promus led them onto the upper embarkation deck and such a scene of devastation to make even the staunchest blanch. Hundreds of torn bodies lay strewn around the wreckage of the entire deck: bronze-armoured Sisters, entire maniples of robots and enemy legionaries without blazons or any identifying marks on their armour.