The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  He allowed himself to sink into the water, digesting the works of the great Jovian architects, the life of a worker in the labour camps surrounding the Emperor’s great Himalazian works, and shared the thrill of excavating a long-lost city beneath the dust bowl south of Tali.

  He swam back to the surface, giddy with the sheer joy of learning things thought beyond his understanding. But as he prepared to set off again, he saw something of the world around him had changed.

  Ahead, the edge of the horizon was broken by the outline of something rising from the water.

  An island?

  Amon struck out towards it with powerful strokes.

  As he drew nearer, a quiescent sense of dread crept up on him. Something of this island appeared somehow fixed where everything else around him was fluid and inconstant, filled with possibility and the potential for growth.

  After so liberating a time in the ocean, he did not relish setting foot on land where change was anathema, but what other choice was there? The island swiftly grew in scale, its dimensions impossible to guess, but clearly enormous.

  Amon saw the mass was not in fact one island, but many thousands, all linked by arched bridges like the steelwork frame beneath the Pyramid of Photep. He saw curious formations in the islands’ mass, suggestive of forms he felt he ought to recognise. Each resemblance was more profound than the last, but he could not be sure any were intended, for they changed upon his next glance.

  Perhaps this island was not so fixed after all.

  Amon reached its sheer edge and climbed from the water. Its substance was porous and gnarled like an ancient coral reef heaved to the ocean’s surface. Handholds were plentiful, and Amon easily climbed the ten metres or so to the top of the cliffs.

  He hauled himself over the top and stood to survey his surroundings. The coral island resembled the dune sea of a black desert, the ground underfoot gritty like broken glass or granulated basalt.

  He heard the soft whisper of the ocean’s infinite spaces and limitless wonders. Amon half turned back towards the water, but his resolve held firm and he resisted the call to swim forever in its depths. Instead, he pushed on, climbing steep ridges and unnaturally shaped contours. The ground crunched underfoot as he climbed towards what he hoped was the centre of the island.

  Without the ocean’s buoyancy, his body felt inordinately heavy, far worse than when his subtle body returned to flesh. His bodyglove hung from a physique wasted by the many years he had spent following the secret footsteps of his lost father.

  Never in his life had he felt so weak.

  Amon stumbled and sank to his knees. The breath rattled in his chest as though filled with glassy fragments and his eyes stung with abrasive dust blown from the ground.

  He heard the crunch of footsteps across the coral’s surface and wearily lifted his head, squinting through eyes gummed with dust and stinging sweat.

  A tall man swathed in a ragged cloak of dark feathers was coming towards him with faltering strides, using a heqa staff fashioned from driftwood for support. His hair was matted grey, pulled back over wrinkled skin to a long scalp-lock that reached to the ground behind him. Tied across the centre of his skull and obscuring his eyes was a filthy bandage, one side stained with ancient blood.

  ‘Who approaches?’ asked the blind man. ‘Ahriman? Is that you?’

  Amon shook his head, too horrified at what had become of the father he had so loved to form a coherent reply.

  He licked his lips.

  ‘No,’ he replied at last. ‘It is Amon.’

  ‘Amon?’ said the blind man. ‘Oh, my son, of course… You came. You finally came…’

  ‘I crossed the world to find you,’ said Amon, his head sinking down over his chest and tears spilling down his cheeks as it dawned on him that his lonely quest was finally over.

  The blind man’s hand reached down to touch his shoulder.

  ‘My son,’ said Magnus the Red. ‘Welcome to the Orrery.’

  From darkness to light.

  Ahriman had read the near-death accounts of drowning victims, and in many such cases, the survivors spoke of seeing a bright light in the instants before being hauled back to life. Some attributed these experiences to witnessing something divine, but Ahriman had long known that to be false. Such experiences were simply dissociative defence mechanisms that occurred in times of extreme danger, a means of distracting someone from the imminence of their own death.

  Yet as the dark water bore him onwards, he saw the brightest light in the world rushing towards him as though down a narrow tunnel.

  The feeling of weightlessness fell away in a heartbeat and the cold of the water was replaced with a searing heat. Ahriman’s vision blurred, greying out as he passed from utter darkness to flickering orange brightness in a heartbeat. Brutal vertigo slammed into him and he fell to his knees, palms splayed before him.

  Ahriman ripped off his helmet and cast it aside, retching what little remained in his stomach. His transhuman physiology made him all but immune to such weakness, but his limbs trembled, his vision spun and his gut clenched as though poisoned.

  He moaned and made a fist with his hands, gathering up black and greasy clumps of oil-soaked sand. The source of the intolerable heat was behind him, and he looked over his shoulder to see a desert burning from horizon to horizon.

  A great wall of orange flame licked the sky, and towering spires of carcinogenic smoke had turned day into the ancients’ vision of a fiery underworld. Structures melted within the flames: silver-steel silos and vats. Kilometre-high drilling derricks drooped like waxen effigies, and container hangars collapsed inwards as their walls bent and split.

  Blackened vehicles sat abandoned before the blazing refinery, thousands of wheeled trucks, armoured personnel carriers, main battle tanks and gutted tankers. The smell of burning metal and flesh was overpowering. Ahriman covered his mouth with a gritty palm, breathing mouthfuls of ash that tasted like it had spewed from a crematorium.

  He staggered to his feet and grabbed his helmet before lurching away from the wreckage of the burning refinery. His eyes stung with acrid tears and his throat was scorched raw with heat and smoke inhalation. He walked until he could walk no more, finally crashing down behind a gutted Rhino lying in a blackened shell crater.

  Ahriman coughed up great wads of frothed black matter and raised a hand to shield his eyes from the heat and brightness of the city-sized conflagration.

  Other figures moved through the haze, but only when they lurched from the smoke could he tell they were fellow legionaries. Hathor Maat emerged first, looking drained by his experience. Sanakht came next, the swordsman for once looking less than perfectly balanced. Tolbek came last, and even the Pyrae adept was not untroubled by the flames.

  One by one, they sank to their haunches in the lee of the wrecked vehicle.

  ‘Where are we…?’ managed Sanakht.

  ‘I do not know,’ replied Ahriman.

  Tolbek reached up and wiped a gauntleted hand across the blackened hull of the Rhino. He smeared the soot, but enough cleared to reveal an icon painted onto its side, that of a great king casting what looked like serrated teeth from his outstretched hand.

  ‘You recognise this?’ he said.

  Ahriman nodded. ‘King Kadmus sowing the dragon’s teeth.’

  ‘The icon of the Yeselti,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘Throne, does that mean…’

  Ahriman pushed himself to his feet and climbed to the lip of the crater. Beyond its blasted lip he saw an encamped army of global conquest, tens of thousands of armoured vehicles, millions of soldiers and an armada of hovering aircraft.

  All under eagle-struck banners of crossed lightning bolts.

  ‘We are on Terra,’ he said.

  Lemuel studied each of the statues as they climbed the processional stairs higher into the mountain. The faces were not unfamiliar to
him; he had seen a great many of them upon marble plinths arranged around Occullum Square at the heart of Tizca.

  ‘Do you know them?’ asked Widdowsyn.

  ‘Once I did,’ said Lemuel, unable to mask the bitterness welling within him, ‘but your interrogator’s psychic trawling, and years of abuse in that orbital hellhole purged the memory of their names from my mind.’

  Widdowsyn shrugged, as if the matter were of no import, and anger touched Lemuel.

  ‘My life and my suffering means nothing to you, does it?’

  Widdowsyn paused, hearing the anger in Lemuel’s voice.

  ‘You lay down with maleficarum,’ said the warrior. ‘You only remain alive because Yasu Nagasena thinks you will be of use in helping us destroy the remnants of the Red Cyclops. I thought you understood that?’

  ‘I… I thought…’

  ‘You thought what? That you were forgiven? There is no forgiveness for consorting with evil. There is only penance.’

  ‘So this?’ said Lemuel, holding up his arm and aiming the stump at Widdowsyn. ‘This is my penance?’

  ‘Fenrys hjolda, no!’ laughed Widdowsyn. ‘From what Bjarki tells, this is just the beginning of your journey.’

  As if this were the funniest thing he’d heard, Widdowsyn slapped a palm on his thigh and kept climbing, shaking his head with mirth.

  ‘Come,’ he shouted back. ‘You walk in my shadow or you die.’

  Lemuel trudged up the steps after him, letting the pain of his crooked legs fuel his anger towards his captors. He knew it was pointless. What good would anger do? But he sustained it nonetheless, imagining all manner of violence worked upon the Wolf’s head.

  He had reached one hundred and eight ways he would enjoy seeing Widdowsyn die before they reached the summit of the steps. Lemuel’s leg moved automatically, seeking the next step and finding that there were no more.

  It wasn’t the top of the mountain, not by a long way, but the air felt thin and the sun was perfectly framed over spires of rock too angular and too evenly spaced to be the result of any natural processes.

  The interior of the mountain’s flank had been reshaped in the likeness of a grand arena, like the killing grounds built by ancient Romanii kings to stage bloody games for the entertainment of the masses. At least five hundred metres in diameter, tiered arrays of stone benches climbed from the sand to a dizzying height.

  Enough to seat ten thousand souls.

  But only one awaited them.

  Lemuel’s bowels turned to water and his bladder cramped with the almost uncontrollable urge to empty itself.

  ‘No,’ said Lemuel, as if denying it would somehow make it not so. ‘No.’

  Seated upon a great throne of gold opposite them within the Emperor’s raised pavilion was the splintered soul-shard of Magnus the Red, clad in armour of bronze and with his glittering blade unsheathed across his thighs. Lemuel had never seen this aspect of the Crimson King, but it was clear this was the primarch arrayed for war.

  Magnus’ red hair was bound by a golden circlet with a red gem at its centre, and the hatred that flowed into Lemuel from the primarch’s burning eye was so singular it drove him to his knees, weeping in terror.

  His own human hate was a petty thing by comparison.

  Lemuel hated the Wolves for breaking his legs and locking him away in purgatory for five years. He hated them for being part of the reason the galaxy was aflame.

  But such grievances were insignificant when set against the razing of a world and the death of sons.

  ‘Do you like your place of execution?’ asked Magnus.

  The four legionaries marched from the wrecked Rhino towards the Imperial lines, gazing about themselves in wonderment. None of them had set foot on Terra in decades, nor had any truly expected to see it again.

  Even though the air was thick with petrochemicals and ash, every breath felt different.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘I’d always assumed the stories of travellers cast through time by the Great Ocean were allegorical or metaphors for deeper truths. I never expected them to be real.’

  ‘I don’t think any of us did,’ said Ahriman.

  ‘Then why did we follow the word of a daemon?’ demanded Tolbek, the vast inferno burning behind them inflaming his Pyrae passions. ‘On a straw-thin hope?’

  ‘It was the only hope we had,’ pointed out Sanakht.

  ‘You would agree with him, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Enough!’ snapped Ahriman as he saw Sanakht reach for his blades. ‘Look, our arrival has not gone unnoticed.’

  A demi-squadron of cavalrymen was riding towards them on gleaming steeds with flaming red pennons.

  ‘Didn’t our Legion take part in this fight?’ said Hathor Maat.

  ‘I believe we did, but whatever records there are of it were lost on Prospero,’ said Ahriman, searching his memory for what little information had been recorded of the Boeotian campaigns.

  ‘Then might we expect these men to be surprised to see four legionaries walking from the ruins of an enemy refinery?’ pointed out Sanakht, as the five riders lowered gleaming, steel-tipped lances.

  ‘They will be,’ agreed Ahriman with a note of real regret in his voice. ‘But we are Space Marines, and in this time the Legiones Astartes are all loyal to the Emperor.’

  The riders reined in their cybernetic steeds, and Ahriman saw they were green-jacketed hussars with plumed helms of an impractical-looking design that left their faces exposed.

  Their lances were lowered, but when they saw the nature of the warriors before them, they were swiftly raised. The lead rider spurred his steel horse forwards and socketed his lance in a holster worked into the mount’s flank.

  ‘I am Captain Berardo BonGiovanni,’ he said in thickly accented Gothic with the slow cadence of the Terran-born. ‘We weren’t expecting to see anyone walk out of that blaze this morning, let alone warriors of the Legions.’

  Ahriman nodded and said, ‘The fall of a Terran dynasty, even a rebel one, merits the attention of the Fifteenth.’

  ‘Indeed so, lord,’ replied BonGiovanni, ‘but some advance word would have been a courtesy.’

  Ahriman was impressed. The arrival of the Emperor’s legionaries would intimidate most mortals, but BonGiovanni was maintaining his composure. His riders spread out in a line, lances raised and their crimson gonfalon snapping in the rogue thermals billowing from the refinery.

  ‘You are, of course, correct,’ replied Ahriman. ‘But matters are afoot that require immediate action, which does not always allow for professional courtesy between fellow warriors. My apologies to yourself and Commander Selud.’

  ‘You’re Legion, my lord,’ said BonGiovanni. ‘You don’t need to apologise, but Commander Selud’s not in charge any more.’

  ‘Of course not,’ agreed Ahriman as his recall of this moment in the Legion’s history caught up with the conversation. ‘He was removed at… oh six thirty-five, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He was,’ said BonGiovanni. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘You recognise to which Legion I belong?’

  ‘You are the Fifteenth, lord, by your millennial markings.’

  ‘Then that should answer your question.’

  BonGiovanni nodded with a reckless grin and shifted in his saddle, as if debating whether to say anything in reply.

  ‘Captain?’ asked Ahriman.

  ‘Those matters you mentioned,’ asked BonGiovanni, obviously keen to earn glory at the side of the Emperor’s finest. ‘Can we help?’

  ‘As a matter of fact, you can,’ said Ahriman.

  Promus walked carefully towards Magnus, feeling as though a host of unseen eyes were upon him. The rising bench seats were empty, but the sound of the wind blowing over them was like the soft murmur of myriad silent observers.

  ‘You know this pl
ace, don’t you?’ said Bjarki.

  Promus nodded.

  ‘He mocks us with what he has wrought. He knows I will recognise its significance.’

  ‘Then we mock him back,’ grinned Bjarki, turning and spitting on the ground, shifting his frost-bladed sword from hand to hand. Promus hadn’t even noticed he’d drawn it.

  ‘Hjolda!’ cried the Wolf towards Magnus, swinging his sword in muscle-loosening practice swings. ‘This is a grand fighting pit you’ve made, but I’ve seen better. On Fenris, the Fathsrk cut into the ice for theirs, but the Balt were more direct, ja? Bone spikes around the edges, a few heads on spears, that sort of thing. Ah, but the Ostmaan… Oh, the Ostmaan. Even if their land-thirst was slaked and there was no need to go on the murder-make, they would reave and take many captives. They would pit tribe against tribe and make red snow underfoot even when there was no snow lying.’

  Bjarki paused, grinning like a madman as he turned in a slow circle and nodded slowly. The Rune Priest planted his sword in the ground before him.

  ‘But it will do for us to slay you again.’

  Promus stood with Bjarki on his left as Magnus rose from his throne. The primarch’s single eye blazed with anger.

  ‘Do you really think you can defeat me?’ he asked.

  Bjarki shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. Since when does that matter?’

  ‘It matters,’ said Nagasena, appearing at his other shoulder and drawing his borrowed blade. ‘If Menkaura is to be believed, it matters a great deal.’

  Though no love had been lost between Promus and the swordsman, to see Nagasena without Shoujiki was somehow unnatural. No matter that this sword was perfectly balanced and crafted by a master, it was not his. It did not bear the promise Nagasena had made upon it.

  ‘The Blind Oracle,’ said Magnus. ‘Yes, let me see my son.’

  ‘You were warned,’ continued Promus, ignoring the primarch’s request and unsheathing his psy-sword of blue steel and crystal. ‘I was there. I stood with Targutai Yesugei and many of my brothers to speak for you. We did this unasked, because we believed it was the right thing to do.’