The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  He stepped towards Magnus, and a surge of psychic energy along his blade set it aglow.

  Promus fought to control his anger, an anger that had, until this moment, smouldered like a banked fire, but which now threatened to grow into an inferno.

  He was dimly aware of the Ursarax spreading out to his left and the Vorax automata stalking to his right. He paid them no heed, all his fury, all his hurt and all the aching sense of a brotherhood betrayed on that day pouring out of him in a torrent of anguish.

  ‘You broke faith with the Emperor and you broke faith with your brothers!’ roared Promus. ‘We defended you, but you lied to us. To all of us. You have no right to feel anger towards us. None. You were warned. And for what did you betray us? A chance to gaze into the abyss and see what might stare back?’

  ‘You have no idea what I saw,’ said Magnus.

  Promus shook his head, taking another step towards Magnus. His allies followed suit, and he felt their unease. He shared it. Approaching a primarch with hostile intent, even a splintered shade of one, felt like suicide.

  But Promus was past caring.

  He aimed his sword at the Crimson King’s heart.

  ‘I remember the Emperor’s command, word for word – “Woe betide he who ignores my warning or breaks faith with me. He shall be my enemy, and I will visit such destruction upon him and all his followers that, until the end of all things, he shall rue the day he turned from my light.” Did you think that was an empty threat? Did you really think your lies would not be uncovered, that you could betray your father and He would not know of it?’

  The fire on Promus’ sword grew brighter with every word until it shone with the luminance of a sun.

  ‘You broke faith with the Emperor,’ repeated Promus, his heart breaking anew and his voice cracking as he spoke words that had been bottled inside him for years. ‘So I ask you this. What else could you expect but Primarch Russ and his Wolves being set upon you?’

  Magnus dropped lightly to the sands and marched towards them. Promus steeled himself for the fight to come, marshalling his psychic defences, and lifting his blazing sword to his shoulder.

  Magnus walked calmly into the heart of the arena like a champion gladiator ready for the bout to secure his freedom. The Vorax and Ursarax extended their curving lines around Magnus to surround him. With the exception of Olgyr Widdowsyn, who remained by Lemuel Gaumon’s side, the Space Wolves stood with their leader. Only Sister Caesaria did not draw closer, ensuring her null did not impede his and Bjarki’s powers while keeping Menkaura’s ability deadened.

  Magnus surveyed the forces arrayed against him and grinned.

  ‘Tell me, Master Nagasena, how many men did you bring with you when you climbed the steps of the Preceptory to kill the Crusader Host?’

  ‘Around three hundred Black Sentinels,’ said Nagasena. ‘And I never went there to kill them.’

  ‘Don’t say another word,’ snapped Promus.

  ‘Three hundred?’ said Magnus. ‘That would seem a woefully inadequate number for such a potentially dangerous mission.’

  ‘Perhaps, but one of your own sons prevented it from becoming a massacre,’ said Nagasena. ‘A warrior named Atharva.’

  Promus saw a change in the Crimson King’s aura, a pained regret that, on any other individual, he might have attributed to guilt. It vanished almost as soon as he noticed it.

  Magnus looked left and right at the ring of steel and flesh encircling him. He lifted his golden khopesh and swung it in a dazzling figure of eight, his eye alight with anticipation.

  ‘Do you think you have brought enough to kill me?’ he asked.

  ‘We shall see,’ said Nagasena.

  Magnus grinned and cracked his neck. ‘Indeed we shall.’

  Promus lowered his blade and looked back over his shoulder to where Credence Araxe and Vindicatrix awaited his word.

  He nodded and said, ‘Fire.’

  A floating sphere of warp flame illuminated the lee of an overhanging spur of coral upon Magnus’ island. It required no fuel and cast a warming glow over Amon and his gene-sire. They sat in silence, watching the dance of stars from a cliff high above the dark ocean.

  Within the water, it had seemed the stars were static, but from here Amon now saw they moved in an intricate pattern that appeared random but actually possessed an underlying motion as predictable as clockwork.

  He studied Magnus’ face. He had not thought it possible, but his father had profoundly aged. The courage that had seen him do battle against Leman Russ was still there, as was the wisdom in his hidden gaze, but the lines on his face were deep canyons, and his skin had the texture of yellowed vellum.

  Amon struggled to know what to say. He and his father had always enjoyed a close rapport, but the man before him felt like a stranger. Had so much time passed for Magnus that he had forgotten their friendship?

  Yet simply being in the presence of Magnus was invigorating, and the weariness that had plagued Amon as he climbed from the water was diminishing with every passing moment. But such renewal came at a price, and with his returning strength came all his old hurts. The grinding agony pulsing from the shattered ruin of his spine, spliced with innumerable grafts bonded by Pavoni artifice, would always be with him.

  ‘I am sorry, my son,’ said Magnus at last.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For the pain you suffer because of me,’ said Magnus, staring far out to sea. ‘And for leaving you in the Great Ocean as I did. That was not my intention, but I lost myself. I was… distraught and I had to begin the building of the Orrery alone.’

  Anger touched Amon, an emotion he had never thought to feel towards his primarch.

  ‘Then why ask for my help?’

  ‘I did?’

  ‘Yes. Atop the Obsidian Tower. You promised we would build the greatest library the galaxy had ever seen. You told me we would build it together.’

  Magnus shook his head with a rueful sigh.

  ‘I was boastful back then,’ he said.

  ‘Back then?’ asked Amon. ‘How long have you been here?’

  Magnus shrugged his raven-cloaked shoulders and sighed. ‘Too long. How many years did you spend in search of me?’

  ‘I do not know. A great many, I think,’ said Amon, hearing evasion in Magnus’ answer. ‘Time is hard to gauge on the Planet of the Sorcerers.’

  Magnus nodded, accepting that truth, and they lapsed into silence once more.

  ‘So you found a place for the Orrery,’ said Amon, looking out to sea.

  ‘I did,’ agreed Magnus, running a hand across his features, and Amon saw just how deep the weariness in his father’s soul ran.

  Seeing him so bowed made Amon want to weep.

  ‘The moment I left you I was… not myself,’ said Magnus, his blindfolded gaze never leaving the cold flames. ‘Much of me had been broken beyond repair, Amon. Too much has already been lost. In truth, I am not sure I can ever be the soul I once was. If I go back with you, I fear I will diminish with every breath.’

  Amon’s anger fled in the face of Magnus’ vulnerability.

  How little he and his brothers understood of their father’s burdens, and how much they had taken his immortal presence and unbending strength for granted.

  Magnus reached a hand out to the fire, staring into its pellucid depths. ‘When I… came back to myself, I was so very, very far from you in time and space. I wanted to bring you to me, but I could hear the song of the world ocean calling to me in my mind. And when I found this planet, the place where I would build the Orrery, and saw the scale of what lay before me, I knew I could only do it alone.’

  ‘Why alone?’ pressed Amon. ‘I could have helped.’

  ‘No, you would have been long dead by now.’

  Amon kept silent. Magnus’ words spoke of a time span where even a functionally immortal le
gionary would certainly perish.

  ‘And you spent all the time since then building the Orrery?’ asked Amon. ‘Filling its world ocean with memory?’

  ‘Among other things,’ said Magnus with a grin. ‘Sometimes I would fly the Great Ocean to gain a better understanding of how the galaxy had moved on without me. Once I even dared Lorgar’s Ruinstorm and bore a creaking ship of Vulkan’s lost sons through its tempests.’

  ‘So what happens now?’

  Magnus stood and his raven cloak parted to reveal his armour, burnished bronze and boiled red leather. ‘We go back to what remains of our great Legion. We attempt to finish what I have started here with the time I have left.’

  Amon stood and held out his hand. ‘We will finish it together.’

  ‘We shall,’ said Magnus.

  Part Three

  The Opening

  of the Mouth

  Seventeen

  Echoed souls

  Blood and sand

  A good man

  It took Ahriman and his companions another six hours to reach their destination. They traversed rugged haunches of mountain landscapes, great swathes of forest and vast bodies of polluted sludge that had once been glitter-sheened lakes.

  Acidic rain had poured down the mountains, poisoning the waters and laying waste to an ecosystem already reeling from centuries of global war. Flammable vapours leaked from the bedrock and the mountain rocks were hazed with imminent ignition.

  The Tupelov Lancers matched the punishing battle pace of the legionaries, riding their iron steeds along hardpan military roads that criss-crossed a devastated landscape of blackened wrecks, fire-gutted settlements and smouldering pyres of corpses stacked like cordwood.

  BonGiovanni led the way, threading a path through the thousands of Imperial camps spread around the burning Yeselti refinery fields as best he could, angling a course higher into the peaks surrounding Mount Cithaeron.

  A vast city of rusted booster cradles glimpsed on the western horizon was identified as Meghara, the first oathing city for the regiments of the Old Hundred before they shipped off world to begin the conquest of the solar system. BonGiovanni explained the city had been quarantined after militant anti-Unity cells released a rapacious gene-plague that fused living tissue and inanimate matter in hideous ways.

  The city was soon lost to sight as the mountains rose around them, and the higher they travelled, the more Terra opened up to them.

  Far to the east and south were wide valleys that once ran with meandering rivers, but which were now arid dust canyons. The brooding twilight of smog boiling from the refineries behind them filtered the failing sunlight through a haze of toxic layers.

  The war-ravaged majesty of humanity’s birthrock was intoxicating: striated bands of petrocarbon storms raging in the ionosphere, the glittering spires of a distant missile launch facility, ice-filled shell craters in wastelands of petrified forests, clashing magnetic borealae to the east where fleets of transports plied the shipping lanes running between Terra and its orbital plates.

  Ahriman still found it strange that such beauty could be found in wanton destruction. It was a contradiction that had seen brother set against brother since the first primate raised a bone club to dash out the brains of its fellow.

  His eyes were drawn up towards the distant shadow of a matt-black leviathan hanging in the clouds and attended by a fleet of gravitic tenders. It seemed impossible that such a titanic craft could possibly remain airborne, and the sight of it triggered a flash of…

  Corvidae foresight…?

  A memory?

  BonGiovanni’s warriors lifted their lances and let out whooping yells in salute of the gargantuan ship. They called it the Lux Ferem, and chanted its name over and over again, wishing it good hunting and safe travels.

  Eventually the convoy left the military roads and began climbing mountain paths that bore track marks of civilian transports. Their route followed a switchback higher and higher, eventually running through a jagged cleft between two peaks.

  Ahriman had never been to this place before, but recognised it from the description given by Camille Shivani. A thrill of anticipation travelled the length of his spine as he understood they were close to one of the shards of Magnus.

  The switchback pathway widened onto a plateau, shorn from the mountain by the detonation of a rogue shell. A trio of rugged Cargo-6 haulers were parked in a semicircle, their hulls dusty from the climb and with canvas awnings strung between them to form a sheltered camp.

  Ahriman led them into the site, taking a moment to study the dozens of crates, hermetic specimen-capsules, excavation equipment, numerous canvas tents and hab-shelters arranged in an orderly, logical fashion. Four servitors looked up with vacant expressions as they approached, but quickly returned to their dormant state.

  ‘This is it?’ asked Tolbek, standing before a doorway worked into the cliff face, a massive trilithon formed of two vertical slabs and a lintel set atop them.

  ‘How many other doorways going down the throat of the mountain do you think there are around here?’ snapped Hathor Maat. ‘Of course this is it.’

  The lancers dismounted and tethered their steeds to the trucks, an unnecessary and curiously anachronistic gesture. BonGiovanni nodded to Ahriman as his men formed up with their rifles pulled in tight to their shoulders at the doorway.

  ‘Go in and get them out,’ said Ahriman. ‘Ensure that nothing is damaged.’

  ‘Yes, my lord,’ said BonGiovanni, snapping down his visor. Lambent green photomech cursors slid across the horizontal vision slit.

  ‘When they’re clear, escort them back down the mountain to the Imperial lines,’ Ahriman added. ‘See to it quickly, but no harm is to come to them. Understood?’

  ‘We’ll get it done,’ BonGiovanni assured him, chopping his hand towards the doorway, and Ahriman heard clicking chirrups over the vox-pickups. The five lancers vanished into the darkness, stablights swiping left and right as they went deeper into the mountain.

  ‘Why are we letting those mortals go in first?’ asked Tolbek. ‘If you’re right and one of the shards of Magnus is below, then we should be the ones to find it.’

  ‘If I am right, then we are in the midst of events that have mystified our Legion’s scholars for decades.’

  ‘What events?’ asked Sanakht.

  ‘Better you do not know,’ said Ahriman. ‘We walk a razored line where even the slightest deviation could have grave ramifications.’

  Tolbek stepped in close to Ahriman, his fists ablaze.

  ‘More damned secrets, Ahriman?’ he hissed.

  ‘Be warned, Tolbek,’ said Sanakht, his blades half drawn.

  The Pyrae adept rounded on the swordsman.

  ‘Or what, you’ll draw those pretty little blades fully, try to take me on? It’ll take a better man than any of you to end my life.’

  ‘Simmer down,’ said Hathor Maat, placing a gauntlet on Tolbek’s shoulder guard. ‘There will be foes for your fire soon enough without having to turn it on your brothers.’

  Tolbek shrugged off Hathor Maat’s hand, heading towards the trilithon doorway in the mountain.

  ‘You wait here if you want, but I’m going in,’ he said.

  ‘Tolbek! Wait!’ called Ahriman, but the adept of the Pyrae ignored him and marched into the mountain. ‘Damn it… Let’s get after him before the fool ruins this entirely. Sanakht, wait here. Make sure there are no further arrivals and when those below return to the surface, ensure they are sent down the mountain alive.’

  Sanakht nodded and drew his blades with a spinning flourish as Ahriman and Hathor Maat plunged into the mountain. Ahriman’s auto-senses easily penetrated the dusty gloom of the tunnel, an ashlar-faced passageway leading to numerous galleries hung with caged lumens that fizzed and buzzed with sporadic power.

&n
bsp; He caught up with Tolbek in a vaulted chamber of offering bowls and dusty statues as the passageway angled steeply downwards. It spiralled in an arc, descending to a depth of two hundred metres.

  Ahriman heard arguing voices drift up from below, and irritation touched him that BonGiovanni hadn’t yet managed to clear the cavern. He pulled ahead of his battle-brothers and reached the bottom of the passageway, entering a high-roofed shrine cavern. Twin statues of jade and gold with moonstone eyes pupilled with obsidian stood at its farthest end.

  Sixteen mortals in conservators’ robes stood in numb incomprehension, their hands raised as the Tupelov Lancers trained their rifles on them.

  ‘Why are these civilians still here?’ asked Ahriman.

  No one answered, and Ahriman sighed. ‘I asked a question,’ he said.

  ‘We’re clearing them now, lord,’ replied BonGiovanni.

  ‘Hurry.’

  The hussars began herding the bewildered mortals towards the chamber’s exit. A few mumbled in protest, but their defiance was half-hearted, too cowed by the unexpected arrival of the Legiones Astartes.

  One man took a hesitant step towards Ahriman, holding out a holographic pass-pad.

  ‘Please,’ he said in desperation. ‘Please, we’re licensed conservators. See?’

  The hologram bloomed to life, but Ahriman didn’t give it a second glance. He knew it was genuine, but didn’t care.

  ‘My lord, this is a profound discovery,’ said the man. ‘It is beyond value. It should be preserved for the benefit of future generations. My team has the expertise. The right equipment too. Please, lord.’

  ‘This area is not safe,’ said Ahriman. ‘You will remove yourselves.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘I have given you an order, civilian.’

  ‘My lord, which Legion do I have the honour of being protected by?’

  ‘The Fifteenth.’

  The man nodded. Clearly he knew who they were. Ahriman studied this man, feeling like he ought to know him.

  Or maybe that he already did.

  ‘What is your name?’ he asked as the lancers led the rest of the mortals from the shrine, leaving only this solitary man behind. His eyes widened in awe as Hathor Maat and Tolbek entered the chamber.