The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  Ahriman turned to Lucius and the swordsman flinched as Ahriman’s voice echoed within his skull.

  Be swift,+ he sent.

  ‘Please,’ said Lucius, ‘it’s me.’

  The nullifying properties of Nikaea’s arena had been smashed by the bombardment. Complex geomantic arrangements of psychically inert materials had been blown to dust, and only the lingering traces of its power remained. To a warrior whose powers had been honed to a razor’s edge in the belly of a Black Ship, this was nothing.

  Hathor Maat’s power was a subtle knife in the mind of the mortal Ahriman had indicated, a scalpel that softly reimagined the architecture of his neocortex. He did not rush his work, nor did he employ more power than was necessary. Excessive force would alert the Imperial psykers that something was amiss within one of their allies.

  The decay of the meat within the man’s skull repelled Hathor Maat. He was dying, but more than that, his every waking moment was consumed with the terror of his body’s betrayal.

  No better crack in armour than fear…

  Hathor Maat plunged deep into the mind and body of Magos Umwelt Uexküll, undoing the damage done by the neurodegenerative disease and restoring life to dead cells and atrophied muscles. In the blink of an eye he undid years of decay and sickness. Muscles swelled with new growth and Hathor Maat felt hope flare in the man’s mind.

  After fear, hope is the final twist of the knife.

  Now he withdrew his power, and the creeping malady returned like a black corruption – an invisible battle fought at the cellular level.

  Hathor Maat felt the man’s terror and poured power into him, driving back the disease once more. Over and over again he alternated curing and afflicting him, each act of healing accompanied by a whispered seduction.

  He was dimly aware of Ahriman’s voice beyond the shell of bone in which he worked, but paid little attention to it. Whatever he was saying was irrelevant, simply a means to distract their enemies and give Hathor Maat time to bait the hook of betrayal.

  Uexküll experienced his potential futures over and over at the speed of thought. He saw his body’s final, inevitable fall to the dreadful affliction. Hathor Maat projected images of Uexküll lying twisted and soiled in a fused ball, abandoned by his fellow adepts as being too disgusting and too hideous to be around. He was a burden, cared for by only rancid, meat-bodied servitors until his body could endure no more and finally ended its wretched, pain-filled existence.

  Hathor Maat poured his own terror of mutation and decay into this assault on Uexküll’s mind, raising the man’s fear to inhuman levels.

  Then he unveiled his temptation.

  Hathor Maat showed Uexküll as tall and powerful, blessed with physical perfection and a body that could resist all forms of disease and cellular entropy. Flesh that would never fail him, never weaken or become infirm.

  A body raised up as a god amongst men.

  Please! cried Uexküll within his own skull. Heal me!

  I will,+ promised Hathor Maat, +but I require something of you.+

  Anything!

  Anything?+

  Heal me and I am yours!

  Lucius had never met another warrior his equal in terms of speed.

  Yes, Sanakht was proficient – the scar bisecting his face was proof of that – but his skill with a blade was enhanced by precognitive powers. Even Nykona Sharrowkyn, the little raven who had killed him on the world of the fictive Angel Exterminatus, had been trained to wield powers beyond any normal warrior.

  But in the end, neither was as naturally swift as Lucius.

  He dived forwards, rolling to one knee and snapping his left arm out. The barbed whip unravelled from his wrist like the lashing tongue of an insectile predator.

  It cracked the air like a gunshot.

  The finely tapered end of the whip coiled around Sister Caesaria’s neck like a garrotte. Spiteful thorns swelled as Lucius wrenched his arm back like a slamming piston.

  Barbs and razor-fine edges tore through meat and metal.

  Blood fountained as Caesaria’s head fell from her shoulders.

  And the greater portion of her pariah powers died with her.

  Promus watched Sister Caesaria fall, her helmeted head rolling away into the rubble. He ducked for cover and shouted over to the robotic form of Magos Araxe.

  ‘Kill Lemuel!’ he roared. ‘Do it now!’

  But the piston-driven arm didn’t crush Lemuel’s neck.

  Instead, it released him.

  Araxe’s robot body turned towards Magos Uexküll, and even though it possessed no features to which human emotions could be ascribed, Promus sensed its confusion. Its limbs juddered as it attempted to move.

  How had Magos Araxe’s cybernetic body failed him?

  A moment later he knew.

  Beneath the steelwork struts of Uexküll’s gibbet harness, Promus saw his previously waxy, grey and dying body was now smooth and pink. He tasted sorcery on the air, hidden by Sister Caesaria’s power until now. Bjarki smelt the same thing and understood the significance of Uexküll’s transformation a fraction of a second quicker than Promus.

  ‘Maleficarum!’ cried Bjarki, swinging his frost blade in a short, brutal arc. Driven by all the fury and power of Fenris, Bjarki’s weapon clove Uexküll from shoulder to groin. Blood and oil sprayed as the betrayer’s body fell to the rock of Nikaea, but the damage had already been done.

  Lemuel stood unmolested before Magos Araxe, his body seething with newly unfettered power. He lifted from the rocky ground, gobbets of light dripping from his feet like molten glass.

  Promus swung his bolter to bear on the host flesh of Magnus’ soul-shards.

  He snapped off a shot as dozens of weapons blazed.

  In an instant, the space between the two forces was a hell storm of gunfire.

  Yet none of it reached its intended target.

  Scores of mass-reactives hung motionless in the air.

  ‘No,’ said Lemuel, rising farther into the air. ‘This won’t be settled by crude bullets and primitive blades. Not when there are so many buried secrets and revelations to be had.’

  Promus squeezed the trigger of his weapon again, but it refused to fire. He looked over at Bjarki, who shrugged and shook his head.

  The Thousand Sons looked equally surprised, stunned into immobility at this turn of events.

  Had they not expected this?

  Lemuel drifted higher, beyond the reach of any on the ground. Aether-fire wreathed his upraised limbs and cascaded from his body like sparks in a foundry.

  ‘These ruins are ill-suited to so grand a moment,’ shouted Lemuel, his eyes of cold fire sweeping the warriors below with inhuman disdain. ‘Such dramas as are to unfold for each of us demand a grander setting.’

  Dark rain boiled around Lemuel as he lifted yet higher and brought his arms down like the conductor of a grand orchestra at the moment of crescendo.

  The basalt floor of the arena bucked, heaving upwards as the rock split apart and newly wrought structures speared towards the sky. Bladed pillars of geometric stone punched upwards with ferocious speed, showering the warriors below in shards heaved from the very depths of the planet. Choking veils of dust billowed as gleaming walls of crystal and glass arose, forcing the legionaries in their path to separate or be crushed by their ascension. Promus vaulted the emerging walls and rising outcroppings of tessellated black stone as he ran towards Bjarki and his men.

  ‘Behold, the crystalline labyrinth!’ shouted Lemuel.

  A city was being raised here, tapered obelisks and walls of glass, ranging from transparent to opaque and variations in between. Promus and the others were at the centre of a titanic structure, its every plane angular and sharp-edged. Mirrored walls formed an ever-growing pyramid of dark and smoky glass that rippled as if stained with fuliginous oil.

 
An ancient necropolis was surfacing like a city submerged beneath an ocean for aeons and now emerging from its long entombment. It was a dark inversion of a place once famed for its wonders and miracles. It took Promus a moment to connect what he was seeing here with what he had only read about in remembrancers’ verse or after-action reports.

  ‘This is Tizca,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Bjarki, before he and his warriors were obscured by rising crystal walls. ‘This is the Underverse.’

  Twenty-Two

  World’s ending

  Labyrinth

  A single soul

  Amon exerted his kine powers to prevent yet another towering megalith from toppling. The immense stone cracked and shed a rain of sharpened fragments, but its fall slowed until more of the Thousand Sons lent their power to help him direct its fall outwards.

  The hundred-metre obelisk crashed to earth, throwing up a choking cloud of dust. Spalled shards of rock slashed down like napped flint blades. Amon nodded to his brothers, but they did not respond. He sensed the turmoil within them, and knew at least two were holding the horror of the flesh change at bay by the slenderest of margins.

  Amon let them go and released a hot breath, sinking down to his haunches in exhaustion. Ice limned his armour and sheened his skin in fractal patterns of frost. Yet sweat ran from him in rivers. The repercussions of wielding his powers constantly were searing through his bloodstream like molten glass.

  He pressed his palm to the ground, feeling the pained vibrations coming up through the rock. The world was unravelling beneath him, and he wished he had the strength to prevent its dissolution.

  But only one among them had power enough for that.

  All around Amon, the primitive city of the dead beasts lay in ruins, its pagan structures toppled by planet-wide earthquakes and global aether storms.

  The ongoing cataclysm had drawn the Crimson King’s remaining sons to his side, and they gathered in numbers not seen since first coming to the Planet of the Sorcerers. Each brought tales of insanity and destruction, of continents split apart, entire cities of light swallowed whole and the wounded heart of the world exposed.

  They spoke of mountains of glass exploding into glittering razor storms, of iron plains raining ferrous metal precipitation into the sky, and oceans of darkness pouring off the edge of the world. Hundreds more told tales of madness and entropic decay, of the skin of the world shedding itself into the Great Ocean.

  The Planet of the Sorcerers had only endured by Magnus maintaining its impossible structure and without him, their adoptive home world was tearing itself apart.

  How long could it last without him?

  Amon stood with a grimace of pain.

  The marrow in his spine ground like broken glass as he picked a path through the ruins towards Magnus. The sky blazed with lightning, reflecting on the war-plate of his brothers as they waited for their world to end.

  When did we become so fatalistic?

  We were once agents of change, a Legion who embodied notions of growth and development.

  How we have fallen…

  High overhead, Amon’s clockwork pyramid rotated with stately grace, two thousand metres above the exact centre of the city of menhirs. Its sides coruscated with flickering lightning and tens of thousands of the bejewelled manta-creatures circled its bronzed flanks. Amon limped towards the stretching and undulating shadow cast by his sanctum. If this world was indeed doomed, then he would face its end by his father’s side.

  Whispers and narrowed eyes followed Amon as he drew nearer to the centre of the city. His brother legionaries blamed him for what had become of their gene-sire, and he knew they were right to do so. Had it not been his argument that convinced their primarch to put aside his great work and return to face his degeneration? Had it not been Amon who bound him to this new and terrible fate?

  Directly beneath the bronzed pyramid, Magnus the Red sat surrounded by his grieving sons. Some flanked him in the self-assigned role of praetorians, while others knelt before him like supplicants before a king.

  Amon felt his heart break anew.

  The Crimson King’s burned body sat locked within the support throne in which Amon had been forced to place him. Its metal had writhed and run like molten gold moments after Amon had interred the primarch within its life-sustaining mechanisms.

  It had flowed over Magnus’ body to enfold him in a gleaming web, before writhing downwards to split the rock like the roots of a tree. It resembled the baroque throne of some ancient emperor, a prison and life-support in one.

  Amon lifted his gaze and stared into his father’s blackened, metastasised features; it was impossible to tell whether he was alive or dead, or existing in some state in between. He saw depthless pain in his primarch’s eye as it stared out over a realm that would die without him, but was killing him with every passing moment.

  Magnus had brought them here to save them from death at the hands of the Wolves, but Amon had condemned them to a far worse fate instead.

  ‘Where are you, Ahriman?’ he whispered.

  Where am I?

  The crystalline walls rose up like blades, driving the Thousand Sons apart and isolating the warbands from each other. Ahriman saw warriors crushed between converging walls or impaled on rising blades of glass.

  He rolled aside as a confluence of walls slammed together with the sound of glass breaking. Their surfaces were darkly translucent and veined with ribbons of ruddy illumination like sluggish blood vessels.

  The rough gravel and sand of the arena was gone, replaced with a reflective marble floor in which wheeling stars turned with a soft illumination.

  Ahriman…

  He looked up at the sound of his name, but a dizzying vertigo seized him as he saw the walls to either side of him soared to impossible heights, meeting at a far-distant vanishing point.

  ‘What is this place?’ said Tolbek, picking himself up and igniting fire at his fingertips.

  ‘Can’t you tell?’ said Hathor Maat, down on his knees with his bunched fists held tight to his chest.

  ‘I wouldn’t ask if I could,’ snapped Tolbek.

  ‘It’s Tizca,’ said Ahriman, rising to his feet. ‘Or at least another version of it.’

  ‘Where’s Sanakht?’ said Hathor Maat. ‘Or anyone else for that matter?’

  Ahriman turned a full circle, but could see no sign of the swordsman. He listened for any indications that the rest of his warbands were nearby.

  He heard nothing.

  ‘We are to face this alone,’ he said, edging forwards and keeping his hand pressed to the dark glass. It was warm to the touch and thrummed with a subtle vibration, like the iron bulkhead of a starship.

  Ahriman…

  ‘Did you hear that?’ he asked.

  ‘Hear what?’ asked Hathor Maat.

  ‘My name,’ said Ahriman. ‘Someone called my name. You didn’t hear it, either of you?’

  ‘No,’ said Tolbek.

  Hathor Maat shook his head.

  Ahriman nodded to himself. Very well, if this was the game, then he would play it for now.

  ‘Then it’s onwards,’ he said. ‘To the heart of the crystal labyrinth.’

  Ahriman set off, with Tolbek and Hathor Maat following in his wake. The passageway continued onwards for what might have been a few hundred metres, but could have been far longer. The gradual motion within the depths of the crystalline walls made it next to impossible to gauge how far they had travelled with any degree of accuracy.

  He pushed on, taking turns at random, but crafting mnemonics to allow him to navigate back should that prove necessary. Yet a nagging sensation told him that even were he to turn back now, his return path would already have changed.

  Ahriman…

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll not fall prey to temptation. Not here.’

  ‘W
ho are you talking to?’ asked Hathor Maat.

  ‘No one. Myself, perhaps.’

  Ahriman made a left turn, arriving at a crossroads with identical passages splitting off in three directions. With nothing to differentiate them, Ahriman led his brothers right this time and his eyes were drawn inexorably to the swirling galaxies within the walls – so real it felt as if he could reach inside and touch them.

  Yes…

  His hand reached towards the spray of stars deep within the substance of the wall. Only at the last instant did he stop.

  The reflected hand in the glass was not his own.

  All is dust…

  Ahriman looked up to see a warrior standing on the other side of the glass wall. A legionary in the war-plate of the Thousand Sons, but blackened at its edges as if seared by heat powerful enough to scorch ceramite.

  Ahriman…

  ‘Sobek?’

  Hundreds of figures were arrayed in motionless, serried ranks behind his dead Practicus. They each stared at him with one accusing eye, the other a ravaged socket from which poured fine streams of dust.

  Sobek lifted his arm and slammed his fist against the wall. Splintering cracks spread from the impact.

  I won’t let you kill us all.

  Bjarki reached up to grasp the wolf-tail talisman hanging from the pauldrons of his war-plate. Olgyr Widdowsyn and Svafnir Rackwulf stood behind him as the gleaming walls rose around them.

  The arena of Nikaea was gone, and the Wolves found themselves at the centre of a cavern formed from glittering ice. Its walls shone like mirrors, throwing their distorted reflections back at them in infinitely repeating patterns. Sulphurous wisps of smoke rose from cracks in the rocky floor, together with what sounded like the creaking and groaning of lost ships trapped beneath the ice. A number of shadow-wreathed archways were carved into the walls, each with obscene symbols gouged in the rock.

  Breath misted before them.

  ‘Is this truly the Underverse?’ said Widdowsyn.

  Bjarki shrugged. ‘Maybe. Or maybe it is someone’s idea of what the Underverse is supposed to look like.’

  ‘Then where are the wights?’