The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  Ululating howls echoed weirdly from the shadowed archways, drawing ever closer.

  ‘You and your stupid mouth,’ said Rackwulf, his words distorted and slurred by the gaping wound in the side of his face.

  Howls echoed from the walls again, closer this time.

  ‘You really think those are wights?’ asked Widdowsyn. ‘I always imagined them to sound… bigger.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Rackwulf. ‘You want to make this worse?’

  ‘If they are wights, we will find out soon enough,’ said Bjarki, seeing something moving in the ice out of the corner of his eye. Something that moved with jerky, twisted motion.

  Something broken.

  ‘Formation: Russ at the Tower of Dulan,’ he said.

  The others understood immediately, and moved to stand back to back with him, shoulder to shoulder as brothers.

  ‘The walls,’ said Bjarki. ‘Look to them.’

  He kept his gaze loose and unfocused, knowing something was watching them, but unsure as to where it lurked. His senses, both physical and psychic, reached out. A biliousness climbed his throat as he sensed foul corruption on the air, the rank smell of maleficarum.

  ‘Show yourself,’ he commanded.

  The mirrored walls rippled with motion, and the blackened form of a withered, skeletal thing stepped towards the front of the glassy surface. Every facet of the walls threw its reflection around the cavern, and Bjarki recognised it as the scorched cybernetic accompanying the Thousand Sons. He had paid it little attention, but now saw its metalled body was not black with burning, but a sickness seeping from within like a cancer.

  A hissing runic form crackled on its chest, once golden but now tarnished and all but obscured. The hundred versions of its reflection lifted their heads in unison.

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

  ‘I am, but do not speak the names of my kin again,’ warned Bjarki.

  ‘Very well, warrior of the Rout,’ said the creature.

  Bjarki let his gaze roam around the creature’s body, seeing no hint of the blocky, functional forms of the Martian priesthood in its bodyplan. This machine’s form had once been sleek and elegant, but was now barely hanging together.

  ‘You were not wrought by the priests of Iron, that much is obvious,’ said Bjarki. ‘So what are you?’

  ‘What am I? Ah, that is a question the empyreosophists have debated for millennia,’ said the creature. ‘The old word for my kind is daemon, but you may call me Aforgomon.’

  ‘Daemon will do,’ said Bjarki, moving away from his brothers and pacing towards the centre of the chamber. His every sense was alive to the terrible danger this creature represented, and his hackles rose as he saw the twin flames burning at its heart.

  ‘What do you want?’ he asked. ‘Are you bound by ancient sorcery to the Thousand Sons and want me to free you? If I do, will you grant me great power?’

  ‘I can,’ said the hundreds of reflected daemons. ‘We could make a pact, you and I, as I have made with Ahriman.’

  Bjarki laughed. ‘No, I’ll make no pacts with you, but tell me more of the pact you made with the traitor.’

  The daemon shook its head and waved an admonishing finger.

  ‘No, for even he does not yet understand what he has bargained away.’

  ‘Then why are we here? Do you want to try to tempt us? Go ahead, let me hear what you have to offer. But if you know anything of me and my Legion, you will know that no warrior of Fenris would ever embrace maleficarum.’

  ‘How little you know, Wolf,’ said Aforgomon. ‘But I did not bring you to this part of the Crimson King’s soul to talk of things yet to be. Rather, secrets you should know.’

  ‘Secrets I should know?’ said Bjarki. ‘And why would I trust anything you have to say?’

  ‘Because you will recognise truth when you hear it.’

  ‘Which is more than I can say for your kind.’

  The howling came again from the cave mouths, and Aforgomon flinched at the sound.

  ‘You should know that my essence is a much-feared aspect of the Pantheon, what the neverborn seers call fatewoven – pure unpredictability and chaos.’

  ‘That does not make me inclined to trust you.’

  ‘Perhaps not, but all ages of great change are nothing more than chains of fatewoven moments, instants where the smallest decision has enormous consequences. This is one such moment.’

  Bjarki paced in a circle, trying to gauge if any one of the many reflected images were any more real, any more able to be destroyed. He could see no difference in any of the daemon’s reflections.

  ‘That sounds far too clever for a savage like me to understand,’ said Bjarki. ‘Like something one of the red sorcerers of Prospero might say.’

  Aforgomon shrugged and said, ‘Perhaps I have travelled too long in their company, but I will be gone soon.’

  ‘Then tell your secret and be gone, daemon,’ said Bjarki.

  ‘Let me tell you of Promus,’ said the daemon, leaning into the glass. ‘Let me tell you of the great deeds he has performed in your Emperor’s name.’

  Lucius moved through the darkened halls of the labyrinth, more amused than awed by the instantaneous construction of this towering structure. He was alone, and Lucius hated being alone. With no audience to pander to and no victim to taunt, his thoughts turned ever inwards, and Lucius was self-aware enough to know that the inner workings of his psyche was a place in which he did not care to dwell.

  Instead, he forced his thoughts outwards, considering where he might venture when this endeavour of the Thousand Sons finally bored him. Bitterness touched Lucius, and he reached up to run his finger along the scar bisecting his once perfect features. Wherever he went next, he would first require Hathor Maat to restore his perfect beauty, repercussions be damned.

  Perhaps he would return to his Legion brothers to show them his new features and learn what fresh sensory extremes they had explored.

  Or should he narrow his focus to a particular aspect of profligacy?

  The Iron Warriors were too hidebound for Lucius to even countenance joining, and the morose Death Guard would surely drive him to open his wrists. Perhaps he might seek out warriors of Angron to follow. Their single-minded devotion to carnage might be diverting for a time.

  Or perhaps the Sons of Horus?

  Yes. Proximity to the Warmaster would surely hone his indulgences to their keenest edge.

  His peripheral vision saw swirling motion within the walls, but Lucius ignored it. He knew enough of the neverborn’s machinations to guess that all he would see would be banal horrors of mutilated flesh and sensuality.

  Lucius…

  ‘You are wasting your time,’ he said to the air. ‘Trust me, whatever temptations of the flesh you are conjuring, know that my brothers of the Emperor’s Children have long since wrung even the most extreme practices dry of sensation.’

  The motion in the walls intensified, and Lucius grinned as he reached a T-junction. Passageways ran to his left and right, swimming with shimmering light.

  ‘What can things of the warp that have never known flesh teach a son of Fulgrim of physical pleasure or pain? You know nothing of either. You are echoes of what we feel, pale ghosts masquerading as sensation.’

  It’s not just about the blade…

  Lucius paused, his heart racing.

  He had heard those words before.

  ‘Loken?’

  Too fast for you, traitor.

  Lucius spun as another voice spoke from the opposite wall.

  He knew that voice too.

  ‘Sharrowkyn.’

  Lucius turned and for the briefest instant saw the faint outline of a darkly armoured figure within the glass. Luci
us blinked, unsure he had even seen the shape.

  You are nothing to me – simply a rabid dog that needs to be put down.

  A line of fire sliced across his back, and he spun in time to see a shadow flit past the wall. His sword was in his hands an instant later. He felt blood well from a hideously sharp line down his spine. Despite the pain, he was impressed. Corax’s warrior had been fast, but Lucius had forgotten just how fast.

  ‘Come out, come out, little Raven,’ said Lucius, letting the coils of his whip slither from around his left wrist. ‘Ready for a rematch?’

  He turned a slow circle, his eyes seeking a target.

  Your thoughts betray you.

  Lucius gritted his teeth. First Loken, then Sharrowkyn, and now Sanakht.

  Fresh pain lanced into his side and his sword came down to block a weapon that wasn’t there. Stabbing pain shot through the small of his back and he staggered, dropping to one knee.

  ‘Fight me!’ yelled Lucius, surging to his feet as the three warriors stepped from the glass walls like ghosts: Loken clad in the pale ivory of the Luna Wolves, Sharrowkyn all in black and Sanakht in crimson. They surrounded him, but Lucius had fought worse odds than this and triumphed.

  Three of the greatest bladesmen that he had ever faced.

  Now, this was a fight he would relish.

  Loken attacked first, going in low with a stabbing thrust of a gladius. Lucius blocked it, rolling his wrist and slamming a hard jab into the Luna Wolf’s face. He felt bone break. Loken fell back and broke apart into shadows. Sharrowkyn’s twin blades scissored over Lucius’ back. He bit down on a scream and spun on his heel, his sword slicing deep into the Raven Guard’s neck.

  He too fled into broken shadows.

  Lucius threw up his whip to entangle Sanakht’s blade, fouling it for long enough to drive his blade to the hilt in the swordsman’s belly.

  A screeching wail shook the walls as the ghost of Sanakht fell away. Lucius roared in triumph and punched the air with his sword arm. Laughter bubbled upwards from deep within him, almost hysterical. His eyes were wide with pain and savage joy at having defeated the only three warriors ever to best him.

  The grin fell from his mouth as he saw a last warrior facing him from the glass. A figure of perfection, clear-eyed and with a rakishly handsome face.

  He barely remembered it any more.

  Lucius felt his fingers tighten on the grip of his sword.

  His whip tensed in anticipation.

  He’d destroyed his face once before, and he would do it again, but this time he would use a sword instead of a razored shard of glass.

  Show me how you fight. Show me how you win.

  Lucius threw himself at the reflection, his sword slashing for the glass. The blade smashed through. Glass splintered and flew. A shard cut deep into his face.

  Lucius didn’t care. Pain meant nothing.

  His reflection taunted him.

  You can beat everyone else, but you’ll never beat me.

  Lucius pushed into the glass, his cuts ferocious and merciless. A hurricane of bladed fragments swirled around him. Blood poured in torrents where lethal shards sliced his face.

  Skin peeled back, muscles lifted from bone.

  He roared with inchoate fury, loss and loathing mingled.

  Deeper in he went, a blitzing storm of glass and hate.

  The shattered glass reformed behind him, swallowing Lucius and leaving no sign he had ever walked its inconstant passageways.

  Another weak mind snared by the crystalline labyrinth.

  Ahriman ran through the passages of the pyramid with his brothers at his side. They took turnings at random, attempting to throw off the shambling, dust-filled suits of armour that followed Sobek from the shattered walls.

  But no matter how many turns they took, their pursuers were always just behind them. Ahriman led them through wide galleries of crystal, down serpentine passages and into echoing vaults that shimmered with myriad colours, as though the Great Ocean itself pressed against the glass.

  For all he understood of their surroundings, perhaps it did.

  Bolts did not stop Sobek’s slow and purposeful advance, nor did psychic powers hinder the fleshless forms of his army.

  At each turn, the living Thousand Sons saw more of the shambling, automaton-like warriors in the livery of their Legion, but some trick of the undersea quality of the illumination imparted a strange azure cast to their war-plate.

  ‘They will never stop,’ said Hathor Maat, staggering as if in great pain, though he had suffered no injury as far as Ahriman could tell.

  ‘Then neither do we,’ snapped Tolbek.

  They paused at the end of a wide chamber that offered numerous ways onwards. Ahriman walked a slow circle with his pulsing heqa staff held before him.

  ‘Does it offer any insight as to which way offers an escape?’ said Hathor Maat.

  ‘Escape is not what I seek,’ he said.

  ‘It’s not?’ said Hathor Maat, standing and bunching his fists at his stomach. ‘Then what are you seeking?’

  The pain in Hathor Maat’s voice was impossible to miss.

  Ahriman had heard pain like that before and knew what it portended. So too did the others, and each kept a wary eye on the adept of the Pavoni.

  ‘A way onwards,’ said Ahriman. ‘Our path is being directed.’

  ‘To where?’ demanded Tolbek, the flames of his order flickering in the lenses of his helm.

  ‘I believe we are being led to the heart of this pyramid.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Sanakht.

  Ahriman said, ‘The power I sensed within Lemuel wants us here. I know it.’

  ‘Then I will buy you the time you need to reach it,’ said Sanakht as the slow and purposeful warriors accompanying Sobek appeared behind them once more. ‘I will find a choke point and hold them as the Lion Emperor did at the Hot Gates.’

  ‘The Lion Emperor and all his men died,’ pointed out Tolbek.

  ‘No one will be dying here,’ said Ahriman, feeling insight from the power bound to his staff. ‘We keep going. All of us.’

  He plunged deeper into the structure, hearing the flapping of giant feathered wings, screaming and a terrible, low moaning that came from the walls themselves, yet faded as soon as he sought to pinpoint its location. The labyrinth obeyed no laws of perspective or causality Ahriman knew.

  Onwards and deeper until, without warning, they emerged into the immense, impossible chamber at the heart of the labyrinth.

  It was a hundred times larger than the Pyramid of Photep, its crystalline walls tapered to a point above a seething layer of storm-wracked clouds. Spears of lightning ripped through the air and bathed the chamber with flickering electric-blue illumination.

  Ahriman’s heart lurched in despair as he looked up.

  The titanic form of Magnus the Red, hundreds of metres tall, hung suspended in the air just below the clouds – a slain colossus, mightier in scale than an Imperator battle-engine. His black-and-bronze armour was scorched and his head hung low over his chest, his crimson hair limp across his face.

  Ahriman heard gasps of astonishment from his brothers as they craned their necks upwards in amazement, and his hope that this vision was some form of hallucination was dashed.

  The Crimson King’s vast arms were thrown out to the sides and Ahriman saw the substance of his body was being slowly eaten away, like the charred embers of thick parchment as it burns in a crucible. Tendrils of coiling smoke unravelled from the colossal body, floating like swirling cinders.

  The drifting lines of power unweaving from the suspended corpse poured into a figure of dark energy floating before it.

  Even from hundreds of metres away, Ahriman recognised Lemuel Gaumon. The soul-shards wearing his skin and bone were lambent skeletons oozing out of his flesh, growing in power as
they drew this last soul-shard into the remembrancer’s body.

  A host of capering horrors seethed below Magnus, an undulant wave of daemonic flesh, grasping hands, distended eyes and gnashing fangs. They raised claws skywards as if seeking to catch the lightning or pull the body of Magnus back to earth.

  Movement drew Ahriman’s eyes and he saw other figures staggering from the labyrinthine interior of the pyramid. He saw the frost-armoured forms of the three Wolves charge out, and almost laughed as he saw their sudden shock at seeing the vast body overhead.

  He saw Promus and the warrior of the Dragon Nations emerge from other clefts in the walls. Camille Shivani and Chaiya Parvati also stumbled from the maze, immediately making their way towards one another with joyous cries.

  Last of all came Menkaura.

  The Corvidae seer’s face was a mask of blood. He fell to the ground, his fingers red and clawed. Ahriman saw both his eyes were gone, gouged from their sockets by his own hands. What horrors had Menkaura seen in the depths of the maze to cause such self-inflicted mutilation?

  ‘What in Prospero’s name…?’ said Tolbek.

  ‘Is that really Magnus?’ Hathor Maat asked, sinking to his knees and fumbling at his gorget with trembling hands.

  Ahriman had no answer for him, and nodded to Sanakht, who moved behind the kneeling Pavoni adept, knowing exactly what might be required.

  ‘It is Magnus,’ said a rasping voice now stripped of any semblance of humanity. ‘The part of his soul that died here when his father betrayed the promise He made to His son.’

  The Thousand Sons turned as Aforgomon limped from the labyrinth behind them. The yokai’s body was all but ruined, a blackened shell roiling with seething corruption within. How it remained upright was a mystery, for every joint leaked oily black secretions, and the metal of its form was rusted and flaking with every crippled step it took.

  ‘Your time in this world is ending,’ said Ahriman, with no small amount of satisfaction.

  ‘In this form,’ said Aforgomon, the words now strained and wet, like the last words of a dying man whose lungs were filling with blood. ‘But I will endure.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ said Tolbek, circling the yokai.