The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  Their souls had been pushed to the edge of despair, but with every step they took towards Magnus, more remembered his light and awoke. Hundreds of warriors surrounded Ahriman and his cabal, pressing their gauntlets against the battered plates of their armour, like pilgrims confronted by a saint or holy object.

  ‘Ahriman,’ said Magnus, and every one of the Thousand Sons turned to the source of their gene-sire’s voice.

  Ahriman stood as though drawn to his feet by a puppeteer’s hand, and his brother legionaries parted before him. He and the warriors who had set out to restore the Crimson King marched through the newly created path towards him with their heads held high.

  He reached Magnus and saw the mighty grimoire he had carried from this world was once again chained to his primarch’s hip. He had no memory of taking the book to the surface of Nikaea, but here it was restored to his father.

  Ahriman fell to one knee and bowed his head.

  ‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘My sons, from this moment onwards you will never kneel to me.’

  Ahriman rose and looked up into his father’s face.

  ‘You saved me,’ said Magnus. ‘All of you, and that is a debt I can never repay. Your faith and courage humbles me, but I must beg yet more of you.’

  ‘Ask!’ cried Ahriman. ‘We are yours to command.’

  ‘The tides of the Great Ocean have revealed our course, the path we must take,’ said Magnus, his voice carrying to every warrior gathered before him. ‘Horus gathers his forces for a final push on the solar system, and we will join him for the last great battle on Terra’s soil.’

  Long had Ahriman waited to hear the primarch speak of what the future held for the Legion. But Terra? The birthrock?

  ‘We will gather the vessels of our fleet and make all speed to rendezvous with the Warmaster. The hour is upon us where the Thousand Sons must join this fight, a war we wished no part in, and bring ruin upon those who have sought to humble us.’

  Cheers spread through the assembled warriors, but Magnus was not yet done.

  ‘Make no mistake, my sons,’ he continued, ‘the coming days will test us all. But cleave to this when the darkness presses in, and hope grows scarce – I do not fight for Horus, nor any of my fallen brothers. I do not fight for the primordial forces that would claim dominion over this galaxy. No, I fight to save the hope of a brighter future, the dream that began life when the first expeditionary fleets set sail upon the Great Ocean.’

  Magnus drew his golden khopesh and raised it high.

  ‘I fight with Horus only until we break open my father’s Palace! And when its gates are sundered and its vaults forced, I will reclaim the first and greatest shard of my soul held prisoner beneath it!’

  The nine suns caught the gleaming edge of the blade, and threw out nine reflections of the primarch’s all-seeing eye.

  Ahriman cheered himself hoarse to see his father so sure in his conviction, so vital and singular in his purpose.

  Magnus reborn.

  The Crimson King crowned in fire.

  Magnus the Red is made whole, dragged back to the physical plane

  In war, the result is an impostor.

  Prospero’s doom taught me that. My father will soon learn it as well. It is possible to fight with courage, honour and bravery, and still lose.

  That war has no victors is a lesson as old as time, some might say, but something greater will arise from the Imperium’s slow fall into ruin. Something everlasting.

  The Orrery.

  Knowledge is a continuum. Just as our ancestors presented us with the hard-won fundamentals of lore, so too must we, as its new guardians, reach out to those who come after us and ensure that this continuum remains unbroken.

  The coming battle for Terra and the centuries of bloodshed sure to follow in its wake will fade from memory as death takes the last of those who fight in the flames. The truth of what Horus has unleashed will recede with each retelling, until a time comes when living remembrance yields to the simplest narratives of mythology.

  The bloody edges of my brother’s rebellion will be worn away, and the irresistible illumination of the victor’s truth will banish ambiguity so that all that remains is a child’s tale of good vanquishing evil.

  I take it upon myself to preserve an authentic record of this time. The guardianship of its truth has to live on, but it will not be passed down by the brutalised hearts of those who witness mankind’s cradle burn.

  The libraries of Tizca represented the merest fraction of what the Thousand Sons knew – a sliver of what I know. What I seeded in the ocean was to have been so much more: nothing less than the sum of all the knowledge that humanity once possessed.

  But Hawser had the truth of it when he spoke about the danger of gaps in mortal understanding. What solid footings were there for the Imperium when no one grasped the totality of what had been preserved and what had been lost?

  The Orrery was to be my answer.

  But the small perturbations we miss or ignore, tiny flaws we regard as inconsequential…

  They have far reaching consequences.

  Afterword

  Hands up, all of you who never thought you’d get to read this book?

  If you could see me just now, you’d see I have my hand raised too (as are the hands of at least half the editorial staff at Black Library, I’m guessing…) Along the way, there were so many points where I felt like this story was never going to get finished. So many that it seemed impossible it ever would. That’s a point I know a lot of authors, myself included, go through. The creation of a novel is a marathon rollercoaster ride of emotions and states of mind: feverish joy at its opening, the glorious potential of the book to be your magnum opus, the uphill battle to the midway point, the return of initial joy as that point is crossed, the eternal stretching of the last third, the excitement and increase in pace when the end is in sniffing distance…

  And then the bewildering sense of disbelief that you’ve actually done it, you’ve finished the first draft! It’s a heady mix of elation, sadness and relief. Now magnify all those emotions a thousandfold and you’re somewhere in the region of what I was feeling when I was writing this book.

  The Crimson King had a difficult beginning, what with it being nearly five years since I’d written its predecessor, A Thousand Sons. Plunging back into that book was a real pleasure – even if I do say so myself – remembering all the moments where I wrote a particular scene, crafted a certain line of dialogue or came up with an original twist on a known character. The Horus Heresy has moved on a lot since then, and other authors have taken the characters of the XV Legion onwards in new and exciting directions.

  All of this made pulling the threads back together for this book quite a daunting task.

  Given where the main narrative had reached, finding what the new story would be for the Thousand Sons was a trickier prospect than I expected. It needed to be a tale worthy of the main players and one that packed a big enough punch from the previous book. And it couldn’t tread on any of the many tales already in flight.

  This was taking a toll on my confidence in the direction the book was taking, as well as slowing my word count to a crawl. Which, as a lot of other writers will tell you, has a cumulative, knock-on effect where the fact that you’re not producing the words hits you hard enough to keep you from producing words. A vicious circle of a self-fulfilling prophecy, if you will.

  I was struggling with this book. Struggling hard.

  As I’ve said to many people at events, momentum is one of the key factors in how you get a book written. Firing up the enthusiasm and passion, and maintaining the word flow while you’re on that roll, is essential to keeping the creative engine running. That momentum was failing me badly, and I considered myself lucky if I got more than a few hundred words done in a day. That was a new reality for me, and it meant that I began to fall out of love w
ith the story and everything about it. It became a real struggle to open the file and try to get words down. Displacement activities became the norm, as did reading and rereading what I’d done in an attempt to kickstart the process once again.

  Then, just to add to the pressure, I decided I was going to move my entire family across the Atlantic to take up a full-time position in Los Angeles. When it comes to organising my work and life, I’m normally pretty good at compartmentalising things so I can deal with whatever demands a portion of my brain-space. But, as it turns out, organising the moving of an entire family to another continent requires more than I had to give at that point. What with sorting out the hundreds of hoops we needed to jump through to get to the US, together with dealing with all the things that needed to be tied up before we left... I had next to nothing left to give to The Crimson King.

  And when we got to LA, I had to figure out how to live in a new land, fit into a new workplace (which was much harder than I expected, what with having been my own boss for ten years and used to swanning about on my own schedule) and discover a new city while living in a new house with no furniture, phones, car, internet, or any of our personal touchstones. It was hard, not least because the idea of working all day and then coming home to start work on the book – and not spending time with my family after just uprooting them all – was just not an option. As anyone who has put off something they don’t want to go back to for a long time knows: the longer you leave it, the harder it is.

  When we finally got sorted with our furniture arriving and our growing familiarity with California, I hoped I’d be able to get started again, but that just didn’t happen. The office in the temporary house we were renting was located in the basement, and a more dank, depressing, lightless space I can barely imagine. It put me in mind of the hellish scriptoria of the Imperium – a space that I just didn’t want to go to every night.

  So I didn’t. For nearly a year.

  Then we moved down to Venice, not far from the beach, and a place much more conducive to writing. But still I didn’t get behind the keyboard.

  But there comes a time in every writer’s life where there has to be a bullet bitten, a saddle got back into. I read and re-read what I’d already written (around 65,000 words) and that’s when the first rays of light began to break through the black clouds engulfing the novel. I read it and, to my amazement, I really liked it. What was there was good. I began to feel the same flush of excitement I had felt when I was planning the book in the first place. I’d forgotten a whole lot of the character arcs I had been planning, the payoffs I’d seeded earlier in the text, but they all came back in a rush – most of them better than I’d originally envisaged them. I broke out the index cards and started scrawling ideas, arcs and scenes in a feverish rush.

  Then I started writing. Earlier in the year, I’d penned the novel Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero, and that had broken me back into the language and tone of the Thousand Sons as well as giving me a refresher on the Horus Heresy. So when it came to getting back into The Crimson King, the words started coming. Slowly at first, then with ever-greater speed as I started hitting all those payoffs I’d planned years ago when I first pitched the idea of the book. One by one, the big moments came and got knocked out of the park as I worked late into the night for the next two months.

  And then it was done.

  I don’t think any book I’ve written (or ever will write) has given me the travails this one has. But, as in most arenas, the things that require the most effort, the most bloody-minded determination and sheer willpower to finish are often the ones that drag the best work out of us. I don’t know if the book you’ve just read is my best work, but I’m fiercely proud of it and the fact that I managed to finish it at all, given the pressures surrounding its creation.

  The Crimson King is crowned, and now with all the story threads and hooks I left in my wake, I need to figure out where and how to pay them off. I hope you enjoyed this novel, and to everyone who offered me encouragement along the way by asking if it was finished or coming soon, I offer my sincere thanks. Knowing that the readers really wanted this book was a huge boost to my see-sawing spirits through the course of its writing.

  Thank you, one and all.

  Graham McNeill

  October 2016

  About the Author

  Graham McNeill has written many Horus Heresy novels, including Vengeful Spirit, New York Times bestsellers A Thousand Sons and the novella The Reflection Crack’d, which featured in The Primarchs anthology, and the Primarchs novel Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now six novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written a Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus. For Warhammer, he has written the Time of Legends trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award.

  An extract from Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero.

  The dust swirled like a miniature vortex in Atharva’s palm, its composite elements spun by the whims of the planet’s increasingly chaotic magnetic fields. It was reckless to remain in Zharrukin’s ruins in the face of the oncoming magna-storm, but the Thousand Sons did not lightly abandon knowledge won by lost generations.

  An ashen wind howled through the broken structures and collapsed ruins, as if in lament for the city’s lost glories. It must once have been magnificent, the scale and plan of the remaining stumps of pitted marble suggestive of enormous constructions of polished stone and shimmering glass.

  Zharrukin spread from the rugged haunches of the mountains, following the unnaturally straight groove of a wide river valley. A thousand years or more had passed since the city had been inhabited, and nature had reclaimed many of its ancient plascrete canyons and shattered thoroughfares.

  The architecture was pre-Old Night, bespoke and without the modularity that would later typify the aesthetic of humanity’s ultra-rapid expansion to the stars. Morningstar had been settled early in the golden age of exploration, and Zharrukin was one of its earliest cities.

  ‘Was this where Morningstar’s first king raised his capital?’ Atharva asked as the dust danced in his hand. ‘Why did your world alone stand untouched by the madness, but this city fall? Did your hubris bring you down, your greed? Or was it simply your time? Would that I could talk to you. What might you teach me?’

  Atharva knew he was being overly sentimental, but the thought of knowledge being forgotten was as painful to him as a gunshot. He eased his mind into an elevated plane of thought – something the Legion’s newly established cults, the Fellowships, were calling ‘Enumerations’.

  He’d read variants of the technique in the few ancient Achaemenian texts that had survived Cardinal Tang’s purge of the Shi-Wu library, but only since leaving Prospero had he begun to perfect the technique. The Enumerations allowed him to focus perfectly on the task at hand, to better construct the mental architecture required to face any given situation.

  Atharva studied the play of particles in his palm, watching them spin in ever more complex iterations. Iron oxide particles glittered, the remnants of something ancient and metallic, long since gone to dust amid the ruined city. He sought meaning in the patterns, echoes of the future woven within the random interactions of the dust’s gyrations. Future-scrying had always been his focus, but sifting meaning from the Great Ocean’s depths had always been challenging.

  He glanced from the dancing red dust to the curvature of his left shoulder guard. Emblazoned in pale ivory upon crimson was the serpentine star icon of the Thousand Sons Legion.

  Within it was the staring eye of his new Fellowship.

  Athanaean.

  The name felt new to him, yet spoke of ancient learnings, of a time when wizened academics pored over many quaint and curious volumes of forgotten lore. Atharva
was well aware of the mystical significance of names, and this one held a power all its own. The cult’s teachings – and those of the Corvidae, the Pavoni and the rest – granted him power he had never dreamed possible. They had allowed him to achieve things all but unknown in the days before Prospero.

  Before the Legion’s rebirth.

  He eased the barriers within his mind, allowing the Great Ocean to seep into his flesh. It flowed into his body like water pouring along a complex series of aqueducts, directed and shaped by the mental thought-forms of the third Enumeration.

  He thrilled to the sense of the unknown becoming known, of the unseen and unwritten possibilities now being revealed. A tantalising image formed in his mind, a fleeting glimpse of a dreaming city at the top of the world, its spires molten as the world burned around it.

  Was this Zharrukin’s doom?

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked a muffled voice behind him, and the moment was gone. The flames fell away from his sight and he quelled the build-up of power within him, sighing as the mundane reality of the world reasserted itself.

  ‘Thinking,’ he said, opening the fingers of his gauntlet and letting the winds howling through the city blow the dust away.

  Atharva wiped the last of it from his palm and turned as he rose to his full height in the centre of the windswept thoroughfare. The crimson of his bulky war-plate reflected the tortured light of the sky, making it shimmer as if with a veneer of oil.

  An elegantly proportioned woman with charcoal-black skin stood before him, tightly wrapped in a brightly coloured robe of interlocking geometric patterns. He’d assumed her attire was ceremonial when they’d first met, but he had since learned it was culturally significant, indicating scholarly status within the peoples of the equatorial regions.