Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero

by Graham McNeill

'They don't want our help. They want to stay.'

  Hathor Maat felt Obax Zakayo's confusion discolour his aura. The Iron Warrior did not have the imagination to comprehend such illogical behaviour. Truth be told, Hathor Maat was little better equipped to understand it.

  'Ignorance is nothing to be ashamed of,' he said. 'It can be undone by learning, but deliberate stupidity irritates me.'

  Hathor Maat looked to the mountaintop. Boiling clouds of ash and lightning raged around the summit; bands of purples, pinks and sick yellow smeared across the buckling sky. His scrying powers were weak in comparison to his new-found potency in biomancy, but Hathor Maat needed no seersight to know that the volcano would soon obliterate every living thing within hundreds of kilometres.

  'They will all die here,' said Obax Zakayo.

  'Yes, they will.'

  'So what are we to do?'

  'We let them,' snapped Hathor Maat.

  The street was full of screams.

  Bodies lay at awkward angles. The ground was slick with blood. Men and women ran from their attackers, but bullets and blades met them at every turn. Husbands sheltered wives and mothers sheltered children. The Sons of Shaitan showed no mercy, turning their weapons on the young and the old, the strong and the weak.

  Ahriman's first shot all but obliterated a man carrying a weapon with a long, perforated barrel. The man had killed at least a dozen people with indiscriminate fire, chanting a heathen catechism with each pull of the trigger. His body came apart, blown open by the explosive power of Ahriman's mass-reactive bolt shells. His second shot ripped through three men in a welter of shattered bone and pulped organs.

  The deafening echoes of bolter fire overshadowed all other sounds, and every head turned at the deafening reports. People threw themselves to the ground, crawling behind what little cover the streetscape offered.

  The gold-robed killers turned their guns on the two legionaries. Bullets sparked from their armour, but such low-powered weapons could do little more than scratch the paint from their plates.

  A bolt shell detonated, and another gunman was ripped apart from the inside. Ahriman saw mercury-bright haloes of zeal and certitude surrounding the murderous men and women. His seer-sight was better than any reticule on his helm visor. His targets were picked out unmistakably.

  He fired twice more, killing another two attackers.

  Forrix matched his movements, advancing at his right shoulder. He fired with the metronomic regularity of a forge hammer, putting foes down with every shot. They waded through screaming refugees, twin giants with fire spitting from their weapons.

  A man wearing a bloodstained fright-mask rose to his knees. A ricocheting fragment had ripped away most of the right side of his torso, leaving him hideously misshapen. He screamed as he fired a blitzing stream of high-calibre shells. They burst into flame an instant before impact as Ahriman surrounded himself and Forrix with a layer of superheated air.

  He extended his Pyrae thought-form and hurled the man backwards, his golden robes ablaze. His screams were abruptly cut off as searing fires dragged the oxygen from his lungs and consumed his flesh with phosphex speed.

  He felt surprise flow from Forrix, but spun around as his Corvidae senses flickered with a jagged vision of the statue upon which the demagogue had hectored the refugees.

  There! Two masked men in golden robes, with an Imperial Army-issue rocket launcher primed and ready to fire. He yelled a warning as the gunner pressed the launch trigger.

  The rocket streaked towards Forrix.

  The Iron Warrior saw it coming. He braced and bent into the incoming ordnance with a defiant roar.

  The warhead impacted dead centre on his shoulder guard, exploding on impact with a percussive hammer blow. Ahriman threw an enclosing kine barrier around Forrix. A storm of razored fragments engulfed the Iron Warrior, but remained trapped within Ahriman's psychic shield.

  The two men bent to reload their weapon with a speed that spoke of professional training but they had already taken the best shot they were ever going to get. Ahriman pushed his thoughts into the eighth Enumeration, the most warlike posture of his Fellowship, and poured his psychic power into their mortal physiology.

  They screamed, clawing the flesh from their bones as superheated blood aerosolised from every pore in a stinking red mist. Skin slid like melted wax, bones bent and snapped.

  Ahriman let the power of the Great Ocean bleed out, exhaling as his combat instincts sought fresh threats. He registered no more gunfire or screams of terror; weeping and pain were all that remained.

  He blinked away freeze-frame after-images of half-remembered truths, a corollary to such reckless expenditure of power.

  A brother lost to a terrible curse.

  A pain so great his mind fled from its memory.

  A great and terrible god reaching deep inside him to push the horror down into the deepest vault within his mind.

  Memories close to the surface and yet so far out of reach.

  Repercussive pain settled in his marrow and confusion shrouded Ahriman's thoughts. His mind rebelled at being forced to bear such a burden.

  A scorched gauntlet steadied him as he swayed.

  'Thank you, brother,' he said. His vision greyed at the edges, and he knew not which of his brothers aided him. 'I have not wielded such power since Bezant.'

  'How did you do all that?' asked Forrix.

  The interior of the Sharei Maveth was not at all what Atharva had expected. Though there had been hints of considerations beyond the practical in the outward design of the fortress, they had been mere tasters for its interior.

  The spaces within were artfully formed and as exquisitely detailed as the dragon palaces of Terra. Its walls were polished smooth as marble and lit with recessed lumen strips. Yet the interior's clean simplicity sacrificed nothing of its defensive nature. Every screwstair turned to the left as it descended, and every onward passageway was laced with blind murder-holes and hidden sally ports.

  Perturabo led them to a vaulted chamber deep in the heart of the mountain, a grand hall of gleaming marble veined with gold. Hard-wired servitors laboured at banks of cogitators, and spectral veils of noospheric data shimmered before cliques of Mechanicum adepts conversing in the staccato cadences of Lingua Technis.

  Three of its walls were hung with decorative tapestries large enough to fly from the armoured carapace of a Titanicus war-engine. The fourth was inset with a wide oculus screen that put Atharva in mind of the picts he had seen showing the bridge of the Imperator Somnium.

  Towards the rear of the chamber, wide steps led to a raised mezzanine area where Perturabo had set his command table. Magnus followed his brother up to a space that had the feel of a workshop, the air redolent of hot metal, grease and craft. Sheet-covered workbenches lined walls hung with a host of artificer's tools, and the purpose of a great many were not immediately apparent.

  Two Iron Warriors stood at the command table in the centre of the space, haptically shifting data manifests between glowing tags of starship designations. From the crimson stains in their auras, their discussions had been heated.

  They looked up as Perturabo arrived and stood to attention. Perturabo took in the details of the plotter table with a glance and gave a curt nod, indicating Magnus and his warriors should join him. The volume of data presented on the plotter table was bewildering: loading rates, trip times, cargo capacities, fuel reserves, fleet rotations, population influx, food levels, water supply, billeting arrangements and hundreds more variables that played into the evacuation equation.

  Even Atharva, who prided himself on his analytical nature and capacity for the unforgiving arithmetic of war, found himself struggling to process the ocean of information displayed.

  'My two senior Warsmiths,' said Perturabo, indicating the two Iron Warriors sifting the data. 'Harkor, and Barban Falk.'

  To Atharva's eyes, the former had the look of a brawler, thickly waisted and with the majority of his muscle mass layered over his shoulde
rs. A flicker of red danced before Atharva's eyes, a Corvidae sense of bloody destiny.

  Falk, however, was finely balanced, and Atharva sensed he was a warrior who might achieve greatness.

  'Atharva, my senior Librarius, and Phosis T'kar, one of my First Fellowship captains,' said Magnus.

  'Librarius? You still think that is a good idea?' asked Perturabo. 'I do,' said Magnus. 'And Sanguinius agrees with me.'

  'Tread lightly, brother,' said Perturabo. 'What happened on Bezant travelled farther than you think. These are uncharted realms. Be sure you know what lies beneath.'

  'I will do as you advise and temper my researches with caution,' replied Magnus, and Atharva felt the lightest brush of psychic influence from his primarch, so subtle he was unsure if he'd felt it at all. 'Now, to business, brother. Tell me of the evacuation's progress. Are you on schedule?'

  Perturabo blinked and looked up at his brother's use of 'you', but said nothing. If Magnus noticed his brief irritation, he chose not to acknowledge it.

  'Barely, and we have little margin for delays,' said Perturabo, turning his attention to the plotter table once more. The primarch called up the manifests and fleet registries for the Legion ships anchored within the upper atmosphere. Data streamed from each entry, a cascade of energy demands, orbital vectors and cargo capacities.

  'Your ships are burning fuel at a prodigious rate by coming so close to the pull of Morningstar's gravity,' noted Atharva.

  'They are,' agreed Falk. 'It's a necessary trade-off between fuel consumption and overall trip time for the trans-atmospheric vessels. Even a few tens of kilometres less of a round trip makes a considerable difference to the evacuation timetable.'

  Perturabo pulled up a host of schematics, spinning wireframe diagrams of the various trans-orbital shuttle variants available to the evacuation effort.

  'Leaving aside the Lux Ferem, the typical capacity for the trans-orbital conveyors available to us is in the region of three hundred people. Our surface-to-orbit operations can clear around two hundred launches every day, bearing approximately sixty-five thousand people off-world. That gives us a baseline requirement of needing to run thirty days of constant surface-to-orbit flights without interruption to get everyone off-world. And that's without factoring in flight time, air traffic bottlenecks, refuelling or ongoing maintenance. And it takes no consideration of loading and unloading evacuees at either end. Working to best case margins, my initial timetable demands two Terran months to complete operations. We shave some time off that as efficiency scales up with repetition, but we'll be doing very well if we get it much below my initial estimate. And that, of course, assumes everyone cooperates and is ready to be moved off Morningstar at regular intervals.' Magnus smiled. 'I see now why this world needs you.'

  'It needs us, brother,' said Perturabo. 'Both our Legions are required to make this work.'

  'My Lord Perturabo?' said Atharva. 'Might I make an observation?' 'Of course,' said Perturabo. 'You see a flaw?'

  Atharva hesitated, well aware of how fluid the foundations were beneath him. Though he had been part of the Great Crusade for a few years only, Perturabo's fearsome reputation for logistical brilliance was already well known.

  'Perhaps,' he said.

  'Well, spit it out - we're on a tight enough timetable without having to stand on Fifteenth Legion rituals.'

  Atharva nodded and dismissed the rotating schematics of the trans-orbital shuttles with a swipe of his hand. He pulled up the fleet registries once more, highlighting each vessel's passenger capacity with haptic gestures.

  The Fourth and Fifteenth Legion fleets comprise enough civilian craft to accommodate between forty and sixty thousand evacuees per vessel. We have thirty-one such ships between us, meaning we have capacity for - on paper - one point six five million people.' 'I can do arithmetic,' said Perturabo. 'What's your point?'

  'Even after all that has befallen it, Morningstar's most recent census puts its population at just over two million,' said Atharva. 'Even by stretching supplies, space and available time to breaking point, we cannot evacuate everyone from Morningstar.'

  'I am well aware of that, Atharva,' said Perturabo. 'Sadly, not everyone will survive to reach orbit and safety. We've already seen civil disobedience, riots and people who simply don't want to leave.'

  'Then a great many people are going to die,' said Atharva.

  'A lot of people will end up dead anyway, no matter what we do,' put in Harkor. 'There's no way anyone can organise the mass evacuation of an entire planet without loss of life.'

  'Why would anyone not want to leave a doomed world?' asked Phosis T'kar. 'It makes no sense.'

  'Hathor Maat and others have reported instances of the populace refusing to relocate in the face of certain death,' said Magnus.

  'But I agree, it is vexing why arguments of sound logic and reason should be ignored.'

  'The Imperium is better off without such fools,' said Phosis T'kar. 'Why should we waste time and energy trying to help those who will not help themselves?'

  Perturabo leaned over the plotting table, and Phosis T'kar recoiled from the flint in his gaze. When the primarch spoke it was with the measured tones of a disappointed teacher.

  'For the same reason I would not allow a child to pick flowers on the edge of a cliff, no matter how bright the blooms,' said Perturabo. 'For the same reason I would not let you wander the minefields before this fortress without a Fourth Legion map and the training to interpret it. We must put aside such childish ignorance and do what is right. Now do you understand why we must help as many of Morningstar's people as we can?'

  'Yes, Lord Perturabo,' said Phosis T'kar. 'I am in your debt for correcting my erroneous thinking.'

  Atharva bit back his amusement. Phosis T'kar was a seasoned scholar, but rarely did he ever admit to being in need of instruction. Even now, in the face of a primarch's rebuke, his aura betrayed a measure of insolence.

  Magnus grinned and said, 'Phosis T'kar is at his best when dealing with absolutes. True and false, right and wrong. He excels at unlocking the structures of empirical formulae, but he will never be a moral philosopher or grand debater.'

  'Perhaps not, and he's not the first to express such sentiments,' said Perturabo. 'But I'll not have it said we left innocents to die when we could have done something to save them. You and I need to work together, brother. I need every one of your warriors tasked to this world's evacuation, not chasing relics and digging in the dust.'

  'One squad diverted to the preservation of knowledge will not affect your timetable,' said Magnus. 'The secrets this world might hold are too precious to be so easily squandered.'

  'You really believe there is some ancient knowledge buried in Zharrukin that will explain why Morningstar survived Old Night unscathed?'

  'I am certain of it,' said Magnus.

  'In anyone else I would say such certainty was arrogant,' sighed Perturabo, letting the data on the plotter table disperse like smoke.

  'When have I ever been wrong about such things?' asked Magnus.

  'Never,' admitted Perturabo, stepping towards the sheet-covered workbenches at the perimeter of the mezzanine. 'But there is a first time for everything and I need all your warriors on board. But here, I want to show you something.'

  The primarch pulled back a white sheet to reveal a haphazard arrangement of half-finished projects, contraptions of mysterious purpose and beautiful arrangements of gears and motors.

  'This is my workshop,' said Perturabo.

  'It is just as I expected,' said Magnus, delightedly moving from bench to bench to examine the pieces lying around the edges of the workshop. He lifted a sheet of wax paper laid beside a partially completed model of a grand amphitheatre.

  'The Thaliakron,' said Magnus. 'You've begun work on it?'

  'Not yet,' said Perturabo. 'Soon. When the Crusade is done and we have heroic tales aplenty to fill it with song, then I'll build it. On the mountain across from father's palace.'

  'I will be there
to see it unveiled,' promised Magnus, and his enthusiasm for his brother's works was genuine and contagious.

  He and Perturabo spoke as brothers who had shared every memory from birth to this moment, yet they had known each other for only a few short years. Magnus had once spoken of how he and Perturabo had spent time together on Terra, recovering the relics of a long-dead polymath and unearthing arcana from the forgotten places of Old Earth. Atharva had thrilled to hear such tales, relishing every opportunity to learn more of his gene-sire.

  The obvious love between these godlike warriors filled the workspace with a swelling feeling of confraternity, a bond of brotherhood that could never be broken.

  'This will be of interest to you, brother,' said Perturabo, holding out a complex arrangement of curved metal, winding mechanisms and adjustable lenses. 'I made a replica of the Antikythera, just like you asked.'

  To see so delicate a mechanism in Perturabo's hands seemed incongruous, as most apparatus bearing the stamp of the Iron Warriors that Atharva had seen - save for those within this chamber - had been brutally functional.

  'Does it work?'

  'I am not entirely sure,' answered Perturabo. 'You never fully explained its intended purpose or how exactly it was designed to function.'

  'You've built it,' said Magnus. 'What do you think it does?'

  'I believe it to be some form of navigational instrument,' said Perturabo, lifting the device to look through one of its eyepieces. 'It has the look of a sextant once used by seafarers, but with infinitely more dimensions to its operation. What manner of ocean would you be navigating to require such a device?'

  'The Great Ocean,' said Magnus. 'It allows even those without our gifts to perceive the realm beyond.'

  Perturabo nodded and set down the Antikythera.

  'I suspected as much,' he said with a sigh, turning to lift something heavy from another part of his workbench. 'You remember what our father told us in the Hall of Leng? When he spoke of the warp and the danger of looking too deeply into its heart?'

  'I do,' said Magnus, 'but this has nothing to do with that.'

  'It has everything to do with that, as well you know, but we will speak of this later.'