The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  Menkaura staggered as he felt the man die, his mind recoiling from the grimoire and careening around the exhibits. Horror engulfed him as yet more visions of death swept through him. Agony as the wielder of a six-barrelled pistol had his limbs hacked off. Searing heat as armour designed for a creature with multiple arms became white-hot and burned its wearer to death.

  A sword, a mirror, an eagle-faced helm, a filigreed jewellery box. Death draped every one of them. Innumerable treasures that were not treasures at all, but trophies taken from the murdered corpses of the Torquetum’s victims.

  ‘Everything is a tombstone,’ he said. ‘A monument to murder.’

  Menkaura’s subtle body snapped back into his flesh, and the usual fleeting claustrophobia and revolting sense of meat and decay washed through him. He blinked away a haze of dizziness and drew in a breath of air.

  He tasted metal and caustic oils, chrome and hot plastic.

  A yokai stood next to him.

  Blue-hot blades of psychic fire blazed to life at its fists.

  The first clove Menkaura’s armour and split his primary heart before ripping down to burst his lungs. The second swept around in a decapitating strike.

  Another sword intercepted it, silver-steel and buzzing with photonic energies. A bolt pistol fired, deafeningly close, and the yokai’s head exploded.

  ‘I thought you people could see the future?’ snapped Lucius.

  ‘You mean to take the Iron Oculus from us,’ said Temelucha.

  ‘I do,’ agreed Ahriman, feeling the heat of the aetheric blade at his throat.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The Crimson King demands I do so.’

  Temelucha circled around Ahriman, a crackling sword of indigo fire extending from her fingertips. His armour would offer no protection against such a blade. He sensed Temelucha’s desire to end his life warring with her deep confusion as to why she had not already done so.

  ‘I told you to go,’ she said. ‘I gave you a chance to leave this place alive.’

  ‘Did you give those whose possessions you parade below the same chance?’ said Ahriman. ‘My brothers may not guess the truth of it, but I know a mortis reliquary when I see one.’

  ‘They were all like you,’ said Temelucha, her bladed hand trembling with the urge to thrust into his neck. ‘Knowing their future was never enough – they wanted to change it. Like you, they sought to steal knowledge that was not theirs to take and bend its power to their own ends.’

  Ahriman sensed falsehood and said, ‘Then why warn me? It was not for my benefit, was it?’

  ‘I gave you the chance to change your fate,’ said Temelucha, her coloured eye churning with desperate psy-light. Ahriman lifted his gaze to the brute form of the hanging sarcophagus, feeling its power oozing outwards. Whatever wards bound the Iron Oculus were nowhere near as secure as Temelucha believed.

  ‘It was not my fate you sought to change,’ said Ahriman as the control of his armour crumbled. ‘It was yours.’

  Temelucha cried in release and thrust her blade for his heart. Ahriman’s heqa staff swung down to intercept it. Aetheric energies blazed. He spun the staff and extended his hand. Temelucha’s fiery blade was snuffed out, a candle against a hurricane.

  She flew at him, borne aloft on silent winds, aetheric power coruscating along her limbs. The air around Ahriman shrieked as it ignited. He blinked and a skin of sub-zero air encased him. Roaring, superheated vapour exploded from Ahriman.

  Temelucha flew into it, and her screams were piteous as the searing mist boiled the flesh from her bones. Even as she fell, her command of the enumerations was quelling the pain. Her robes hung scorched and bloody, her meat now skinless and weeping. Too agonised to reach for the higher powers, she cast lightning from her hands in jagged, arcing bolts.

  Ahriman’s staff broke them to glassy splinters, and he lashed her raw with the reflected power. Temelucha reeled in pain, her mind’s defences in tatters. Easy prey for an adept of his skill and ruthlessness to tear apart from the inside.

  He bombarded her with phantasms, filling her skull with the manifold horrors of Prospero’s annihilation. All the nightmarish things he had seen, the unimaginable losses he had suffered – he concentrated them into one, merciless skewer and drove it right through the heart of her.

  Temelucha screamed as physical agony and psychic terror coalesced in a blaze of unimaginable suffering. The only refuge was madness, and the shattered ruin of her mind fled to darkness rather than endure another moment of that day.

  She collapsed, little more than hollowed-out meat. Her chest hiked in unnatural rhythms as the autonomic functions of her brain went into seizure. Her curious eyes were molten craters, burned out by the ravaging psychic fire.

  Ahriman stood over the twitching body, feeling nothing for her pain. What had ended her, he had suffered in reality. But Legion minds and Legion flesh could endure grief and pain beyond any mortal tolerance.

  ‘You were deceived,’ said Ahriman, though Temelucha was utterly beyond comprehension. ‘The Iron Oculus was never your prisoner to guard.’

  ‘Nor is it yours… to take…’

  Her features went slack and whatever wisdom she had left to impart went unsaid. Ahriman lifted his gaze to the iron sarcophagus. Its power had withdrawn, coiled within its metal cell like a predatory serpent whose monstrous appetite was now sated.

  ‘I am right, am I not? You were never their prisoner.’

  OF COURSE NOT.

  ‘You kept her blade from my neck. You broke her hold on my armour.’

  YES.

  ‘Why?’

  SHE MEANT TO KILL YOU, AND WE HAVE OUR BARGAIN YET TO STRIKE.

  Ahriman stepped towards the hanging sarcophagus. Its chains creaked as it swung slowly towards him. The stitched seams split, bleeding droplets of raw aether into the shaft below.

  ‘What bargain?’

  ‘What in Fulgrim’s name is a mandala?’ yelled Lucius, spitting blood as he picked himself up from the glass-and-timber ruins of a display case. Disintegrating leather and paper fluttered around him.

  Menkaura lay slumped next to Lucius, seemingly more distressed at the drifting scraps than the grievous wound in his chest. The yokai whose hammering psy-shock had felled Lucius was a molten mass of fused metal and plastic.

  Tolbek’s powers were ascendant in a brutally direct way.

  ‘A mandala is a ritual symbol used to represent the universe,’ said Sanakht, blocking a scythe blade composed entirely of vibrating air molecules. ‘Its cosmic symbolism focuses the mind of a practitioner as a means of establishing a sacred formation in which to fight.’

  ‘You mean a kill-circle?’ said Lucius.

  ‘A simplistic way of putting it, but yes.’

  ‘You Sons and your fancy words,’ said Lucius, spinning on his heel to decapitate a porcelain-masked yokai with a crack of his vile whip. The swordsman dropped to one knee and cut low. His silver blade sliced the slender ceramic-and-steel calves of another yokai. It crashed to the metalled decking, and a blaze of tar-black aether fire shrieked from its contoured skull.

  The automata surrounded the Thousand Sons, like greenskins around a last shield-wall. No sooner had Menkaura fallen than Sanakht and the rest of the Thousand Sons formed the mandala around the Corvidae adept. A moment later, the yokai host from beyond the black gate poured in to attack. At least two hundred, maybe more. They came at them with a lethal mix of psychic blades, integral cannons, kine powers and pyromantic energies.

  Sanakht had faced too few to yet discern any correlation between the goetic sigils and each yokai’s power. His hawk blade deflected the downward strike of a psychic edge as he sprang to his feet. The yokai’s enflamed weapon reversed direction with blinding speed.

  He leaned into it, letting the psy-blade carve the crimson and silver of his shoulder plate. Spinning inside the y
okai’s guard, he hammered his jackal blade through the centre of its blank skull. Black fire burned along the blade as he wrenched it clear and blocked yet another attack.

  The fight was breathtakingly swift, blows exchanged at a pace no mortal bladesman could match. The yokai were machine-fast and warp-cunning, but the Thousand Sons fought with transhuman reflexes alloyed to unmatched psychic discipline.

  Arrayed in the sacred geometry of the mandala, they fought shoulder to shoulder as brothers, their minds linked to seamlessly blend their abilities in a cohesive whole.

  Tolbek threw up blazing shields against the shredding gunfire of the yokai’s fist cannons. Ceramic shells turned to hot vapour in mid-flight, still travelling at supersonic speeds but harmless to Legion battleplate.

  In return, the Pyrae adept crafted darts of phosphorescent brilliance that pierced the armour of the automata and cored them to the heart of their bindings. The warp scraps died in blazing plumes of incandescent fire.

  Hathor Maat engaged the Tartaruchi, freezing their flesh for Sobek to smash apart with kine blows more powerful than a thunder hammer in the hands of a Sekhmet champion. Ahriman’s Practicus grunted as he fought, veins standing out like pulsing feed-lines on his neck. Though grievously wounded, Menkaura used his Corvidae seersight to gift each warrior with prescient reaction times.

  They fought at the edge of their abilities, but only Lucius appeared to be relishing the ferocious skill of their enemies.

  ‘Fast for robots,’ said the swordsman, perversely proud of just how little he understood this foe. He cracked his lash and laughed as its barbed tip split open a seamless skull. Black fire geysered from within, a piercing shriek of pained release to those whose senses were open to the Great Ocean.

  ‘I told you, they are not robots,’ replied Sanakht, rolling his wrists and sidestepping a thrust to his groin. ‘Didn’t you hear what Ahriman said?’

  He stamped to the side and buckled an attacking yokai’s knee inwards. It staggered and Sanakht scissored both blades through its neck.

  He stepped back from the spurting black fire.

  ‘I weep to destroy such exquisitely fashioned artefacts.’

  ‘Speak for yourself,’ yelled Lucius, using the shattered chest of a falling yokai to vault into the air and sever three enamelled heads before his feet hit the ground.

  Lucius landed lightly, spinning with both arms extended and a reptilian leer splitting the reticulated skin of his hairless skull. He snapped his wrist and the lash coiled around its ebon handle in a manner altogether too organic for Sanakht’s liking.

  ‘Are such wasteful theatrics truly necessary?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re dead, aren’t they?’ countered Lucius.

  ‘Save your energy for the next hundred then.’

  ‘Enough talking,’ commanded Hathor Maat, sweeping his arms out to blast a wedge of frozen air through the yokai. ‘Keep to the sixth enumeration. Menkaura! If you cannot fight, seek out the minds of the Tartaruchi. Kill them and it may break the yokai’s link to the Great Ocean.’

  Sanakht risked a glance over his shoulder. Menkaura sat on his haunches at the centre of a bloody lake, propped against the remains of the broken display case. His eyes were closed, but he nodded and Sanakht felt the seer’s mind cast itself into the Great Ocean for the means to defeat their foes.

  ‘Look at him!’ snapped Sobek, striding to the forefront of the mandala with his staff and gauntlet held before him like an ancient prophet. ‘Our brother is all but dead.’

  ‘Wait!’ cried Tolbek. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Ending this!’ roared Sobek, eyes wide and skin both ruddy and taut.

  ‘No! The mandala will be broken. Its geometry cannot hold with only four adepts!’

  Sobek ignored him and spat words of power Sanakht had never dared read in close proximity, each one a rusted nail hammered through his skull. As every deceitful syllable poisoned the air, living nightmares coalesced in tattered ghost-slicks around Ahriman’s Practicus.

  Crack-horned things. Broken-toothed things.

  Negative imprints of terrors best left to the shadows.

  Sobek drew them into his body with a roar, and every one of the Thousand Sons staggered at the repercussive sickness of their dread touch.

  ‘What in Ruin’s name is he doing?’ said Lucius.

  ‘Reform the mandala,’ said Hathor Maat, ignoring the swordsman’s question.

  ‘The Voydes of Drekhye,’ said Sanakht, feeling his eyes weep tears of blood in response.

  No sooner had he foolishly named the evocation than a host of darkly radiant comets erupted from Sobek’s staff, howling like war-dogs with the taste of blood on their tongues. They ignored the horde of smooth-skinned automata, slashing between them towards the living, breathing Tartaruchi.

  The Chronicles of Ursh and other poetic grimoires spoke of forbidden sciomancy summoning these voydes: malignant warp wraiths that unravelled their victim’s souls and devoured them piece by piece.

  Until now Sanakht had believed them lurid inventions.

  The dark comets struck the Tartaruchi and he knew differently.

  The guardians of the Iron Oculus were literally turned inside out. Bones snapped like tinder. Metre upon metre of veins and arteries unspooled in wet ropes. Organs detonated like grenades, and teeth and bone shards flew like bullets as apocalyptic quantities of blood aerosolised in a vile mist.

  The screams of the Tartaruchi echoed long after their flesh was ruined. It was an animal sound, the sound of prey being ripped to pieces by spiteful predators that kill for pleasure.

  The broken bodies fell apart like sodden rags, and the fury of the automata was extinguished in the same instant.

  Without the Tartaruchi, the controlling animus of the yokai was broken. They froze like a phalanx of Cybernetica battle robots with malfunctioning slave collars. The entities within shrieked in anger as they were cast back into the Great Ocean.

  Sobek’s ploy had succeeded, but the voydes allowed him no breath to speak the words of ending, no motion to cast a rune of severance. The wraith creatures twisted towards the Thousand Sons, hungry for fresh souls to rend.

  ‘Sobek!’ shouted Hathor Maat. ‘Stop this. Now!’

  But Sobek remained locked in place, undone by the power he had unleashed and the pact he had unthinkingly made. His staff dropped from palsied fingers and his mouth stretched wide with a crack of tearing cartilage and snapping sinew.

  ‘The Sign of Amaterasu!’ cried Menkaura from the centre of the mandala. His sudden shout drew a froth of bright blood from his mouth and chest. ‘Invoke its sigil now! All of you.’

  Sanakht fought to visualise the complex sigils and somatic forms of Amaterasu’s warding configuration, but the howling, gibbering wraiths filled his mind with broken glass.

  He felt Menkaura’s presence within his psyche, guiding him as he had guided so many of the Legion over the decades. Menkaura had learned his craft from Magister Templi Amaterasu, who had in turn received his wisdom from Magus Phanek himself – whose master had been Magnus the Red.

  And still it wasn’t enough.

  The voydes struck the mandala and broke it open with howling glee. The impact swatted Sanakht from his feet and foetid winds reeking of corrupted blood clogged his helm’s filters.

  The mandala was broken and each warrior fought alone.

  The voydes had slain the Tartaruchi in an instant, but these were Legion warriors they faced.

  Sobek remained isolated, locked within his armour like a statue. The voydes ignored him, sensing his flesh offered no sport. Hathor Maat stood over Menkaura, a swirling corona of biomantic power keeping the wraiths at bay for now. A pillar of blinding fire obscured Tolbek as he gave free rein to his powers. With the flesh change a very real danger, the Crimson King had warned them against such displays.

  But what
other choice was there?

  All thoughts of the Sign of Amaterasu were forgotten as the spectral forms of the muttering wraiths surrounded Sanakht like frenzied sharks.

  They came at him in a rush of night-black claws and freezing shadows, faster than anything he had fought before. Each touch was a blade of ice in his heart, slowing him, making him vulnerable. He found himself back to back with Lucius, their affinity as swordsmen naturally pulling them together.

  They spun in a kill-circle of their own, forced into a bargain of mutual trust neither really believed.

  Not that they had a choice.

  ‘You have your wish,’ said Sanakht.

  ‘What wish?’

  ‘Finding a foe who can kill you.’

  Lucius laughed as he struck out at the voydes.

  ‘These things?’ he said. ‘No, this isn’t my death.’

  Sanakht read the utter certainty flaring in the swordsman’s aura and wondered how he could be so sure.

  Later, much later, Sanakht would wonder if Lucius had known of the eternal damnation lying in wait for him.

  And even if he had, would he have changed it?

  None of them would die this day.

  Sanakht and Lucius fought with skill that had not been seen since the rival champions had duelled at the walls of lost Truva, and, had fate decreed their Legions remain true, such courage would have become legend in the Imperium.

  With Hathor Maat on his knees and Menkaura sliding into death’s embrace, Tolbek alone fought the voydes on an equal footing. Pillars of gleeful flame scattered their darkness as spears of molten light burned them back.

  And still it wasn’t enough.

  Hathor Maat fell to the shadows as if beneath a murder of ravens. Tolbek’s fire was brutally smothered by the aching cold of the voydes. A flurry of clawed shadows penetrated Sanakht’s defences, plunging into his ribs and freezing his heart. He fell, plunging into what felt like a depthless pool of glacial water.

  None of them would die this day.

  Ahriman made sure of that.