The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  Yasu Nagasena’s modified Aquila lander held station on his upper prow quarter, its swept-forward wings matt-black and emblazoned with a serpentine dragon.

  They had not spoken since their first meeting, save to confirm waypoints and rendezvous coordinates between the Arethusa and the Doramaar. The memory of the lost Holkenberg still lay between them, each man holding the other responsible for what had been sacrificed over Jupiter’s baleful red eye.

  The Stormbird began climbing, following a previously inloaded approach vector. Kamiti Sona’s boarding protocols were necessarily strict, especially for psykers. Promus gasped as the dampening effect of the psy-field hit him, a cloying sensation that felt like being enveloped in impenetrable fog.

  His mortal senses were undimmed, but having his psychic sensibilities blunted was like being plunged thousands of metres underwater in an instant. Sounds became robbed of tone, tactile sensations felt second-hand and his vision became bland and colourless, bereft of crisp vigour.

  Promus held the sides of his bucket seat in a crushing grip, as though the world might fade entirely if he did not hold on tightly enough. He was a warrior of the Legiones Astartes and death held little terror to him, but being cut off from his higher senses left his mouth dry and his gut knotted with tension.

  The icy topside of Kamiti Sona raced beneath the gunship, meteor-cratered and belching plumes of vapour like miniature cryovolcanoes. Whip antennae, rotating dishes and networks of null vanes that smoked with dissipating immaterial energies flashed past, but Promus ignored them, entranced by the sight of the vessel berthed on Kamiti Sona’s dark side.

  Its outline was all but invisible, a silent hunter of the void. Unmarked by any identifying symbols, its hull was utterly black and non-reflective. Even denied his psy-sense, Promus felt the misery that bled from this ship.

  He did not know its name, only its designation.

  One of the Black Ships, a harvester of warlocks.

  He turned from its bilious silhouette as the inloaded flight data threw the Stormbird’s engines into reverse and brought it to a rapid halt. A metres-thick blast door opened silently beneath it and blazing stablights shone into the void. A shaft wide enough for the Stormbird and Aquila to descend side by side was revealed and both craft rotated on their centre lines, engines vectoring to guide them down into Kamiti Sona. The Black Ship was lost to sight, and the bleak alien landscape of ice and hopelessness disappeared, replaced by a shaft of engine-scorched steel, hazard striping and blinking sodium strobes.

  Promus grunted as a crushing grip of ice clamped down on his mind. The psy-wards beyond the prison were potent, but those within were merciless in their unstinting suppression.

  He barely felt the impact of the landing gear on planed rock or the hard imposition of gravity. His armour pressed him to the seat and every limb felt weighted with lead. Even the air felt oppressed, deprived of some vital animus by the stagnancy of the prison’s environment.

  It took Promus an act of will to rise. Every movement was an effort, as though the fibre-bundle muscles of his battleplate were resisting his every step. He made his way back to the troop compartment, where those elements of his command given leave to enter Kamiti Sona awaited.

  A dozen Vorax battle-automata under the command of Datasmith Vindicatrix stood mag-locked to the deck. Magos Videns sat at the rear of the compartment, clutching a pair of dataslates to his chest, as far as possible from the hunched, predatory cybernetics.

  Credence Araxe, the psychopathic Master of Ursarax, was already inspecting the cybernetic warrior-thralls under his command, issuing orders in barking Lingua-technis. His Lorica Thallax armour was painted a deep gold-red and the dome of his helm had been replaced with a crystalflex cowl that revealed the fleshless skull beneath.

  Promus marched past them without speaking, his mouth gummed and his throat compressed with thirst. The assault ramp lowered and void-cold air misted as it met the comparative warmth of the troop compartment. He swallowed his distaste and stepped down the ramp as though a welcome from the Avenging Son, Roboute Guilliman himself, lay beyond.

  The drop-shaft had brought the Stormbird and Aquila into an angular hangar of dull metal, the walls cut with Imperial eagles over older, more angular engravings, like a hastily scrawled palimpsest. Moisture condensed on the cooling hulls of the aircraft and huge vents clattered overhead as they finished decompression protocols.

  Nagasena’s Aquila remained sealed, its gloss-black hull creaking as it expanded, the engines still throbbing with power. Promus saw its fuselage had been widened and strengthened beyond the customary specifications required for mortal dignitaries and officers.

  He turned from the lander as a detachment of dome-helmed Kastelan battle-automata entered the hangar chamber through an armoured vestibule. They advanced in perfect, thudding lockstep. Carapace-mounted phosphor-blasters smoked with heat and hissing blue flames burned in the perforated barrels of their incendines.

  A woman in form-fitting armour of bronze marched before them, a pair of swords sheathed cross-wise at her back and an ivory-plumed helm worked in the form of a hunting hawk nestled in the crook of her left arm.

  At the sight of the battle robots, the Vorax spread out behind Promus, limbs tense and agile bodies rocking back and forth. Vindicatrix, robed in midnight-blue and encased in a rapidly unfolding harness-array of glowing slates and manual control mechanisms, kept their aggression in check for now.

  Araxe and his blue-armoured Ursarax fighters formed up behind Promus like sprinters awaiting a starting gun, ready to erupt into violence at a moment’s notice.

  The Kastelans kept coming, crashing to a halt five metres from Promus. He studied the woman. Her age was hard to judge, her skin firm and her jawline slender. But her eyes… Her eyes gave her away, empty and unreadable. Even in a prison complex expressly designed to annul psykers, she still stood out as a void in the world. A soulless pariah.

  Promus’ skin crawled at the sight of her, unreasoning hatred generating an aggression response. His armour responded, but he suppressed its engaging combat systems, knowing his reaction was a purely animal response to the void where her soul should be.

  Her helm plume marked her as a senior within her order, but Promus saw no sign she had taken the Vow of Tranquillity.

  At least he could talk to her and have her respond.

  ‘I am Sister Caesaria,’ she said. ‘I am commandant of Kamiti Sona and your kind is not welcome here.’

  ‘My name is Dio Promus,’ he began. ‘I am here at–’

  ‘I know who you are,’ said Caesaria. ‘Do you imagine I would allow anyone of unconfirmed identity within this facility?’

  ‘Then I will assume you know why we are here?’

  ‘She knows, ja,’ said a gruff, laconic voice coming from the direction of Nagasena’s lander. ‘She doesn’t much like it, but she knows. Ja, she does.’

  Promus recognised the accent, rich with acoustically prominent tones suited to the oral traditions of its speakers.

  Now he knew why the Aquila had been modified.

  Yasu Nagasena stepped down from the serpent-winged craft behind a swaggering pack of five legionaries in fur-mantled plate the colour of a midwinter’s dawn over Fenris.

  ‘Your “men of ice” are Space Wolves?’ said Promus.

  Nagasena grinned and nodded.

  ‘Allow me to present the warriors of Bödvar Bjarki.’

  Sailing the Great Ocean was an ordeal for most travellers, something to be endured, but for Hathor Maat it was a chance to directly connect with the source of his powers.

  Even Fellowships whose star was in decline were empowered.

  The surging tides of the empyrean had made the Pyrae into gods of hellfire, and bulkheads throughout the starship crackled with flames as the Khemet hurtled towards its uncertain destination. The Raptora shared a measure of that bellicose e
nergy, while the seersight of the Corvidae remained stubbornly cataracted. The Athanaeans knew balance, but the Pavoni… Their powers waxed and waned with each ringing of the shipboard watch bells.

  And, right now, the tides were against him.

  ‘You are sure you can do this?’ asked Lucius.

  ‘Yes,’ said Hathor Maat.

  ‘I don’t feel anything.’

  ‘We haven’t yet begun.’

  ‘Then you should start.’

  ‘I will,’ snapped Hathor Maat. ‘If you stop interrupting.’

  They sat facing one another in the centre of Hathor Maat’s quarters, a chamber of mirrors that offered no respite from reflections. Lucius was armoured, his sword resting across his knees. Hathor Maat wore the powder-blue robes of the Pavoni.

  An Ourania circle of powdered umbilicus veneris enclosed them, its cardinal points marked by crystals of rose quartz.

  ‘Understand that once we begin there is no turning back,’ said Hathor Maat.

  ‘I don’t turn back from anything,’ said Lucius, and the horrific scars webbing his shaven skull squirmed like worms beneath the skin. ‘I only ever go forwards.’

  Hathor Maat nodded; that much was obvious.

  The swordsman’s aura was in constant flux, a seething hell storm of conflicting emotions and razored desires that could never be satisfied. Life and death warred within him, the potential for immortality or eternal damnation. Only an iron discipline kept the storm within Lucius from consuming him utterly, a determination never to yield that only the truly insane could know.

  ‘How are you even alive?’ marvelled Hathor Maat.

  ‘Can’t you tell?’ asked Lucius. ‘I thought your order were all about the workings of meat.’

  ‘Adepts of the Pavoni know a great many things, but we are not gods.’

  ‘Funny, I get the feeling that’s exactly what you think you are,’ said Lucius, his almost reptilian eyes flicking towards the walls of mirrors. ‘A raging narcissist if ever I saw one, and I’ve seen the very best of them.’

  ‘Says the man seeking to be beautiful again.’

  ‘There is a shortage of great beauty in this sterile galaxy,’ said Lucius with a simpering grin. ‘It would be a shame to deprive it of mine a minute longer than necessary.’

  ‘You cut your own face off,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘Tell me why you mutilated yourself so completely. And speak truly – it will make my task that much harder if you lie.’

  ‘I wanted to make myself ugly,’ said Lucius, without shame or hesitation.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because a dead man spoiled my perfect beauty with his fist,’ said Lucius. ‘And if I couldn’t be perfectly beautiful, I would be perfectly ugly.’

  ‘Then we are kindred spirits,’ said Hathor Maat.

  Lucius nodded. ‘You should begin, brother.’

  Hathor Maat let out a calming breath and eased his mind into the seventh enumeration.

  ‘Picture yourself as you were, as you would wish to be again,’ he said. ‘Let no other thought enter your mind, let no other desire touch you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘As within, so without.’

  ‘Done.’

  Hathor Maat slid heightened awareness of flesh into the swordsman’s body. His initial reaction was one of disgust.

  Oily skin, dense muscle mass, meat and gristle, ossified bones and blue-glistening organs that had no place inside this grotesquely enlarged transhuman frame.

  And every part of it rotting to pulp with every breath.

  This was unstoppable entropic decay, a countdown to extinction.

  Slowly Hathor Maat descended into the sixth enumeration, letting his disgust ebb as the true genius of the Emperor’s design opened up to him.

  In an age of peace, a legionary might endure for millennia or more, but he would not live forever.

  The immortality of the Legions was a myth.

  Eventually the biological mechanisms sustaining them would fail and the horrifying descent into decrepitude would begin. Traditional life-prolonging drugs and surgery were ineffective on transhuman physiology. Martial cults spoke of a warrior’s legacy as his immortality, but Hathor Maat wanted more.

  Death held little terror for him, but the infirmities of age and the weaknesses of a failing body were a constant horror. The artes of the Pavoni had kept him beautiful, had allowed him to avoid the bland homogenisation of features common to warriors of the Legions.

  It had kept him unique, but it couldn’t last forever.

  He had looked to Ahriman to save him, to save them all.

  But Ahriman had failed. Despite everything, Sobek had died, reduced to nothing more than fine dust. He knew Ahriman held him responsible for their failure. The great Chief Librarian was unable to see past his own limitations and was sure to place the blame squarely on Hathor Maat. Ever since Sobek’s death, he felt Ahriman giving him sidelong glances when he thought Hathor Maat wasn’t looking, suspicious and jealous.

  A sigh of frustration escaped as he felt his grip on this most delicate level of perception slip. Quelling thoughts of Ahriman, he forced himself to concentrate on the task at hand.

  Lucius had cut deep. Flesh had a long memory and the pain of its disfigurement was still strong. It surfaced in his own features, and Hathor Maat flinched as he felt his skin burn with repercussive pain.

  That too could be managed. Hathor Maat allowed his will to be guided by the swordsman’s absurdly simplistic view of himself: chiselled jaw, strong cheeks, wide eyes, noble brow and aquiline nose. The most beautiful hero imaginable.

  Lucius cried out as the bones of his skull cracked under Hathor Maat’s aether-sculpting. Cells long since ruined were rendered functional, withered veins and arteries ripened with newly flowing hyper-oxygenated blood. Poorly healed breaks were erased as bruised musculature smoothed and soft tissue was reshaped to make Lucius more beautiful than he had ever been in reality.

  With the underlying structure restored, the gouged scars receded into waxen flesh as the swordsman’s dead skin mask was peeled away to reveal a face Hathor Maat had last seen upon the grand dais at Ullanor.

  The connection between them broke and Hathor Maat groaned, the aftershocks of so great an expenditure of power wracking him with pain as his aetheric humours sought balance.

  ‘It is done,’ he sighed.

  Lucius lifted his hands to his face, fingertips exploring his new features like a blind man. His chest heaved in a series of hyperventilating exhalations that turned to bubbling, hysterical laughter.

  Lucius stood and his new reflection stared back from a host of gleaming mirrors in an infinitely regressing mise en abyme, beautiful and perfect in every detail.

  The very image of Fulgrim himself.

  The swordsman was long gone and war musters rang throughout the Khemet’s decks, but Hathor Maat remained confined within his chambers. Of all the disciplines of the Fellowships, biomancy took the greatest toll on its practitioner.

  And the Pavoni Law of Equivalent Exchange was unequivocal.

  To obtain, something of equal value must be lost.

  Lucius had a new face, and Hathor Maat was paying the price for that, but having so sublime a warrior in his debt would be worth the pain.

  He still felt what the Phoenician’s warrior had done to himself with a shard of broken glass, still felt skin and muscle parting before its edge. His face felt wet with blood, but when he touched his fingers to his cheeks they came away dry.

  Hathor Maat drew in a fearful breath.

  His fingers were trembling as though palsied.

  ‘Repercussions are normal,’ he said, drawing his hands into fists and rising to the first enumeration. ‘To be expected.’

  Hathor Maat sent restorative power down through his arms, healing ruptured cells and halting the tre
mors in his hands. Bladework calluses on the heels of his palms and middle fingers faded as his skin renewed itself.

  He exhaled slowly as Ahriman’s voice resonated within his skull. Even drained by his workings, he heard the Chief Librarian’s excitement.

  Hathor Maat, I need you on the embarkation deck. The Fellowships are mustering.+

  You have a destination?+

  Better. I have brought us where we need to be.+

  I shall be there directly,+ he sent, but Ahriman had already broken the link between them.

  Hathor Maat stood and smoothed his robes.

  And a sickening wave of nausea swept through him. Multiple images flooded his perception, like a host of transparencies overlaid on top of one another. He fell to his knees, hands flat on the floor and the sensory assault instantly ceased.

  Hathor Maat drew in a panicked breath, blinking away the dizzying sense memory of his chambers viewed from a host of skewed angles. Undulant pressure squirmed in his palms and he rocked back on his haunches, drawing his hands into fists and resting them on his knees.

  Slowly he turned his wrists and opened his hands.

  ‘Please, no…’ he whispered.

  Unblinking, myopic eyes stared up at him from his palms and every one of his fingertips.

  Nine

  The neophyte

  Star-cunning

  The Scarlet Orrery

  The weeping wasn’t the worst thing about Kamiti Sona.

  As he drifted in and out of chemical and psychic fugues, the dull sounds of sorrow no longer touched him. The sterile gloom was filled with endless sobbing, grunts – sometimes in pain, sometimes in what passed here for pleasure – plaintive wails, pleas for help, and the rhythmic drumming of fists or skulls against the impervious metal of a cell wall.

  After a while, the only sorrow anyone cared for in Kamiti Sona was their own. How long had he been here? He didn’t know. Time was impossible to judge, but years must have passed since the fright-masked warriors with yellow eyes had thrown him to the Silent Sisters.

  It wasn’t even the violence. The brutality of many inmates could not be subdued by chemicals or the threat of cortical overload collars. Beatings were a daily occurrence, and deaths frequent. He kept clear of trouble when it reared its fists or bared a crude blade. The worst of it had passed him by, but not all trouble was avoidable. The gouged socket where his left eye had once sat was proof of that.