The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  Nor was it their gaolers. The half-human, half-cybernetic servitors that patrolled the metalled corridors and tomb-like cells were predictable, and the bronze-armoured Sisters used force only when necessary. When they did, it was swift and shocking and utterly without mercy, but there was always purpose to it.

  Nor was it the nightmares.

  When silence fell in Kamiti Sona it fell completely. When the sorrow finally ended, when the violence abated and their captors withdrew, the soundless void that was left was rich with nightmares.

  Nightmares of skull-masked interrogators with iron-braided beards and yellowed eyes, of agonising trawls through his mind that left him screaming and soiled. Endlessly repeated questions drilled into his skull like hot skewers, questions to which he had no answer.

  One accusation laid against him again and again.

  Maleficarum.

  Over and over in unending hammer-blows.

  Maleficarum. Maleficarum. Maleficarum. Maleficarum…

  It broke him. These men and their questions and insults and agonies. They stripped him of every last shred of dignity and made him less than human.

  But eventually it stopped. Eventually they were satisfied he had told them all he knew, that every last secret had been ripped out of him.

  And when it stopped, he thanked them.

  He loved them for making the pain go away.

  But not even the nightmares of pain and the wolf-cloaked interrogators were the worst part of Kamiti Sona.

  The worst of it was the undiluted hate that now filled him.

  Hate for the one who had put him here.

  Ahzek Ahriman.

  Bödvar Bjarki was lean compared to his brothers of the Vlka Fenryka, and the warrior in the unmarked plate walking alongside him was half a head taller. Hawk-nosed and clear-eyed, he had the look of eagles upon him.

  ‘You’re one of Jarl Guilliman’s, aren’t you?’ he said.

  ‘I was,’ said the warrior as Sister Caesaria and her hulking battle robots led them through an adamantium gate. Beyond the gate was a long, ribbed chamber with dark walls glistening wetly like something fresh-risen from the ocean depths.

  Bjarki nodded towards the mortal warrior in lacquered armour with the finely balanced sword. Followed by thrall-warriors of flesh and iron, he walked with Sister Caesaria, answering her questions with short, vague answers.

  ‘Yasu Nagasena tells me you are called Dio Promus.’

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘You look like one of the stone men the Upplanders build on Fenris,’ said Bjarki. ‘They look pretty for maybe a season, but they fall down as soon as the land’s roots get soft.’

  ‘And you look like the statue of Bardylis carved over the Civitas Gate on Macragge.’

  ‘Who is Bardylis? A Jarl of the Five Hundred Worlds?’

  ‘No, a barbarian defeated by Lord Guilliman in his youth.’

  Bjarki grinned, exposing his fangs. ‘If he killed this Bardylis, why raise a statue to him?’

  ‘He did not kill him,’ said Promus. ‘He spared his life and in return Bardylis swore an oath of loyalty to Lord Guilliman at the Gathering of Paonia, which proves even a savage can recognise greatness.’

  Bjarki turned to his warriors with a mock grimace.

  ‘I think I have just been insulted.’

  ‘You should kill him,’ said Svafnir Rackwulf in guttural Wurgen.

  Bjarki nodded as though considering Rackwulf’s advice.

  ‘What did he just say?’ asked Promus.

  ‘He asks if you are star-cunning like me.’

  Bjarki watched Promus’ gaze roam over his armour, noting the runic cuts encircling his heart-cage, the toothed amulet set upon his breast and the lupine talismans hung from iron cords looped around his arms.

  ‘I am a psyker, yes,’ agreed Promus. ‘Like you. What is it your lot calls it? A Rune Priest?’

  ‘I think maybe we are both very powerful,’ nodded Bjarki, spitting on the dark metal of the floor. ‘But here? That counts for nothing. This place is not kind to brothers of the wyrd.’

  ‘The wyrd?’

  Bjarki spun on his heel to face his brothers, walking backwards with a disbelieving shake of his head.

  ‘Fenrys hjolda! Dio Promus knows not of the wyrd.’

  ‘He is Upplander and comes with iron men instead of clan-brothers,’ said Harr Balegyr, his one good eye hooded and hostile. ‘Why would he?’

  ‘You serve the Sigillite, yes?’ said Bjarki, turning back to Promus as they passed into a tall chamber with glyph-cut walls that tapered inwards to a point far above. ‘Like Yasu Nagasena?’

  ‘I serve the Emperor,’ said Promus, and in his mind’s eye he saw the face of Varaestus Sarilo and countless others, ‘but not like Nagasena.’

  ‘You kill the Allfather’s enemies?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you serve Him like us.’

  ‘Why are you here, Bödvar Bjarki?’ asked Promus as squads of the Silent Sisterhood appeared from hexagonal tunnels on either side to march with them. The Vorax and Ursarax cohorts tensed, but Promus shook his head.

  ‘Why do you think we are here?’

  ‘To stand at my side and slay me if I turn traitor?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not,’ said Bjarki, tapping a blackened shred of oath paper fixed to his armour with wax imprinted with the Sigillite’s seal. ‘We do not relish such tasks. The Wolf King commands it, so we obey.’

  ‘I am flattered,’ said Promus, ‘but I thought your sire only sent watch-packs to the halls of his brother-primarchs?’

  Bjarki gave a weary shrug. ‘We are not a true watch-pack – we do not have that honour. But we still watch, yes? Because you and I both know that of those who turn, star-cunning make the worst enemies.’

  He looked Promus in the eye. ‘Prospero taught us that.’

  Promus halted his march and met Bjarki’s gaze. The Vorax bringing up the rear hissed binaric irritation at the delay.

  ‘You were there?’ he asked. ‘You fought the Thousand Sons?’

  Bjarki nodded. ‘We lost many brothers in the fight, but we killed the Daemon Lord’s sons.’

  ‘Daemon Lord?’

  ‘Ja, Magnus. The King in Crimson,’ said Bjarki, covering one eye with his hand. ‘Svafnir Rackwulf back there slew more of his red sorcerers than any could count with that bloody great null-spear of his. And Olgyr Widdowsyn? He alone of his pack survived the last battle before the great pyramid of glass.’

  Bjarki pointed to a barrel-chested legionary with a forked beard and a clicking, mechanised red eye. ‘Harr Balegyr tore his own eye out when facing a sorcerer-lord rather than suffer the maleficarum he sent to kill him.’

  ‘Aye, and the skjalds never let me forget it,’ bellowed Balegyr, causing the Sisters to turn in alarm. He rapped the knuckle of his thumb against the eye. ‘Like I need reminding.’

  ‘And that,’ said Bjarki, nodding towards a warrior whose legs and one arm were the bare metal of augmetics, ‘is Gierlothnir Helblind, shield-bearer of Tra. He who stood over Widdowsyn as fiends of the Underverse tried to cut his thread.’

  ‘He is more bionic than flesh.’

  Bjarki leaned in as if sharing a joke. ‘It’s why we call him Spear Inviter. He welcomes pain a little too much, I think.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ asked Promus.

  ‘Lemuel?’

  He looked up, blinking in the gloom.

  Shapes. A faint outline of two women silhouetted in the door of his cell. His hands instinctively tightened on the ceramic urn he cradled. He had kept it safe all these years and everyone in Kamiti Sona knew never to touch it. For reasons Lemuel was never able to fathom, even the Silent Sisters turned a blind eye to it.

  The woman who’d spoken took a step into his cell. Her skin had once been beautif
ully tanned, but like every soul within Kamiti Sona, it was now light-starved and ghoulishly pallid. Her hair, once long and dark, was now grey and cropped.

  Only her eyes still held to their vitality, one emerald-green, the other hazel flecked with gold. Her companion was fine-boned and dark-skinned, but she too was blanched and hollowed out by confinement.

  ‘Camille?’ said Lemuel. ‘Chaiya?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Camille. ‘Are you ready?’

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘We were going to walk together, you remember?’

  ‘We were?’ he said, his voice little more than a parched wheeze. ‘Yes, a walk. Together.’

  Like everything within Lemuel’s mind, his recollection of Camille and Chaiya was fractured and unreliable. He thought they had been friends once, somewhere that felt far away and long ago. They remembered that too, so it was probably true.

  His life before Kamiti Sona was a book with pages that turned too fast and with some of the words missing. His most cherished memories were gone, torn from his mind or left so fragmentary as to be meaningless.

  But despite all the skull-masked interrogators had done to them, all that had been broken inside their heads, they could still remember that friendship.

  ‘Yes,’ he said again. ‘We’d like that.’

  Lemuel smiled and pushed himself from the mattress laid against the wall of his cell. Together with a rubberised bowl half filled with piss, it was the only furniture permitted.

  He took a moment to steady himself. He remembered being a big man once, but his frame was spare and wasted after years of prison food.

  ‘Where will we walk today?’ he asked.

  ‘Perhaps a stroll through the Elysian Fields?’ suggested Camille. ‘Before ending at the Aspodel Meadows?’

  ‘You always imagine the best places,’ said Lemuel as they stood aside to let him pass. Camille smiled and nodded to the urn he carried.

  ‘Hello, Kallista,’ she said.

  They left the upper levels with its rows of cells and descended to the main floor. This part of Kamiti Sona was a vast, arched space hundreds of metres in width and many hundreds in height. The ceiling was a curving vault, its black walls of smooth stone gridded with alcove cells like reliquary chambers in a vast catacomb.

  What light there was came from the walls themselves, unchanging and eternal. A lifeless illumination that leached all it touched of vitality. Over a thousand people were housed in the chamber. Like Lemuel, Camille and Chaiya, they wore dirty smocks and chafing collars of dark metal that felt heavier than they looked and kept their wearers in a torpid state of mind.

  Some inmates gathered in small groups, while others wandered listlessly from place to place in their own private miseries. Most remained in their cells, too broken and too exhausted to rise from their soiled mattresses.

  Camille knelt to talk to a sour-faced mother with a small boy of around six years. Births were strictly forbidden in Kamiti Sona, so the child must have arrived with her.

  ‘I think I remember him as a babe in arms,’ said Lemuel.

  ‘Has it really been so long?’ said Chaiya.

  ‘What’s his name?’ asked Lemuel. ‘I can’t recall.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, and her eyes filled with tears.

  Lemuel had fleeting memories of knowing Chaiya in better times. He remembered her strength and poise. To see her so lost was like looking in a mirror.

  ‘It’s Pheres,’ said Camille, rising and taking Chaiya’s hand. ‘Pheres, remember? His mother is Medea, and her son is Pheres.’

  Pheres, yes, that was it. Frail and thin-boned and given to extended bouts of overblown weeping and petulance. Not an easy child to like, but what kind of a childhood could he have in so awful a place?

  ‘Yes,’ said Chaiya, and Lemuel could see her struggle to embed the name in her memory. ‘Yes, Pheres.’

  ‘Come on, let’s keep walking,’ said Camille, leading them away from Pheres and his sullen mother. ‘We’re walking through the golden fields of Elysium. A land where there is no want, no hunger and only bliss.’

  Lemuel smiled, trying to picture the blessed lands. Only Camille could conjure such vivid imagery with her words. Had that been her calling before coming here? Was she a teller of tales, a playwright or poet?

  ‘The sun is golden on our skin,’ continued Camille as they moved across the floor. ‘It’s warm, and the sky is blue, the colour of the open ocean. The wind stirs the crops and the aroma of cut stalks and harvested grain fills the air.’

  Coppered servo-skulls flew overhead, shock-calipers buzzing with lethal energy, but Lemuel ignored them, allowing his mind to escape somewhere beautiful.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s a villa ahead,’ said Camille, the words freighted with her own longing. ‘Fig trees grow in the courtyard, their branches heavy with fruit, and children are playing in their shade. There’s a table set with food fresh from the fields and there’s sweet wine in earthenware jugs, ready to be poured. All our friends are waiting for us.’

  Camille and Chaiya held hands as they walked.

  They had been lovers before coming here and nothing they had endured since had broken that bond. Lemuel held to a fragment of memory, a woman with sad eyes waving goodbye to him from a roof veranda, but who she was remained out of reach.

  Malika? Was that her name? Who was she to him?

  He couldn’t remember, and that loss tormented him.

  But he still had Kallista.

  She was dead. He knew that, of course.

  Her ashes filled the urn he carried.

  Lemuel could not remember the details of how she died, only the name and face of her killer. Ahzek Ahriman. A name without meaning or attachment, a focus for the terrifying hatred he carried inside.

  A hatred that sustained Lemuel in the times between Camille’s pleasant fictions, when he could not keep the nightmares of wolf-cloaked warriors and pain at bay.

  ‘Get away!’ cried a screeching voice, dragging him from his reverie of blue skies and sunshine, sweet wine and fresh food. Lemuel flinched as a near-naked man with a shaven scalp leapt out in front of him.

  ‘Back off, Prinn,’ said Camille. ‘We’re just walking.’

  ‘No! You can’t stand there! This is Prinn’s way out!’ he yelled, his eyes darting between them and the floating servo-skulls. ‘You can’t be here! They’ll see! They’ll see!’

  Prinn’s entire body was covered with infected weals and scabs where he’d scratched himself raw. He lunged forwards and Lemuel tripped, almost losing his grip on Kallista’s urn.

  ‘Get away!’ screamed Prinn, spittle flying from his mouth as he stood over Lemuel, clawing the air with bloodied fingernails. ‘This is where they’re coming for me. They’re coming to take me with them this time!’

  ‘I said back off, Prinn,’ repeated Camille, pushing the madman away and cocking a fist at her shoulder.

  Prinn continued to claw the air with increasing desperation. He sank to his knees and ripped his fingernails down his cheeks hard enough to draw blood. He shook his head and burst into tears.

  ‘I’m not worthy yet and they don’t forgive that,’ sobbed Prinn. ‘Do you know what happens to those who aren’t worthy?’

  ‘No, and I don’t care,’ snapped Camille, pushing past the lunatic.

  ‘They promised,’ wailed Prinn. ‘I tried and tried. I said the words they whispered, but they never answered! They promised this was where they’d come for me.’

  Chaiya offered her hand to Lemuel, but he ignored it, clutching Kallista’s urn to his chest as he climbed to his feet. They left Prinn weeping and tearing his skin, all thoughts of escape to fantasies of the Elysium Fields forgotten.

  ‘Crazy bastard,’ said Camille.

  Caesaria and her Kastelans led them deeper into Kam
iti Sona through a succession of geometric chambers somewhere between abandoned fane-crypts and fabricatus temples. The sense of a place monstrously repurposed was evident in the uneasy symbiosis of ancient architecture and human technology.

  At length, the journey ended before an enormous gate of polished metal, carved with more of the disturbingly alien glyphs. Heavy chains of dark iron ran from two enormous metal berthing rings to darkened alcoves on either side. Within each alcove, the shadowed suggestion of a vast statue cast in dulled bronze was barely visible.

  Weapon turrets clattered as auto-loaders fed belts of shells into breeches.

  Promus licked his lips as he felt his mouth dry a little at the sight of the wide-muzzled autocannons. He had no doubt they were intended to gun down rogue psykers, but what practices were in place to prevent them engaging psykers who were not prisoners?

  As if reading his mind, Bjarki chuckled and said, ‘Now we will see if this place can tell the difference between star-cunning and maleficarum.’

  The targeting mechanisms blinked from red to green, and Promus let out a relieved breath.

  Bjarki grinned and slapped a hand on his shoulder guard.

  ‘You were worried for a moment,’ he said.

  ‘I do not entirely trust weapons without a soul.’

  ‘Yet you surround yourself with such things.’

  ‘It suits my purpose for the moment.’

  ‘And what purpose is that?’

  ‘My own.’

  Bjarki turned to address his warriors.

  ‘We must keep a close eye on this one,’ he said with a toothed grin. ‘He keeps secrets like the gothi.’

  ‘Then tell him to keep them to himself,’ offered Svafnir Rackwulf. ‘No good can come of learning them.’

  The other Wolves grunted in agreement, and Promus relaxed his grip on the hilt of the gladius at his hip.

  Sister Caesaria marched to the gate and placed both hands upon it, as if to push it wide open.