The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  The Wolves fought alongside him, plunging deeper into the mob of warp-touched prisoners. Bjarki was primal fury and elemental savagery, unleashing storms of ice shards, ash-black avatars of ancient wolves and winter lightning that struck wherever his bale-eye fell.

  Svafnir Rackwulf protected his left, hewing limbs with what looked like a harpoon with a long, serrated blade. Just looking at the glitter-sheened edges of the null-blade made Promus want to snap its haft across his knee.

  Widdowsyn fought to Bjarki’s right, a crackling buckler serving in defence of the Rune Priest. Harr Balegyr and Gierlothnir Helblind ranged farther afield as lone wolves, killing with berserk abandon and hearth-songs of the Aett on their lips.

  Though he was without psy-craft, Yasu Nagasena fought shoulder to shoulder with the legionaries, a dangerous place for most mortals, but the seer-hunter’s reflexes were swift enough to keep him safe.

  Behind Nagasena, Vindicatrix directed the lethal predations of the Vorax automata as they slaughtered mortals with distasteful relish. Credence Araxe’s Ursarax thralls hunted in an opportunistic pack, launching themselves through the air and overwhelming those they fell upon with all the homicidal fury of their deranged master.

  Promus fell to one knee, unleashing a war-cry of the XIII Legion that exploded in a ring of cobalt-blue fire. Two score screaming lunatics burned to fang-mawed ghosts where they stood, but a shrieking witch covered in tattoos of snakes that writhed beneath her branded skin remained standing.

  She carried sharpened femur-daggers and her arms were bloody to the elbow. Dripping red skulls circled her, ragged stumps of spinal cord dangling from where she had hacked them free.

  Promus stood, made a quarter-turn and fired a head shot.

  One of her pack skulls intercepted his bolt and exploded in fragments of bone and grey meat. The rest came on like attack dogs. A second bolt took down another before the rest were upon Promus, snapping and tearing with jawbones that morphed into bestial, fanged things.

  They were irritants, nothing more, and thoughts of fire detonated them one by one. Steaming brain matter misted the air as Promus aimed his pistol at the woman again.

  ‘Why do you kill your own kind?’ she shrieked.

  Pity had briefly touched Promus upon entry to this shadow-haunted chamber of madness, but the sight of fallen Sisters’ desecrated corpses had hardened him to thoughts of mercy.

  ‘You are not my kind,’ he said.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about me,’ she cackled.

  Promus fired a custom-load mass-reactive, its chemical explosive mixed with noble elements known to be inimical to the warp-touched. The witch’s torso disintegrated, but her words cut into his soul.

  An avian shadow of impenetrable darkness that yet glittered with myriad painful colours billowed from the witch’s falling corpse. Its wings were feathered and it screeched in fury, swelling and growing with every breath. A hooked, crocodilian beak formed, a skull garlanded with crushed dreams.

  A dark lord of the empyrean.

  Promus unleashed a torrent of psychic fury from his staff, but the creature drew the fire into its body. It pinned him with eyes that were suns illuminating dead galaxies, a mind weaving plots that would not bear fruit for ten thousand years. It uncoiled a fist of serpentine fingers and irresistible kine power wrenched Promus’ staff from his grip.

  ‘No!’ he cried as the beast crushed it to splinters.

  His battleplate smoked as the wards woven into it blistered and burned away. Promus fought to break its gaze, to keep it out of his mind, but its barbed thoughts easily prised open the vault of his skull. It whispered within him, a name and a curse all in one.

  Death to you, and all your kin.

  It laughed at what it found within him, turning and lifting its head to whisper that secret knowledge onwards.

  His mind was buckling at the seams when two saviours in frost-grey armour appeared at his side. Bjarki kicked Promus in the back, breaking the warp-thing’s gaze. He fell forwards, cracking his skull on the stone floor.

  Through a haze of blood, he saw Svafnir Rackwulf bend and cast his serrated harpoon like Tashtego of Old Earth upon sight of his albino prey. Its long, toothed blade flew true and struck the winged monster square in the chest.

  It vanished in a screeching explosion of blinding light and sound, utterly undone by Rackwulf’s null-weapon. Bjarki hauled Promus upright as painful after-images of the monster refused to fade from his retinas.

  ‘I told you we knew how to destroy maleficarum,’ he said.

  Promus nodded, his mouth tasting of ashes and bile. He blinked away nightmarish visions of corpses of dead worlds with sores that were once cities, razed by charnel winds that brushed pallid stars and snuffed them out one by one.

  The unnatural darkness of the chamber lifted, and Promus looked up to its far reaches. Black smoke twisted like a nest of oily serpents lairing in the roof vault. It wreathed the chamber’s upper reaches in shadow, but Promus saw figures moving along the upper galleries: transhuman warriors in crimson plate, burning with warp-light.

  ‘There…’ he gasped, struggling to raise his arm.

  Bjarki looked up and stiffened, a wolf with its hackles raised. The purity of his savage hatred was palpable.

  ‘I see you,’ he snarled.

  The Sun Scarabs went right, leaving Nycteus and the Feathered Ones to guard the steps from anything that might climb from the bloodshed and chaos below. The Scarab Occult and Memunim’s Ankharu Blades followed Ahriman left.

  They moved at speed, clearing every cell and moving down the gallery in overwatching bounds. The Terminators filled each cell with fire as the Raptora sealed them with kine barriers. They left smoking tombs in their wake, billowing the roasted flesh-stink of psyker corpses.

  Eyeless feasters skulked in the upper gallery, devouring the souls their rudimentary fear-sense sniffed out of the morass of raw emotion. They squatted over bodies torn open by bare hands. Gleaming entrails hung from dripping jaws.

  Ahriman kept his pistol holstered, killing the cannibalistic monsters with sharp jabs of focused kine power, like ice picks to the frontal lobe.

  ‘You are certain it was your former pupil?’ said Menkaura, stepping over the caved-in faces of flesh-eaters.

  ‘Yes, it was Lemuel,’ replied Ahriman. ‘He is close.’

  ‘And still alive?’

  Ahriman nodded.

  ‘Surprising,’ said Menkaura, staff in one hand, an ornamented pistol with a conical snout in the other. He fired a blue-hot beam of plasma into the chest of a chatter-toothed cannibal. It vanished in a plume of superheated fire, toppling from the gallery, ablaze from head to feet.

  ‘Did you teach this Lemuel battle-artes? Warding circles?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Very surprising,’ said Menkaura, pressing his back to the wall as an explosion of fire boiled from the cell next to him.

  Ahriman did not reply, keeping one hand pressed to the Book of Magnus. The tremors of anticipation rippled the pages between its bindings. His own sense of what they would find here was no less dynamic.

  ‘You really believe he will be here as well?’ asked Menkaura, nodding towards the book. ‘Kallimakus?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ahriman. ‘It makes perfect sense the primarch would maintain a connection between himself and the scribe who penned his greatest work.’

  ‘Don’t you find it even a little strange the Silent Sisterhood have not sensed the soul-shard Kallimakus might carry within him?’ said Aforgomon, trailing behind Ahriman.

  ‘I would expect the greatest cunning from my primarch,’ said Ahriman. ‘Even split from himself.’

  In truth, he had wondered the same thing, though was loath to reveal that doubt to the daemon within the yokai.

  ‘But you sense more than that, don’t you?’ said Aforgomon. ‘A sleeping drago
n, just waiting on the right song to wake it.’

  Ahriman held up a hand as they approached another cell. Trepidation caught in his throat.

  ‘In here,’ he said. ‘I go in alone.’

  Ahriman spun and entered the cell, staff held before him as a weapon and means of defence.

  The cell had five occupants – three female, two male.

  He recognised two of them: Camille Shivani, a psychometrist of no small ability, and Lemuel Gaumon, his former neophyte. The third woman he did not know, but her bone structure told him she was a native of Prospero.

  But no Mahavastu Kallimakus…

  An older woman in the corner of the cell was weeping, her forearm locked tightly around the neck of a much younger male.

  A son?

  Whatever the relationship between them had been was now irrelevant. The boy was dead. Strangled by his own mother, by the reading of his swiftly diminishing aura.

  Lemuel sat with his back to one wall of the cell, sobbing uncontrollably and with his knees drawn up to his chest, a metallic urn clutched guiltily close to his chest. Camille and her Prosperine companion knelt beside the weeping woman, their faces twisted in grief.

  ‘What did he do, Chaiya?’ screamed Camille, her hands balled to fists. ‘Throne, Lem, what did you do?’

  Lemuel didn’t answer, but Ahriman saw the truth.

  The clumsy marks of psychic manipulation were evident all across the weeping woman’s aura. A lethal mix of old resentment and frustration towards her son, drawn out of the locked place to which it had been consigned before being crudely and massively amplified.

  ‘He saved you,’ said Ahriman.

  The woman would not be parted from her dead son, but the Thousand Sons had no interest in her. They removed Lemuel, Camille and Chaiya from the cell, dragging them onto the gallery.

  ‘Kallimakus?’ said Menkaura.

  ‘No,’ said Ahriman, unable to conceal his disappointment, but before he could say more, the stabbing pain of a blurted psychic hail crashed into his thoughts. He felt the mind that had sent it, one of geometric configurations and Euclidean precision. The others heard it too, even the daemon.

  Ignis?+ he asked.

  None other.+

  Ignis’ voice echoed as if from across a vast chasm. Faint and distorted, but its urgency was beyond doubt.

  What is it?+

  Lord Ahriman, there has been a… development.+

  What sort of development?+ said Ahriman, a leaden sensation of dread settling in his gut. A sense of things ended before they had truly begun.

  The Khemet is lost and its few survivors are now aboard Kamiti Sona. The enemy vessels are turning their guns on this facility and will destroy it rather than allow us to escape.+

  Ahriman hoped he had misheard, but knew he had not.

  Where are you?+

  On the breached upper embarkation decks, fighting to secure an alternate means of egress.+

  What means of egress?+

  One you will not like. Just rendezvous on our location as soon as you can. I am sending you some assistance,+ said Ignis, breaking the connection, but not before Ahriman had a glimpse of somewhere void-dark and hopeless, a screaming black tomb of lost souls.

  ‘Incoming,’ called Nycteus from the top of the steps.

  Ahriman swore. Could things get any worse?

  Before he could curse the stupidity of even thinking such a foolish question, he felt the feral touch of icy souls.

  ‘Wolves,’ he said.

  Eleven

  Unto the ice

  A broken blade

  I have you

  Nagasena had seen legionaries in action before, of course, but was still awed at the inhuman swiftness of Bjarki and his warriors. He followed them up the steps as fast as he could, but the men of ice pulled ahead with every breath.

  The Space Wolves raced to the uppermost gallery like the death-runners of Terra, crazed augmented men and women who defied reason and gravity to leap across the gnarled architecture atop soaring hive-spires for the over-stimulation of their neural implants.

  Harr Balegyr set a berserker’s pace, howling with wild fury. Bjarki vaulted upwards as though his limbs were coiled springs. Svafnir Rackwulf and Olgyr Widdowsyn flanked Bjarki, and not even the hunter’s long-toothed spear hampered his rapid ascent. Only Helblind with his half-iron, half-flesh body consented to match Nagasena’s speed.

  The Wolves fired as they climbed, bursts that chewed the stone of the upper parapet to rubble. Red-armoured shapes returned fire amid booming detonations, their shots displacing air with the distinctive hard bangs of Legion weapons.

  A mass-reactive struck the stone beside Nagasena. The explosion slammed him to the side, forcing air from his lungs. He lost his grip on Shoujiki and rolled, fighting for breath as searing heat burned his chest.

  Machine-like hands of dark steel hauled him upright.

  ‘Hold still,’ said Gierlothnir Helblind, sweeping up Nagasena’s fallen sword.

  ‘Wait!’ cried Nagasena.

  Shoujiki’s blade cut swiftly, slicing through the leather straps securing Nagasena’s breastplate. Smoking shrapnel had ripped the lacquered blend of ceramite and kinetic ablatives to fibrous shreds. Helblind handed the sword back to Nagasena with a disdainful glance at his ruined armour.

  ‘Hardly worth bothering with. You should stay here. Another shot like that will cut your thread.’

  ‘I will take my chances,’ snapped Nagasena.

  Helblind shrugged. ‘It’s your life.’

  The legionary turned and set off once again.

  Helblind’s advice was good, but Nagasena had orders to secure these three prisoners alive. And being caught between warring legionaries was just about the worst place for mortals to find themselves.

  Nagasena followed Helblind as a howling wind roared down from above. He looked up in time to see a raging blizzard envelop the upper reaches of the chamber. Shadowed shapes moved in the freezing mist, coming together in a thunder of Legion plate.

  Purple lightning flared and charcoal-dark lupine ghosts howled. More gunfire and clashing steel. Grunts and the shriek of metal on metal. Nagasena sprinted up the steps, taking them three at a time and looping around each dog-legged landing. A crust of frost coated every surface. He skidded on patches of ice, only reluctantly slowing his pace.

  Nagasena rounded the last turn in the steps and drew his silver-chased volkite pistol, a weapon more than capable of killing a legionary. A weapon he had last drawn in anger against a Luna Wolf who now served the Emperor once more.

  His mouth was awash with a bilious, sour-milk taste. They’d hoped Kamiti Sona’s alien configuration would deny their foes the use of their powers, but fate had decided otherwise.

  Corposant clung to the walls and splintered ruin of the parapet. Glittering fog veiled the air, making him feel light-headed with every breath he took.

  Flesh debris lay scattered across the wide gallery, too violently to tell the number of bodies. Nagasena saw limbs with snapped bone splinters jutting from torn stumps of shoulder, cloven helmets with pulped brains and bright blood spilling out, mounds of stamped-on intestine and broken shards of armour ripped open with bare hands.

  Despite the catastrophic amounts of reeking, chem-rich blood, none of the body parts appeared to belong to the legionaries of the VI.

  Legion war was like no other, cruel beyond the worst brutality mortals could ever inflict. But the savagery of Fenris made Nagasena feel sullied, as though he’d knowingly bartered a measure of his soul in counting them his allies.

  Nagasena set off down the gallery of cells towards the sound of tribal oaths and crashing gunfire. Mass-reactives had transformed the once smooth wall into a cratered cliff face, and the ground was slippery with blood and melting ice.

  He ran into the mist as enormous imp
acts shook the chamber, ringing booms like the pealing of a titanic bell that went on and on. He slipped and went down onto one knee.

  The mist twitched and something flew right at him.

  Nagasena threw himself flat as Olgyr Widdowsyn’s broken shield slammed into the wall. It shivered, half its width embedded in the stone. For a moment Nagasena felt nauseous as it seemed he could see through the shield to the wall beyond.

  A clatter of plate was his only warning.

  Three legionaries – two crimson, one frosty grey – spilled from the mist. Locked together in a flurry of bludgeoning fists, crunching elbows and battering knees, they slammed from the walls like angry bull grox. Knowing he was an insect at the feet of heedless giants, Nagasena threw himself into the nearest cell.

  A pair of blackened bodies lay against its back wall, fused together by some ferocious, intolerable fire. Their eyes stared at Nagasena from cinder-flaked skulls, and he recoiled at the impossible accusation he saw there. He rubbed a hand over his face and when he looked again, their sockets were empty and black.

  He pushed himself to his feet, pressing his back against the wall by the door. An animal roar echoed and a warrior in crimson flew into the cell. He crushed the corpses and immediately tried to rise.

  Olgyr Widdowsyn crashed into the cell, which suddenly felt entirely too small. He hammered his leg at the Thousand Sons legionary’s face. His boot went flat to the wall as the sorcerer’s skull detonated in an explosion of blood and bone fragments.

  He spun around, not quickly enough. The second Thousand Sons legionary entered the cell, his hand thrust forwards. Widdowsyn slammed into the wall, pinned there by invisible forces.

  The Wolf howled, veins bulging as he fought the power locking his limbs in place.

  The crimson-plated legionary took another step into the cell, his face fixed on Widdowsyn with such anger that it made Nagasena blanch. The sorcerer’s bleeding skull was shaven in a widow’s peak and his face was the mahogany of Nordafrik with a closely plaited osiriform beard. He swept his other hand to the side. Widdowsyn’s breastplate ripped away, swiftly followed by his pauldrons and shoulder guards.