The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  Zalgolyssa raised its other arm. Ammunition hoppers clattered and pneumatic auto-loaders slammed enormous shells into the breech of its gatling blaster.

  Take cover!+ yelled Ahriman, lifting Lemuel and Camille as he ran for the nearest cell.

  Aforgomon dragged the other woman as Zalgolyssa opened fire.

  The world erupted in a thunderous hell storm of detonations as the Titan weapon raked the gallery. Percussive blasts merged into a never-ending roar of deafening explosions and earth-shaking impacts. A hurricane of rock fragments ricocheted from every wall and Lemuel screamed in pain, blood blooming all down his leg. Ahriman made himself into a shield as a fireball blazed into the cell, its sucking backdraught drawing out every last molecule of oxygen.

  The three mortals fought for breath, and Ahriman used Pavoni artes to oxygenate the atmosphere around their heads.

  Then it was over. The sudden silence was as shocking as the furious violence of the barrage.

  Move now!+

  Ahriman was still reeling from the sensory overload.

  Go. Now!+

  Ignis? Is that you?+

  Yes. Get out of there now.+

  Ahriman hauled Lemuel and Camille upright, and staggered over to the cell door, the ringing in his ears making everything seem dulled and washed-out. Clouds of toxic propellant smoke fogged what was left of the gallery. The parapet was all but gone, barely a metre of stonework still protruding from the wall. Thousand Sons emerged hesitantly from smoke-filled cells to find the kind of hellscape that only artillery-grade shells could create.

  Below, the Reaver stood with its arm outstretched, coils of blue smoke hissing from vent-ports on its topside. Ahriman couldn’t shake the sensation it was looking directly at him.

  Where are you, Ignis?+ he asked.

  The Titan’s entire body inclined as though taking a bow.

  I took the liberty of projecting my consciousness into Zalgolyssa to ensure its barrage was made without error.+

  You took over a Titan?+

  An act for which I will pay a heavy repercussive price later, but for now, hold on to something.+

  Ahriman was about to ask why, then saw exactly what Ignis intended. He turned back into the cell as Zalgolyssa began rotating its fist, swinging the severed Warhound’s head on the end of the chain like an antique flail. The tempo increased until the Titan lowered its right shoulder and heaved its arm forwards.

  The chained head arced over like a wrecking ball and slammed into the gallery with a booming crash of metal on stone. More debris fell, crushing the few pitiful souls left alive below.

  Aforgomon still held the third woman. She was Prosperine, but Ahriman had no time for sentimentality. He held Camille out to the daemon-yokai.

  ‘Take Mistress Shivani,’ he said. ‘Leave the other one.’

  ‘No!’ cried Camille as the daemon threw the Prosperine woman to the floor and twisted her arm behind her back. ‘No! Throne, no! Chaiya! Please, no! Don’t! Chaiya!’

  ‘Camille!’ cried the fallen woman, scrambling to her feet, but a backhand blow from Aforgomon sent her sprawling. She crumpled in the corner of the cell and did not rise.

  Ahriman left the cell, emerging into choking clouds of dust raining down from above. He moved with swift strides along the crumbling gallery towards the head buried in the wall. The chain attached to it was a taut, shivering bridge to the Titan below. Aforgomon followed at his heels, pushing the weeping and struggling Camille Shivani in front.

  ‘Please, Ahzek,’ begged Lemuel. ‘Don’t leave Chaiya.’

  ‘The Prosperine woman? She is Mistress Shivani’s companion?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She is irrelevant,’ said Ahriman, wreathed in scraps of residual propellant drifting like slow-falling fireflies.

  ‘Irrelevant?’ gasped Lemuel as the edge of the blasted gallery crumbled and chunks of debris cascaded downwards. ‘No one is irrelevant.’

  ‘There’s truth in that,’ agreed Ahriman, ‘but some are less relevant than others.’

  Ahead, the Thousand Sons were already scrambling down the chain towards the Reaver, each link a metre wide and twice that in length. Sanakht was already crouched on Zalgolyssa’s upper carapace, next to a warrior wearing a face that did not match his aura. Ahriman and Aforgomon were the last to reach the chain bridge, where Menkaura stood with his gauntlets pressed against the Warhound’s groaning skull, pinning it in place.

  ‘The Order of Ruin never cease to amaze me,’ he said through gritted teeth as the Titan’s head lurched and the stonework around it crumbled. ‘But you need to go while you still can.’

  The vibrations of the Thousand Sons on the chain were working the Titan’s head loose, like a rotten tooth prised from a gum.

  But for Menkaura’s powers, it would already have fallen.

  ‘Menkaura–’ began Ahriman as Aforgomon leapt onto the chain, lifting Camille as easily as he might a child. ‘This should not have been necessary.’

  ‘And yet it is,’ grunted the Corvidae seer.

  ‘The Wolves and the son of Guilliman would say this was entirely necessary,’ said Aforgomon, turning to shelter Camille as a burst of mass-reactives ricocheted from the chain. Explosive shells slashed between the gallery and Zalgolyssa as the Thousand Sons clustered atop the Reaver’s carapace returned fire. Ahriman looked back as warriors in dust-caked armour emerged from the cover of the cells long enough to shoot.

  ‘A warrior of Ultramar fights with the Wolves?’

  Aforgomon nodded. ‘Yes, though he has strayed far from his once-path.’

  Ahriman swept his mind over the distant figures, feeling the claws of the Rune Priest’s mind scratch at his mind like a rabid dog. But he sensed another mind too, one with the perfect discipline known only to Prospero and Ultramar.

  ‘The headsman’s axe knows not where it is to fall,’ he said. ‘It is simply a weapon directed by the hand of another.’

  ‘Give me the other mortal,’ said Aforgomon, holding its arms out to receive Lemuel. Ahriman shook his head.

  ‘No, he stays with me,’ he said, holstering his weapon and turning to Menkaura.

  ‘Brother,’ said Ahriman.

  Menkaura shook his head. ‘My journey on this path ends now.’

  ‘No, you must–’

  ‘I said go!’ shouted Menkaura, the kine power surging through him giving his words physical force.

  Ahriman nodded and turned back to the chain. He took an iron grip on Lemuel’s wrist and knelt like an Assault Marine preparing to trigger a jump pack. He sprang upwards in a powered leap that easily carried him onto the chain. He heard Lemuel yell in fear as he swung like a pendulum out over empty space, fifty metres above the ground.

  Mass-reactives slashed the air around him as Ahriman half slid, half climbed down the chain, dragging Lemuel and the urn he refused to relinquish behind him. Kine pulses diverted enemy fire and pyrokine layers immolated shells prematurely.

  The enormous chain sagged, suddenly slack as the smashed Titan’s head tore free of the wall.

  Was Menkaura already dead? He had no time to look back.

  Ahriman swayed with its lurching motion, barely maintaining his balance. Aforgomon dropped to the Reaver’s carapace and turned towards him, its daemonic fire bright with expectation.

  And an agonising burst of seersight rammed into the forefront of Ahriman’s mind.

  He staggered, almost losing his grip on Lemuel.

  …a warrior raised in the Five Hundred Worlds, driven by the most terrible guilt. Clad in steel-dust armour, not cobalt-blue. One who no longer called Guilliman his master, a legionary whose very duty would be his undoing…

  Ahriman’s head snapped around in time to see the Ultramarian psyker unleash a ghostly warrior of psychic fire towards them – an avatar of ancient Macragge in golden armour and bear
ing a long pilum with a tip of blazing aether-light.

  It flew like a comet, burning between Ahriman and Lemuel.

  He bit down on repercussive pain as the spectral fire seared Lemuel’s arm to ash from the elbow down. Ahriman reached for his former neophyte, already knowing it was too late.

  Lemuel cried in terror as he fell from the chain.

  And with a final, grinding crack of stone and steel, the Warhound’s head fell free of the gallery. Ahriman leapt, desperately reaching for the edge of Zalgolyssa’s carapace.

  Too far. He wasn’t going to make it.

  He was falling down among the dead men.

  A metallic hand snapped shut on his vambrace, the power of its grip cracking the ceramite.

  Ahriman looked up to see Aforgomon holding him.

  ‘I have you,’ said the daemon.

  The mighty Reaver Zalgolyssa comes to the legionaries’ aid

  Twelve

  First signs

  Rust and rest

  The fallen tower

  Borne aloft by surges of emotion and swells of turbulent consciousnesses, Amon soared on the tides of the Great Ocean.

  This is life as it ought to be experienced,+ cried Magnus, spiralling above him. +Free of physical constraints and limited only by our imagination.+

  Joy surged through Amon as he and Magnus blazed through the immaterium like shooting stars. No shattered spine held Amon in a realm where physical laws were meaningless.

  Here, there was no good and evil, right or wrong.

  The searing trail they left was the brightest beacon, drawing warp creatures of every configuration – from the raptor flocks of atavistic scrap-feeders to titanic leviathans whose mere existence defied human contemplation.

  And yet they flew unmolested.

  Even broken, Magnus was known to the denizens of the Great Ocean and none dared trouble him. The brazen entities of purest rage turned away as well, their blunted survival instincts recognising a destroyer when they sensed one.

  Amon kept close to his father, terrified and enthralled at the risks they took in flying so brightly. The warp entities might fear Magnus, but Amon was nothing to them.

  Stray too far and he would be on his own.

  His subtle body was wrought from the stuff of dreams into his idealised form of his imagined self, armour gleaming like translucent crystal, vivid red and molten gold.

  Come, Amon!+ cried Magnus, spinning to shed corkscrewing comets of inspiration. +Cast off that echoed aspect. Be whatever you wish – a god in mortal form, a winged spirit or a glittering dragon of fire!+

  A twist of thought and Amon became a blaze of coruscating energy, an ultra-dense helix of spinning wheels and eyes, chains of thought more elegant than anything conceived by the greatest mortal philosophers. It made him beautiful, and his tears of joy became newborn stars in the warp’s firmament.

  Magnus flew as a glittering phoenix with wings of blazing amber, starfire eyes and the heart of a supernova. His power and intellect were as one, and he soared on aetheric winds to blaze a trail of light as he went. Where it bled into the material realm, it gifted wondrous dreams to receptive minds.

  They flew far from the Planet of the Sorcerers towards what Magnus had called the Orrery, travelling beyond the limits of space and time, achieving in a breath what was impossible for all but a handful of gifted individuals. They penetrated the hearts of warp storms of sorrowed beauty, skirted the petulant darkness of Lorgar’s Ruinstorm and crested slow-blooming maelstroms of gathering hope. Randomness was everywhere and Amon sought to find meaning in the patterns. The Great Ocean responded to his desire by reshaping itself, tapestries of memory woven from the fabric of things forgotten, things remembered and things impossible.

  Amid the chaos of the Great Ocean, they followed geometric configurations, clues in cosmic alignments and multi-dimensional arrays of perfect synchrony. Confluences of intersecting realities and auspicious convergences presented themselves, and the temptation to follow each to its ending was overwhelming. The sheer thrill of exploring the farthest reaches of the Great Ocean at his father’s side was an intoxicating reminder of glories once thought quotidian.

  Empyreal worlds whose atmospheres were rich in meaning, where every volume contained within Borges’ theoretical library might be stored. Then there were the worlds of fractal complexity upon which every pen scratch since the dawn of time could be recorded. Amon saw a newborn galaxy where the secrets of Akasha were carried on the wavelengths of its starlight, and basked in its radiant illumination.

  But in the end, Magnus had only one place in mind to become the Orrery – somewhere the limitless potential of the Great Ocean could alloy with the material universe, where a metaphorical sea of dreams could be made real. A world veiled from sight by alignments of galaxies and which Magnus would secure with celestial locks that would only open when the stars aligned.

  Such beauty makes it all too easy to forget that the Warmaster has torn the galaxy in two,+ said Amon as they paused to admire what Magnus had found. +Thoughts of war seem so far away.+

  The vastness of the immaterium has that effect,+ agreed Magnus. +It makes mortal affairs pale to insignificance.+

  If such affairs do not matter in the grand tapestry of existence, why then do we endure so much pain and suffering to alter them?+ said Amon. +What grand deed has ever caused the slightest ripple in the universe when seen from so lofty a cosmic perspective?+

  Magnus extended his burning wings and soared towards an unfolding conflagration of energies, a radiant nebula of screaming emotions shaped by some unseen catastrophe in the material universe.

  We are all bound by the better angels of our natures, Amon. None of us can afford to be neutral while the great battle of our time unfolds. Our brothers tear at one another with hatred only made possible by the corruption of love, and could we live with ourselves if we did not try to lessen that horror?+

  Even if we cannot affect the outcome?+

  Who says I cannot?+ said Magnus.

  One might call such a belief egotistical.+

  Then let me ask you this. Imagine you alone had guarded Prospero’s shores when the Wolves came. Would you have stood aside? Knowing you had no hope of altering the outcome of the battle, would you have given up?+

  No, I would have fought.+

  And that is why I act. For all that we are condemned, for all that our names and deeds will be blackened from now until the stars go out, I have always sought to act with honour, Uthizzar. With pride, yes, but always with…+

  Magnus paused and Amon felt a tremor ripple out through the warp. The creatures of the warp felt it too and fixed hungry eyes upon them.

  My lord? Is something wrong?+

  Magnus’ image flickered, his blazing wings guttering and dying as his mortal form resolved itself amid the fading fire. The Crimson King Amon had last seen atop the Obsidian Tower was gone and the being before him was a shadow of that mighty warrior-lord. The cost of this flight in the Great Ocean was proving far greater than Amon had feared.

  Among the many dangers of the Great Ocean were seductions that drew travellers farther from their bodies than was safe. And, like neophytes on their first flight, Magnus and Amon had gone deeper than ever to find what they sought.

  Hostile things uncoiled in the darkness, sensing unexpected opportunity and gathering like carrion around a fresh corpse.

  Baleq?+ said Magnus, uncertainty giving his words a brittle edge. +Baleq Uthizzar, is that you? Your aura is… different.+

  No, my lord, it is Amon.+

  Amon of the Corvidae? Why are you here? I summoned Baleq to attend upon me.+

  Amon hesitated before answering, seeing dreadful uncertainty enter the primarch’s aura like a poison. It formed turbulent swells and swirling aether vortices around them, the early signs of a gathering storm.

  Baleq i
s not here, my lord,+ he said. +He… he died.+

  Died? What are you talking about? Baleq is not dead – I spoke with him just this morning in the Reflecting Caves.+

  No, my lord,+ said Amon, the sight of his father’s confusion like a knife to the heart. That Amon was utterly helpless against this insidious and unreachable foe was crushing. +You did not.+

  Magnus’ fractured state spread agitation through the warp like blood spilt into water. Though Amon suspected the primarch’s splintered soul might suffer further degeneration in the warp, the hope of its restoration seemed worth the risk.

  Of course I did,+ said Magnus. +I… Amon? Is that you?+

  Yes, my lord,+ said Amon, and the fear in his father’s aura made him weep. +We need to return to the Obsidian Tower.+

  The Obsidian Tower? I know of no such place,+ snapped Magnus. +You speak in riddles, Amon. In the Emperor’s name, tell me why Uthizzar is not here.+

  Amon could not bring himself to reveal the truth of what had befallen Baleq Uthizzar, could not hurt his father by telling him it had been his own power that killed the Athanaean telepath after he had seen his father’s thoughts. That truth would bring the predatory warp beasts down on them without mercy.

  We return to Prospero,+ declared Magnus. +And then we will get to the bottom of your lies, Amon.+

  My lord, I do not lie, and we cannot return to Prospero.+

  Why not?+

  A lie would not serve, only the truth – and the things in the dark bared immaterial fangs like knives being sharpened.

  Prospero is no more. The Wolves burned it to ash.+

  A burst of grief exploded from Magnus, a primal venting of emotion that bore an unimaginable weight of guilty knowledge. It set the warp aflame in every direction, and millions of mortal nightmares were born on tens of thousands of worlds.

  Amon screamed as the warp fire burned his subtle body, his primarch’s fears and secrets like hot brands upon his soul. The flames incinerated his armour, leaving his body of light horribly vulnerable. His mind fled to the higher enumerations, throwing up instinctual defences and detaching his screaming consciousness from repercussive sensations.