The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  ‘But it is all right. He knows best. He knows better. He will do the knowing for us, and we will just have to trust he has the truth of it. So what he is ultimately saying is: I know better than anyone, even the Emperor. The Emperor who told him to stop. He forbade Magnus, but Magnus knows better.’

  Pausing in his recitation, Promus lowered his head and slowly nodded. ‘And the worst of it is, he might. Magnus might actually know better. After all, it is said he was birthed to see further than any of us. But our faith is in the Emperor who made us and whose power dwarfs all others. He understands the dark and infernal and eternal magnitude of the warp, and if He says there are places He is unwilling to risk going and steps He is unwilling to risk taking, then that ought to be good enough for us. For all of us.’

  Promus glanced over at Bjarki, and was surprised to see a look of genuine regret there. The Wolves were the Emperor’s red right hand – monsters in their own way – but how easy it was to only see the savage, to fear the axe and miss the subtle knife.

  ‘Did you not stop to think that maybe there could be something else out there?’ asked Promus, and his question was not rhetorical. He truly wanted an answer.

  ‘Didn’t you imagine there could be some… maleficarum out in the lightless, insane folds of the warp? Something watching you and whispering, “That’s right, keep dabbling. Keep thinking you’re in full control… Keep believing you know best.”’

  Promus felt his fists clench and release in time with the tempo of his heartbeat.

  ‘The Fifteenth played with fire, and did not care that it was not just them who would be burned. You were instructed. You were warned. You were forbidden. You did not listen and you never would. So you needed to be put down. You needed to be saved from yourselves.’

  Promus turned to Bjarki, who looked upon him with new eyes.

  ‘And if action needed to be taken against a Legion on that kind of scale, it had to be undertaken by the purest, deadliest force in our arsenal. It had to be a quick, clean, total kill – a blow made by the sharpest weapon in the surest arm, driven by ruthless intent and the most fearless heart. Killing a Legion is no small thing – it needs executioners that will never flinch or hesitate, and never, ever let doubt stay their hand.

  ‘That is why the Sixth was loosed,’ said Promus, stepping away from the seer. ‘That is why you died.’

  Menkaura shook his head slowly.

  ‘You do not see just how badly you were all deceived,’ he said, his face etched with the grief of missed opportunities. ‘What the Crimson King hoped to achieve was for all humanity. He wanted to lift mortal gaze from the shadows dancing on the cave walls, to show them all that he could see, to know the things he knew. Such blood from misunderstanding. Could it ever have been different, I wonder?’

  ‘Wyrd bears us where it will,’ said Bjarki, surprising Promus by approaching their captive to place a hand on Menkaura’s shoulder. ‘The deeds of mighty heroes may sometimes shape it a little, but the rest of us? We are swirling leaves borne in their wake. And those who can glimpse wyrd are blessed and cursed to know it is beyond their power to change.’

  ‘I do not accept that,’ said Menkaura. ‘To know the future is to be given the power to change it.’

  ‘To change it means it will never become the future, so what have you really seen?’ said Bjarki. ‘Fenris teaches us that no future is set. Strong lands with deep roots sink beneath the ocean while spits of rock, barely tied to the world at all, endure for a hundred Great Years. All we can see are warnings, paths of darkness best avoided. So you tell me, Menkaura of Prospero, the sight of what path brought you to Kamiti Sona?’

  Menkaura sighed. ‘The Corvidae teach that all fates are possible, that every action is a ripple in a vast river. But even a ripple has the power to change the river’s course over time. That is why I came to you.’

  ‘Came to us?’ said Promus. ‘You were captured.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Menkaura. ‘Because it is my hope that this ripple will be the one to change the river’s course. You wish to know why we came to Kamiti Sona? I will tell you what you need to hear, what I have seen and what I have kept even from my brothers.’

  ‘Tell us what?’ said Promus.

  ‘That you were right to raze Prospero,’ said Menkaura. ‘You just did it for the wrong reason. You attacked Magnus for what he had done, but you should have killed him for what he will do.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When Russ broke Magnus across his knee, he wounded him more deeply than any of us suspected. My father’s soul was broken into shards and scattered through the cosmos. Ahzek Ahriman seeks to reunite those shards and restore our primarch to his former glory, but I have seen what the Crimson King will become if that happens…’

  ‘What will he become?’ said Bjarki.

  ‘A vast and terrible thing,’ said Menkaura, speaking with fervent urgency, as though his time grew short. ‘More powerful than you can possibly imagine, and whatever good remains in the Thousand Sons will fall to ashes and dust in the fires of his rebirth. He will rise atop a dark pyramid of smoked glass and clockwork gold, and all within the Great Ocean will be his to command. But this new Magnus will make his choice between darkness and light shorn of conscience or compassion.’

  ‘Why are you telling us this?’ said Promus.

  ‘Because you have to stop it,’ said Menkaura.

  Soot-black smog painted the horizon. Toxic petrocarbons and chemical vapour burned throats and blinded eyes. Nothing human could breathe this poisonous fog and live. The defenders had burned their own refinery fields rather than have them fall to the Imperial forces.

  Titans burned in the flames, towering statues melting in the awful heat as seismic mines ruptured subterranean promethium vaults. She felt the pain and terror of their crews, burning to death in upright coffins with no hope of escape.

  Giant fuel lines buckled and split, spewing millions of litres of flammable compounds. Fuel silos exploded in roaring mushroom clouds. Armoured vehicles, their tracks melting in the heat, blundered between the flaming structures, seeking an exit, yet finding nothing but fire and death. Winged lancers dragged down by sucking thermals corkscrewed through the wreckage, red engines detonating like airbursting phosphex bombs.

  Camille slid through the tar-thick air like a ghost, feeling the heat and tasting the caustic air, but untouched by it.

  Horror surrounded her, and she wept at what she saw.

  Soldiers ablaze from head to toe, armour fused to their bodies, flesh running like wax, bones snapping in the heat. Ten thousand men and women reduced to chemical ash in a single, searing breath.

  Then, mercifully, the infernal carnage receded as she rose high above the refinery fields – thousands of square kilometres of drilling derricks, snaking pipeways, pump stations and fuel silos. A sea of smoke and flame like a gateway to the hell of the ancients.

  Camille usually recognised echoes of the places she saw, for she would most often use her powers standing amid their ruins, but this place was new and unknown to her.

  Camille’s psychometric gift had served her well as an archaeo-historian in service to the Remembrancer Order. It had allowed her to touch unearthed artefacts and experience the lives of those who had once held them, reading the lingering psychic impressions they left.

  She only ever risked holding domestic items – pots, clothing, artisans’ tools or suchlike. Never weapons or things with bloody memories, never things that had known terror.

  The length of golden chain resting in her palms had seemed innocuous enough, but the look in Ahriman’s eyes warned her that what she saw would be painful. The monstrous tome to which the chain was attached was known to her, a damned grimoire that Mahavastu Kallimakus had been used like a marionette to write.

  The Book of Magnus.

  ‘Find him,’ said Ahriman, and she knew exactly who he
meant.

  She flew from the blazing refinery fields, borne by memory’s wings over a landscape carved by the passage of living history. A landscape dominated by warfare and scarred by millennia of bloodletting.

  Camped beyond the fires, beneath innumerable eagle-and-lightning banners, she saw scores of Army regiments in strangely archaic armour. Swooping gunships knifed the air, artfully crafted raptor-forms with arrowhead prows and bladed wings that spun around their tail-sections.

  Everything was hazed with distance and time.

  This could be any world in the Imperium, but Camille knew with complete certainty that she witnessed a memory of Terra.

  Camille didn’t know where or when this was. The landmarks were unfamiliar and the terrain very different to the lands of her birth. Corrugated folds of dusty mountains ridged the south and polluted bands of slurry that might once have been great lakes or distant oceans banded the eastern and northern horizons.

  She flew towards the mountains, losing height and swooping down a cleft between peaks that looked to have been carved by some vast impact from on high. Exposed rock that had last seen the sky millions of years ago glittered with sedimentary bands and Camille’s heart beat faster as she saw her destination.

  A cave mouth high on a narrow plateau.

  No, not a cave mouth, for its entrance was unmistakably a trilithon doorway: two vertical slabs of rock with a third set atop them as a lintel.

  Camille flew down the throat of the mountain, along ashlar passageways and wider galleries hung with caged lumens. She saw chambers ringed with offering bowls and alcoves of statues. Too fast to study, as though this memory grew ever more impatient to reveal its purpose.

  Was this a tomb? A reliquary exposed by orbital shelling?

  She flew into a wide, high-roofed cave that housed towering statues of jade and gold with moonstone eyes pupilled with obsidian. On she went, beyond even these cyclopean guardians, flying ever downwards, plunging into the heart of the mountain, only halting her headlong descent in its farthest chamber – a hexagonal library with all but one of its walls lined with bookshelves.

  A circular desk sat at the exact centre of the chamber, piled high with open books. A man read with his back to her, robed in gold-edged crimson and with a weave of silver scale mantling his shoulders like snow on a mountaintop.

  He turned to look up at her and she saw his face was dusky and handsomely regal, framed by lustrous dark hair worn long to the centre of his back. His beard was trimmed close to his jaw except at the chin where it was bound by three copper rings and hung down over the book he read.

  ‘Mistress Shivani,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the Library of Kadmus.’

  The flambeaux burned low in Lady Veleda’s staterooms, enfolding everything in velvet darkness. Incense smouldered in wooden bowls, and the incongruous sound of water tumbling over rocks issued from unseen vox-speakers.

  Enormous rugs patterned with repeating geometries and looping spirals hung on the walls and were spread across the floor. Ancient grimoires filled shadowed bookshelves alongside disquieting statuary of a queerish green soapstone.

  Lemuel recognised the mystical aesthetic. He had visited hundreds of similarly appointed parlours in his doomed quest to find esoteric means to save his wife. Most were home to charlatans or madmen, and he wasn’t yet sure which category suited Lady Veleda best.

  She was a wizened, compact dwarf, and the furniture spread throughout her staterooms matched her scale, which only served to heighten the contrast between her and the inhumanly large ogre looming at the back of the room.

  It stood with titanic arms crossed over its muscled chest, like a war-god in a pagan temple. Lemuel had seen such grunting abhumans before, but never this close. The powerful, livestock reek of its oily sweat was all but overpowering.

  ‘Jambik Sosruko the first migou you see?’ said Lady Veleda, seated cross-legged at a pair of low tables carved from deep red wood. Her voice was heavily accented and impossibly deep for someone so small.

  A memory tugged at Lemuel, but he pushed it aside for now.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I saw gangs of them hauling girders or breaking rocks in the labour camps around the Emperor’s Palace, but he’s the biggest I’ve seen.’

  ‘My son biggest anyone ever seen,’ she said.

  ‘Your… son?’ said Lemuel, almost unable to say the word for the knife of guilt it bore.

  ‘Adopted son,’ grinned Lady Veleda with a glint of mischief in her eyes. ‘He born in avalanche when mountains of Sagamartha and Annapurna collide many of world’s ages ago to lift Himalazia into sky for Emperor.’

  ‘Just as well,’ said Olgyr Widdowsyn, lounging by the stateroom doors. The Wolf was now Lemuel’s constant companion, an arrangement neither entirely enjoyed. ‘I know only a little of mortal women, but even I know dverger does not give birth to Jötunn and live.’

  ‘Be mindful, Olgyr of Balt,’ warned Lady Veleda, without looking up. ‘My cards listen. Careful I not put bale-eye on you.’

  ‘Cartomancy,’ spat Widdowsyn, reaching up to touch a furred paw-talisman hung at his pauldron. ‘The Night Haunter is said to put his faith in such things.’

  ‘So does Sigillite,’ said Lady Veleda. ‘Doubt him too?’

  Widdowsyn didn’t answer and returned his gaze to Jambik Sosruko, perhaps trying to imagine what it might be like to fight him.

  ‘Sit, Master Gaumon,’ she said, gesturing to one table, upon which were three delicate porcelain cups and a teapot of exquisite manufacture that vented fragrant vapour. ‘You want drink?’

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Lemuel.

  ‘Sure? Master Nagasena lend me his prized set for tea. Be shame not to use them.’

  ‘I’m sure, thank you.’

  Lady Veleda shrugged, dealing worn cards with turned-up edges on the empty table. ‘Come, we speak, let cards listen.’

  Lemuel lowered himself to the thick rugs, trying to get comfortable at so low a table. The metallic struts scaffolding his newly set legs and the loss of his arm made that difficult. Balms had dulled the edges of his pain and remorse, but both were still there, gnawing at the fringes of his awareness.

  Lady Veleda spread a fresh dealing of cards on the empty table between them, and Lemuel saw numerous familiar images: a lightning-struck tower, a king, a knave, a wizard. A skeletal reaper leered at him before it was returned to her hand along with all the others.

  ‘You see a deck like this before, though?’ said Lady Veleda.

  ‘Ahriman had one,’ said Lemuel. ‘He called it a Visconti-Sforza trionfi deck. I had the feeling it was unique.’

  ‘It was,’ she said with a nod. ‘A devil’s picture book, made for men with gold and power. This is de Gébelin’s deck, a magician of second century. He believed images on cards were crafted by ancient priests of Gyptus from Book of Thoth.’

  ‘I searched for that book once,’ said Lemuel.

  ‘Better for you, I think, to not find it.’

  Another hand was dealt, and Lady Veleda’s eyes scanned the cards quickly. She shook her head and sorted the cards back into the deck.

  ‘Catheric lords of Romanii brought cards to land of Franc, where de Gébelin first learned of them. He thought them divine and wrote of them in Monde Primitif, a book once lost in fires of Cardinal Tang.’

  ‘Once lost?’

  ‘Rediscovered by Thousand Sons in ruins of Akkad.’

  ‘Then it should be burned again,’ said Widdowsyn, taking a step into the room. Jambik Sosruko grumbled and Lemuel felt the bass of it vibrate his spine.

  Lady Veleda ignored him. ‘De Gébelin discovered mystical connection between twenty-one trionfi and the fool with twenty-two letters of ancient language of angels.’

  ‘Enochian,’ said Lemuel. ‘I read it in the Liber Loagaeth.’

  ‘Not Claves Angelicae?’


  ‘I never found a copy.’

  Lady Veleda nodded towards the bookshelves.

  ‘Read mine.’

  Lemuel’s jaw fell open and he tried to stand, but Olgyr Widdowsyn’s hand clamped down on his shoulder. He hadn’t even felt the Wolf move.

  ‘No books.’

  ‘But–’

  ‘No books,’ repeated Widdowsyn, increasing the pressure on Lemuel’s collarbone just enough to hurt. Lemuel put up his hands.

  ‘Fine, no books.’

  Widdowsyn’s intervention reminded Lemuel he was alive under sufferance, a prisoner in all but name. Lady Veleda shrugged and continued dealing cards as though nothing had happened.

  ‘Soon, a faceless fortune-teller called Etteilla learns last secrets of cards – how to make them talk, but more important, he learns to make them listen.’

  ‘Cards do not listen,’ said Lemuel.

  ‘No?’ said Lady Veleda, dealing another eight cards, seven face down, one face up. ‘They already listen to you. Look.’

  Lemuel rubbed his bruised shoulder and looked down at the topmost card. The image was unknown to any deck he’d previously encountered, but he knew it just the same: a towering mountain of dusty yellow stone, its summit piercing the clouds of a blazing, umber sky.

  ‘The Mountain that Eats Men,’ he said.

  Fourteen

  The quest

  Sorrows to spare

  The mountain

  How long had it been?

  The horologs had been the first system to fail. Amon no longer knew how long he had followed his father’s trail across the Planet of the Sorcerers. Years, if the wheezing of his armour’s servos and the rust eating its plates was any guide.

  Or had he only recently set out from the ruins of the Obsidian Tower?

  Time moved strangely within the Great Ocean, and many were the tales of travellers undone by its temporal chaos. Some flew its tides for a day only to return and find the empires they once knew had gone to dust. Others emerged centuries before their birth, strangers in lands once familiar.

  Dust-stiffened rags swathed the remains of Amon’s armour, fluttering in frozen winds as he left the ruins of Gnoph-Keh’s crystalline cathedral behind.