The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  Magnus had passed this way, lost and alone.

  And where the Crimson King trod, miracles followed.

  Everywhere Magnus worked his wonders, the aetheric winds carried rumour of them to those with the wit to hear it. Amon had followed every such rumour, tormented by the pain of his ruined body and the guilt of knowing his father had fallen to madness because of him.

  In his seemingly endless quest, Amon had seen great and terrible things, witnessed the sins of the past and the future’s many dooms. He saw ghosts of heroism unmatched and suffered the echoes of deeds too terrible to imagine. He fought countless battles, defeated hosts of monsters, but remained always two steps behind the Crimson King.

  In his darker moments, Amon almost believed his father did not want to be found. Every time such disloyal thoughts rose from the abyssal depths of his mind, despair took him until some fresh rumour lured him onwards with the promise of finally locating the primarch.

  Such a rumour had muttered of Gnoph-Keh, a minor Pavoni known to possess only limited grasp of his Fellowship’s artes. The aether winds whispered of how he had raised tens of thousands of ancient crystal corpses to craft a titanic ossuary of gleaming glass. They spoke of him waging war against his Prosperine brothers with an invincible army of yhetees wrought from ice and breath.

  Trying not to let hope blind him to the likely falsehood of this latest rumour, Amon bade his Stormbird follow the muttering winds to its source. Like him, the gunship had changed greatly in these strange times, its silhouette slowly assuming a more hawk-like aspect, its mien transforming from screaming raptor to patient hunter.

  As soon as he had laid eyes upon the crystalline ossuary, Amon recognised his father’s aether-craft. The Crimson King’s power bled from every reflection and star-bright pinpoint of light.

  Gnoph-Keh barred its gates against him, so Amon summoned his awesome power and proceeded to demolish the crystal ossuary piece by piece. A thousands-strong host of ice-born yhetees sallied forth from the splintering fortress, but they were crudely made things and insultingly easy to destroy. The will animating them was weak and Amon easily unravelled the raptures that gave them life.

  He had marched through the dissipating host, limping towards a tower of purest sapphire. Gnoph-Keh tried to fight, but against an adept of Amon’s skill and cunning, it was a gesture of defiance, nothing more.

  With Amon’s ritual dagger at his throat, Gnoph-Keh’s valediction had been to speak of encountering a red-robed magus whose face was hidden behind a shimmering veil. The magus bore a silver key on a broken chain and his power was clearly immense, but he knew neither his name nor from whence he had come.

  Gnoph-Keh wept as he told Amon how he had spun lies of brotherhood to keep the nameless magus at his side long enough to learn the secrets of his power.

  ‘You are a blind fool and you learned nothing,’ Amon had told Gnoph-Keh, plunging the dagger deep into the meat of the Pavoni’s throat. ‘You stood at the side of a god, and still I unmade your raptures in the blink of an eye.’

  ‘Who was he?’ Gnoph-Keh begged of him, each word drawing a fresh squirt of blood around the blade twisting in his neck. ‘I must know.’

  ‘He who is father to us all,’ said Amon.

  ‘No!’ cried Gnoph-Keh, coughing a frothed wad of gloss-red sputum. ‘I am his son… I would have known him…’

  ‘He does not even know himself,’ said Amon, gripping the hilt of the athame tighter. ‘And you are no son of Magnus.’

  ‘Wait…’ begged Gnoph-Keh. ‘He is still here…’

  ‘Where?’ demanded Amon, easing pressure on the blade.

  ‘He… went… deeper into the vale…’ said Gnoph-Keh, bending his dismal artes to halting the tide of blood pouring from his neck. ‘Following… the river of stars…’

  Amon did not give Gnoph-Keh a chance to undo the damage and sawed his blade down hard, cutting his neck open to the bone.

  He left the corpse for the many-eyed worms already wriggling from the earth and the manta-creatures circling overhead. Gnoph-Keh had been a worthless adept in life, but his corpse was saturated in aetheric energy, and such meat was a rarity.

  Beyond the shattered ossuary, Amon followed the vale’s twisting path, plunging ever deeper into an icy labyrinth of moaning glaciers and frozen gorges that echoed to wendigo howls.

  He tasted the raw energy of the Great Ocean, flowing from the secret heart of the mountains in an invisible river. It glittered behind his eyes, and he well understood why Magnus might seek to follow it to the source.

  He limped painfully into the soaring peaks without pause, travelling for what felt like many days. He climbed beyond the clouds until the pain in his spine became so great he could only crawl on bloodied palms and aching bones. He kept going until he could go no farther.

  And just as he contemplated turning back, he arrived at a frozen plateau of liminal space, where the barriers between worlds was whisper-thin. Its glassy surface was littered with toppled megaliths and carved with colossal geometric designs like those of the ancient Nazcans, dead men who unwisely sought to draw the eye of the gods upon them.

  A river that glittered with the light of stars foamed up from the ruins of what had once been a vast palace that looked hauntingly familiar. The impossible passage of non-time had transformed it to little more than crumbling outlines of its once great halls and mighty colonnades. The river flowed along the geometric channels, here fast-flowing, there meandering languidly, sometimes pooling in small lakes or rushing in torrents around broken stonework.

  Could Magnus be here?

  Amon climbed painfully to his feet, letting the potency of the air fill his lungs. He limped over the plateau, feeling as though each bend in the path might carry him somewhere new, somewhere beyond his comprehension. Ghosts of other worlds hovered tantalisingly at the edge of sight, a million vistas of times and places unknown. A single misstep might carry him beyond anything he had ever experienced.

  Who was to say he had not already made that step?

  ‘I seek Magnus the Red!’ he shouted, and the echoes slipped into the cracks between worlds. Who knew to where they might travel or who might hear them and what they might do with them? Entire religions had been built on far less, and the thought of what he might be causing with careless words in so powerful a place kept him silent.

  Instead, he focused on his feet, watching them rise and fall. His left twisted, his right sure and firm. He saw his reflection in the ice. Decades spent in search of his father had left him a gaunt revenant of the warrior he had been, hollowed out and all but hopeless.

  Decades? More like centuries…

  A thin wailing sound drifted on the wind – a lamentation?

  Amon looked up to see a group of pall-bearers emerge from the ruined palace. Hooded in dust-shawled mourning robes of crimson, they bore a great bier of shields upon their shoulders. Seven to each side and one leading their grief-stricken passage.

  They followed the course of the river, their leader reading aloud from an enormous book that drifted in the air before him, the pages turning of their own volition. Guilt followed in a pall of aether ghosts, and as Amon struggled onwards, the agony of his injuries surged with fresh spite.

  The mourners stopped at a churning bend in the river, where it foamed with veiled mists. Other lands and other times shimmered in the spume, bright places that knew neither war nor suffering.

  As he drew nearer, Amon saw the body borne upon the shields was that of a legionary, his armour crimson and ivory. His helm sat on his chest, nestled between his crossed arms.

  ‘Uthizzar,’ said Amon.

  The pall-bearers looked up, and beneath their hoods, Amon saw each wore a variation on the face of the Crimson King. Some were sallow-skinned, others wounded. Some were tattooed, some were branded, but all had their eyes gouged from their sockets as punishment for this mur
der. They turned their blind faces towards him as Amon reached their leader and pulled back his hood.

  The breath caught in Amon’s throat.

  The Crimson King stared back at him. Not an aspect or a shard, but the primarch himself. Yet Amon saw no acknowledgement in his father’s eyes, only horror.

  The primarch’s hair was wild and matted like that of a savage, his skin sapped of all vitality by loss. He alone of these aspects retained his eye, and he fixed it upon Amon with such venom that it took the equerry’s breath away.

  ‘Father…’ he began.

  ‘You!’ snapped Magnus, jabbing him in the chest. ‘A Knight of Magnus! You, who thought yourselves gods! You, who promised enlightenment, but brought only death and darkness! What arrogance! What hubris! How dare you put yourselves above all others?’

  ‘No,’ said Amon. ‘That is not what–’

  ‘I failed,’ said Magnus, his anger replaced with soul-deep weariness. ‘I reached too far and did not heed the warnings of those who knew better. I doomed us all.’

  ‘My lord!’ cried Amon as the mourners lifted the bier of shields from their shoulders, ready to let the body of Baleq Uthizzar slide into the river.

  ‘I am no lord,’ said Magnus, sinking to his knees at the water’s edge. ‘I think perhaps I was once a man of worth, but now I am nothing.’

  ‘No!’ cried Amon, keeling beside his father. ‘You are Magnus the Red, primarch of the Thousand Sons. You are the Crimson King, wisest of us all, and we need you more than ever. Come back to us, please!’

  Magnus looked him in the eye, and for a fraction of a second it was as if his father stared back at him.

  ‘He is gone,’ said Magnus. ‘We will all be gone soon, and the universe will be well rid of us.’

  The mourners released the bier, and it carried Uthizzar’s body into the river. The water claimed its prize, and Amon watched as swirling tides drew it down to unknown depths.

  ‘I killed him,’ said Magnus. ‘Just as I killed all my sons.’

  ‘No,’ said Amon. ‘Only you can save them.’

  ‘Once maybe,’ said Magnus. ‘That task now falls to another.’

  ‘Ahriman?’

  Magnus stood, but did not answer as the mourners moved to surround Amon. He saw his doom writ upon their sightless faces and tried to stand, but Magnus held him with firm hands upon his shoulders.

  ‘It is better for us to pass swiftly from this world,’ said Magnus. ‘To slip into oblivion before we wreak more harm upon those we love. It is time for us to die.’

  The dust-caked mourners closed in around Amon, taking hold of his arms and neck. He struggled against them, searching for his powers, but finding only a howling void of emptiness.

  ‘Please, father!’ he yelled. ‘Come back to us!’

  And suddenly the river was rushing up to meet him.

  It felt like crashing through a wall of ice.

  The frozen water hit him like a blow, paralysing his limbs and locking him with a cold that shock-froze his lungs. The currents spun him around, eager to toy with their new plaything. Grasping hands clutched him from below, dragging him down to join the dead.

  Amon looked up through the swirling chaos of bubbles and saw his father looking back at him.

  And then he saw nothing at all.

  Olgyr Widdowsyn came for Lemuel in the darkest part of the Doramaar’s night-watch and told him he had to come now. The Wolf did not apologise for the lateness of the hour, but Lemuel had been awake anyway.

  Sleep did not come easily to Lemuel, and when it did it brought nightmares of Kamiti Sona. He dreamed of eyeless things, of tortures and lost friends. But most of all, he dreamed of a young boy whose name he could not remember. A boy who would never grow old, never know love and never, ever let Lemuel forget he was a murderer.

  Rubbing his eyes, he awkwardly pulled on a pair of stained fatigues and followed Widdowsyn.

  From the crew decks down into the engineering spaces.

  Below the waterline and past the reeking bilges.

  Through forgotten underdeck transits and dripping conduits stagnant with bad oil, stale air and the incongruous smell of livestock. In moments he was entirely lost, with no idea where they were in the ship.

  Widdowsyn responded to none of Lemuel’s questions and divulged nothing of their destination, save to say it was time for him to earn his keep.

  In the weeks since his session with Lady Veleda, Lemuel had seen no one other than the warriors of the VI Legion. No matter how many times he asked to see Chaiya or Yasu Nagasena, his requests were met with stony silence or curt refusals.

  In that time, however, he was visited by each of the Space Wolves in turn. They came whenever it suited them. It made no difference to them whether he was eating or washing, fitfully sleeping or awake.

  If they wanted to talk, he was bound to listen.

  Each warrior would sit across from him and speak of the brother they had lost on Kamiti Sona. Sometimes these recollections were anecdotes that barely mentioned Harr Balegyr at all. Others were epic recountings of a campaign, complete with every detail from the weather to the circumstances that had brought the Rout – a term Lemuel quickly came to realise was one of the Wolves’ names for themselves – to war. Some spoke of Balegyr’s strengths, others his weaknesses. They told Lemuel of his trials on Fenris, his tribal customs, his favoured fighting styles, his physical prowess and his utter lack of humour. It seemed, at times, that each Wolf was describing a different man.

  When he’d pointed that out to Svafnir Rackwulf, the last of the Wolves to visit him, the warrior shrugged and said, ‘Isn’t that true of everyone? We all are shaped by how others see us as much as our own character.’

  He’d felt irritated by these interruptions, but quickly came to realise this was as close as legionaries came to showing grief before mortals. When the need to unburden themselves came upon them, his concerns were the least of theirs.

  Finally, Widdowsyn came to an archway misted with a fine drizzle of moisture at the end of a radial conduit. He ducked underneath, water spattering from the plates of his armour and soaking the pelt at his shoulder. The darkness beyond swallowed the Wolf, leaving Lemuel alone in the half-light of the echoing conduit. He heard sounds from within, grunts and scrapes of blades being sharpened. Smoke from an open fire leavened the metallic dampness of the air.

  Lemuel took a deep breath and tasted death.

  He had been waiting for this moment ever since the Space Wolves had boarded the Cypria Selene and taken them prisoner. Lemuel risked a glance over his shoulder, knowing he would be overtaken and killed if he tried to flee.

  ‘Once more into the breach,’ he said, and closed his eyes.

  Lemuel stepped into the dripping arch, sensing this was more than a physical threshold he was crossing.

  Through on the other side, he spat a mouthful of chemical-tasting water and blinked. He wiped moisture from his face with his remaining hand, smelling a pungent animal reek of wet fur, raw meat and smoke. Low registers of breath from all around him triggered a prey response. Sweat prickled his forehead.

  The scale of the chamber was impossible to guess, but it felt large. Lemuel pictured a great hall, with hand-carved wooden posts supporting blackened beams and a timbered ceiling of thatch from which hung vast tusks and other trophies won from the ocean. Heat assailed him from a low-banked fire that smouldered in a pit with a deep cherry-red glow. Its illumination was fitful, hinting at shapes just beyond its reach.

  ‘You are Lemuel Gaumon of Sangha, seventh-born son of Wekesa and Ekua?’ said a voice he recognised as Bjarki’s.

  ‘I am,’ he said.

  The darkness rippled in front of him, and suddenly the Rune Priest was there, towering over him, vast and primal in his pelt-draped armour and wolf-skull headpiece. His eyes glimmered yellow in the gloom. He held a carv
ed drinking horn in one hand, filled with a viscous, acrid-smelling liquid.

  ‘You know why we bring you to our aett?’

  ‘Not really,’ confessed Lemuel. ‘I thought maybe you were going to kill me, but now I’m not so sure.’

  Bjarki grinned, exposing teeth that seemed a lot sharper and more dangerous than before.

  ‘I want to kill you,’ said Bjarki, revealing a bone-handled knife limned in blueish frost in his other hand. ‘But that is not your wyrd.’

  ‘You should kill me,’ wept Lemuel as guilt welled up from within him. ‘Throne, I… I… killed him. I made his mother kill him! It’s more than I deserve to be knifed in the dark.’

  ‘True,’ said Bjarki. ‘But that murder was only your first.’

  ‘What? No!’ said Lemuel.

  ‘I see a time when you will be a new man with a new name, one that strikes terror in those who hear it. You will be the death of worlds.’

  Lemuel shook his head. ‘No, I could never…’

  ‘It is your wyrd,’ said Bjarki with a fatalistic shrug as he drew the blade across his palm and let the blood run down his hand. ‘But that is not why you are here.’

  ‘Then why am I here?’

  ‘You are a remembrancer, yes?’ said Bjarki, reaching up to smear his red fingertips down Lemuel’s tear-streaked face.

  ‘I was,’ said Lemuel, biting his lip at the caustic smell and oily texture of the Rune Priest’s blood, dimly aware of sinuous movement in the shadows.

  ‘Then remember,’ said Bjarki, backing towards the fire.

  ‘Remember what?’

  ‘All you have been told,’ said Bjarki, taking a long draught from the drinking horn before tipping the rest over the fire. It roared to life as though doused with promethium, and billowing yellow flames reached to the vaulted roof.

  Lemuel shielded his eyes against the furious glare, but in that brief moment of illumination, he saw he was surrounded.

  ‘Harr Balegyr was my brother,’ said Olgyr Widdowsyn, standing a handspan to his left. ‘Dishonour his memory and I will tear your head from your shoulders.’