The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  ‘Harr Balegyr was my brother,’ said Svafnir Rackwulf on his right. ‘Speak ill of his legacy and I will eat your heart.’

  ‘Harr Balegyr was my brother,’ said Gierlothnir Helblind. ‘Misspeak his deeds and–’

  ‘You’ll rip out my spine?’ said Lemuel. ‘I welcome it.’

  ‘I was going to crush your skull, but I like yours better,’ said Helblind with a grin that wasn’t at all reassuring.

  ‘Let the sending away begin,’ said Bjarki.

  Each of the Wolves stepped back, and Lemuel saw why he had been brought here, why the Wolves had brought him their accounts. It hadn’t been to unburden themselves of grief, and he’d been foolish to ascribe so mortal a motive to these transhuman warriors.

  The armoured body of Harr Balegyr sat at the far end of the chamber on a high-backed wooden throne. A savage king of battle, mantled in furs and girded for war in frost-grey plate. His war-notched sword lay across his thighs, and despite the cut line across his forehead and the stitching sealing his eyes shut, Lemuel had the strongest sensation he might spring into action at a moment’s notice.

  Lemuel closed his eyes and took a long, deep breath.

  He began to speak, retelling the tales he had been told, leaving nothing out and giving each warrior’s account of his brother its due time in the light.

  He spoke until his throat was in rasping agony, until the sending away was done. It took twelve hours.

  With the last tale told, he sank to his knees at the dying fire’s embers and looked up to see if he had satisfied his audience or whether they would make good on their threats.

  But the chamber was empty.

  Seven islands of coalesced matter adrift in the Great Ocean, each linked to the other by arcing webs of lightning. The largest was a vast continental plate, an ashen wasteland with magma rivers and dust-choked ruins of such monumental scale they must once have been inhabited by giants. The smallest was a lightless mansion ripped from its earthly foundations and cast without heed into the tides of the warp.

  Others were mountain ranges of fire that extended from the base of rippling lakes of warp-forms. Some appeared to be living creatures, colossal entities whose scale and appearance defied any classification of form. The rest reshaped themselves from moment to moment, the roiling anarchy of their appearance impossible to pin down for more than an instant.

  ‘The Seven Sleepers,’ said Aforgomon, standing before the oculus, like a grotesque ringmaster unveiling the latest additions to his freak show. ‘Just as I promised.’

  Ahriman fought to hold his temper in check, something that had become ever more challenging on the aether-nulled Osiris Panthea. Just being aboard the Black Ship chafed his every nerve and turned any brotherly utterance into a mortal insult. Tolbek and Kiu had already come to blows, and many others were on the verge of violence.

  Every starfarer knew each ship had a unique aspect, a character all its own. Some vessels were vainglorious, others steadfast or imbued with reckless aggression to match their past captains.

  But the Osiris Panthea carried shame at its heart.

  In another age it would have been designated a Guineaman, a slave ship bearing unwilling souls into unending servitude in foreign lands. The nature of the cargo might have changed, psykers doomed to an agonising fate in the name of the Imperium instead of labourers worked to death in its countless manufactories, but the end result was the same.

  The Osiris Panthea knew it had been crafted for an ignoble purpose, and centuries of anguished guilt saturated its bones. Its every system was truculent and morbidly resistant, especially to those touched by the power of the Great Ocean.

  Muttering voices lingered in its empty transitways and half-glimpsed phantoms spied from the shadows of every deck. Such things should have been impossible on a vessel so heavily warded, but every man in their reduced company knew better.

  Ahriman had sensed ghosts at his shoulder ever since they’d escaped Kamiti Sona. He felt the silent accusations of those he’d sought to save from the flesh change as they died in his fire. Worse, their numbers were legion, far more than had ever gone to ash and dust in his tower.

  He tried not to think what that might mean, and for once was glad his Corvidae seersight was in decline.

  ‘Ignis?’ said Ahriman.

  ‘There are no auspicious numbers here,’ replied the Master of Ruin, without looking up from his post, his brow vexed. ‘I can find no Euclidean angles and no vectors cohering. The order of this place will not hold.’

  ‘So what you are saying,’ offered Sanakht, polishing his jackal-bladed sword with grim intensity, ‘is that you have no idea what these are.’

  ‘Are they safe?’ said Ahriman. ‘We can venture down there?’

  ‘Go down there?’ said Tolbek, gauntlets bunched into fists that sparked at his fingertips. ‘We will not find our father here, only madness and death.’

  The Pyrae adept paced the bridge like an animal in heat, an alpha warrior once in ascendance, but now emasculated.

  ‘For once I find myself in agreement with you, Tolbek,’ said Ignis, fingers drifting over the starboard surveyor array as if seeking to impose order where none could ever exist. ‘We will be walking blind into whatever snare this creature may have fashioned for us.’

  ‘You mortals,’ said Aforgomon. ‘Your lack of trust puts my kind to shame. I told you what they are – gateways to where you need to go.’

  ‘That is what you say they are, but whether to believe that is another matter entirely,’ said Ahriman. ‘You are neverborn, so I am inclined to doubt every word you say.’

  ‘What reason have I to lie, Ahzek?’ said Aforgomon.

  ‘You need no reason, daemon – it is your nature to deceive. I would be a fool to blindly follow you. If we are to set foot on these warp archipelagos, then I need to know what they are.’

  ‘All you need to know is that here is where you have to be, Ahriman,’ said Aforgomon. ‘If you wish to save your father, this is the only way onwards.’

  ‘A route you happen to know about just as we seek it.’

  ‘Your own father bound me to this form and sent me to you, Ahzek,’ said Aforgomon, drawing its black, metalled fingers across the invocatus symbols graven on its torso. The squealing of metal on metal set Ahriman’s teeth on edge. ‘And didn’t I tell you that you would fail without my help?’

  ‘You also told me you were a scorpion upon my back.’

  The daemon laughed. ‘Theatrics, Ahzek, nothing more. My kind cannot help but indulge in them when dealing with mortals.’

  ‘Why are we even listening to this thing?’ snapped Hathor Maat, standing at the back of the bridge, looking like he wanted to be absolutely anywhere but there. His arms were folded and his fingers tapped a restless tattoo against his forearms as though he were communicating in code.

  ‘Perhaps your sire saw further than you,’ said Aforgomon. ‘Perhaps he saw the means by which I would help save him. And maybe he saw that I knew this is where you need to be.’

  Tolbek shook his head. ‘Led here by a daemon on the back of an impossible vision had by a mortal psychometric in the hopes that our father knew of it. A black day for the Thousand Sons.’

  ‘Would that Menkaura was here,’ said Hathor Maat. ‘He would know the truth of it.’

  Ahriman turned on Hathor Maat. ‘Hold your tongue,’ he snapped as the guilt of his old comrade’s abandonment seared through him once more. ‘Menkaura did not command this expedition. That burden fell to me.’

  ‘And what a grand job you are doing,’ sneered Hathor Maat. ‘Half our force dead and our greatest seer lost to the enemy, suffering who knows what monstrous tortures. That is, if the Wolves haven’t already killed him.’

  Hathor Maat stepped from the edge of the bridge, warming to his theme. ‘And what did we take from that orbiting asylum? What great prize
did the mighty Ahriman deem worthy of such loss? A mortal seer whose vision makes no logical sense. No, Ahzek, I’ll not hold my tongue when you allow this monster to bring us here, a place of lunacy that will see us all dead.’

  Ahriman reached inside for power, for the means to rip Hathor Maat apart from the inside, but all he felt were stirrings of minor cantrips. The glyph-scribed walls pulsed with powerful null-geometries and even those petty magicks sank deep inside him once more.

  Perhaps the oppressive environment of the Osiris Panthea grated on Pavoni sensibilities more than most, but Ahriman sensed more to Hathor Maat’s tirade than simple frustration.

  Ahriman took a moment to compose himself in the face of the Black Ship’s many provocations – the painful beehive static in his skull, the bitter taste of iron in his mouth and the repercussive pain burning in his spine and joints.

  ‘You all saw what Mistress Shivani saw,’ he said. ‘The burning of the Yeselti refinery fields, the Library of Kadmus. There can be no other interpretation. Sanakht, you were inside her mind. You saw the truth of what she experienced when she held the chain attached to the primarch’s grimoire.’

  Sanakht shrugged. ‘I saw what the Book of Magnus wanted her to see, Ahzek. That is all I can say with certainty.’

  ‘In any case,’ said Tolbek, ‘that library was destroyed before anyone could properly open it, you remember? The primarch’s fury when he learned of its destruction was a terrible thing.’

  ‘I remember it well,’ said Ahriman, stepping down to the open space before the shipmaster’s throne. He walked in a slow circle, punctuating his words with a clenched fist to the palm. ‘But I also remember what I saw in the Pyramid of Photep. Library shelves heavy with books of Phoinikōn grammata, the alphabet brought to Boeotia by King Kadmus the Wanderer.’

  ‘You forget two things,’ said Hathor Maat, with the sneering tone of one who knows what he says will end a discussion. ‘First of all, what you believe she saw has already happened. And, secondly, it happened on Terra. You would fly us right to the heart of the Emperor’s realm on so flimsy a hope? Dorn’s picket fleets would destroy us before we pass Neptune’s moons.’

  ‘Which is why I brought you here,’ said Aforgomon, turning to face the shimmering, impossible islands of madness. ‘You still don’t understand. You mortals and your oh-so-linear grasp of time. Surely the Fifteenth, who once read the paths of the future, must know that space and time are one, that there is no such thing as past, present or future. It is all the same dreaming moment, only viewed from differing aspects.’

  ‘And these Seven Sleepers offer us a way back to where the Book of Magnus wants us to go?’ said Ahriman.

  ‘If you have sorrows enough to pay the price,’ said Aforgomon.

  ‘Trust me,’ said Ahriman. ‘We have sorrows to spare.’

  The heat. Lemuel had forgotten the ferocious heat.

  A swollen sun beat down on the anvil of the desert sands like a molten hammer. It shimmered from the ground in strength-sapping waves and bleached everything a hard shade of white. He’d expected the Wolves to suffer, born as they were on a world of ice, but they endured the searing heat as though born to it like the rad-cloaked bedouyn scav-tribes who plundered the toxic sands of the Nordafrikan Great Thirst. Surrounded by a hostile-looking cybernetic retinue, Promus stood with Nagasena, their heads craned upwards in disbelief.

  Behind them, a Stormbird sat at the edge of this rocky ledge, its engines throbbing in a swirling cloud of salt dust. Their destination had been clearly visible from orbit and Gierlothnir Helblind had needed no avionics, no maps and no guidance from Lemuel to find it.

  ‘What was this? Do you know?’ asked Bjarki, standing beside a pair of fallen megaliths at the entrance of a shadowed, uninviting valley. His fingertips followed the spiralling carvings cut into the base of one, but the Rune Priest knew better than to touch the wind-eroded stone.

  ‘We called them deadstones,’ said Lemuel.

  ‘Good name,’ said Bjarki.

  ‘The natives believed them to be a barrier against an army of evil spirits entombed in the mountain,’ said Lemuel. ‘They said this land had once been at the bottom of an ocean, and that this peak was only revealed when the immortal god slumbering beneath the sea shrugged and toppled the world.’

  Bjarki shook his head in wonder. ‘Maybe they were right,’ he said, wiping his hands on the plates of his armour. ‘It’s as good an explanation as any. So Magnus and his sons went ahead and tore them down to see what would happen.’

  Promus turned and said, ‘This is the place?’

  ‘Are you serious?’ asked Lemuel.

  ‘Answer the question.’

  Lemuel laughed and looked up at the mountain.

  Too vast and too monumental to have been raised by any natural means, ‘mountain’ was too small a word for this soaring wonder.

  ‘Yes, this is Aghoru,’ said Lemuel, looking up at the titan of mountains. ‘This is where everything began falling apart.’

  Fifteen

  The Reckoner

  As big as Asaheim

  You are my price

  The Osiris Panthea was a slice of darkness above the descending Stormbird, visible only by its outline against a pulsing, kaleidoscopic borealis of immaterial hues. Its edges flickered with warp ghosts and warp static blistering against its impervious layers of protective energies.

  Due to the nature of its cargo, the Black Ship had some of the most powerful veiling energies Ahriman had ever encountered. It was a vessel to which the entities of the Great Ocean were all but blind.

  And now they were leaving its protective envelope.

  ‘Venturing beyond an active Geller field is just about as close to a textbook definition of madness as I’ve heard,’ said Sanakht, his fingers tense on the grips of his twin swords.

  ‘This entire venture is rooted in madness,’ replied Hathor Maat, both hands tightly clasped before him, as if in prayer. ‘What does it matter if our sanity frays a little more?’

  Ahriman wanted to chastise Hathor Maat for his lack of vision, but for once, he and the arrogant Pavoni adept were in perfect agreement.

  ‘Lunacy awaits us,’ said Tolbek, rippling his fingers and rolling a ball of blue flame between them like a sideshow hawker. ‘The kind of lunacy that can only be found in a place as chaotic as the Great Ocean.’

  ‘Are you afraid, Tolbek?’ asked Hathor Maat.

  ‘Aren’t you?’ countered the Pyrae adept. ‘You’re a fool if you’re not.’

  ‘We should all be afraid,’ said Ahriman, moving forwards along the crew compartment to the pilot’s bay, where Aforgomon was at the Stormbird’s controls. The yokai was drawing them ever closer to the largest of the seven archipelagos, a rugged wedge of iron-black rock that resembled debris from a collapsed moon.

  Lunatic energies surrounded it, and Ahriman felt a surge of vertigo as he saw shapes coalesce in the swirling vortices. His seersight pulsed behind his eyes as it sought to sift meaning from meaninglessness. His eyes narrowed as a singular image resolved for the briefest instant before fracturing into a swell of light.

  ‘What did you see?’ asked Aforgomon.

  ‘I am not sure,’ said Ahriman, trying to fix the brief image in his mind. ‘A lost eagle set against a leafless tree.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I imagine it refers to a name of a place or a person,’ said Ahriman. ‘The eagle tree… Arvida?’

  ‘Does that name hold meaning for you?’

  ‘No, but its root is Scandian.’

  ‘Maybe he is one of the Wolves.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ sighed Ahriman. ‘The Ruinstorm raging in the east makes any interpretation problematic. When the future remains so unclear, why does the past so often intrude?’

  ‘Because it is all that is definite,’ said Aforgomon.

  Ahriman
nodded, but thought back to Temelucha’s words as he climbed towards the Iron Oculus, and was no longer certain of the truth of that. He put aside thoughts of the unknown name and looked out through the canopy once more.

  His eyes widened as he saw the soaring outline of a colossal megastructure, massive even from thousands of kilometres away. The last remnant of a failed civilisation or some purposeless edifice raised by the capricious whim of the warp?

  ‘What is that?’ he asked, nodding to the vast structure.

  ‘Our destination,’ said Aforgomon with glee. ‘The Hall of Extinction.’

  Aforgomon set them down at the edge of a wide plain littered with rusted, age-ravaged engines. Perhaps the wreckage of a long ago war? The Thousand Sons debarked from the Stormbird before a tower so enormous in height and breadth that Ahriman’s mind entirely failed to grasp its inhuman scale.

  Aforgomon, Hathor Maat, Tolbek and Sanakht lined up at his side, heads craned back in wonder.

  The tower rose to such monumental height that even their Legion senses balked at its reality. Whoever or whatever had built this tower, this was clearly their masterwork. From its colossal footings to its highest spires, this was work only possible in a realm unconfined by physical laws.

  Given its title, the sight touched Ahriman with equal parts awe and dread as they marched towards a soaring, brutalist archway, beneath which the mightiest Titans could pass through and look small.

  He had studied the great works of architecture and saw how the immaterium’s mindless labours had influenced entire ages of form in the material world. He even saw from whence had flowed the inspiration behind Imperial design, everything from the gothic hives of Europa to the grandeur of the Magna Macragge Civitas.

  Not even the Emperor’s Palace, vast and ambitious and elaborate though it was, could compare to this planetary structure. Buttress upon buttress, spire upon spire, the Hall of Extinction rose with an arrogance that not even the Master of Mankind had dared dream, much less render in stone and steel.