The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  Ahriman looked back the way they had come, now understanding that what he had taken to be wrecks of an ancient war fought in the tower’s shadow, were in fact the discarded remnants of construction engines employed to build this titanic structure.

  And now the collapsed nature of the planetoid made sense.

  ‘They quarried their own world to extinction to build this,’ he said.

  Aforgomon nodded. ‘Entire servitor races, brought into being just for this monumental task, quarried the roots of the world and bore its bedrock to the surface.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Hathor Maat. ‘What purpose does this structure now serve? It looks abandoned.’

  ‘It is,’ agreed Aforgomon. ‘Once the daemonic masons had wrought the planet’s bones into this paean to failed life they abandoned it.’

  ‘What a colossal waste of time,’ snapped Tolbek.

  ‘This is the warp,’ said Aforgomon. ‘Time is meaningless.’

  Yet for all its towering magnificence and the unimaginable labour of its creation, Ahriman felt something skewed about the structure’s reality, as if its entire immensity was an ingenious backdrop upon a theatrica stage.

  The feeling diminished as the shadow of its great arch swallowed them and they entered the building. They marched for what seemed like an eternity until a vast circular chamber opened up before them, its stone floor adrift in dust and echoes.

  Undulating shadows draped the walls and charnel winds sighed from a multitude of arches leading deeper into the structure. The lintel of each onward path was carved with strange runic symbols, the likes of which Ahriman did not know. For once he was glad of his ignorance, fearing what tragedies might lurk in their meanings.

  Every square centimetre of the walls was engraved with carefully indented scriptwork, and Ahriman needed no special insight to know what these were.

  ‘A tally of all the broken branches on the tree of life.’

  ‘Indeed so,’ said Aforgomon, nodding to where a hooded figure stood revealed in the centre of the chamber.

  ‘Who is that?’ asked Ahriman.

  The black light of the symbols on Aforgomon’s artificial body pulsed in wariness as it answered.

  ‘That is the Reckoner.’

  It took another two hours of walking before the Thousand Sons finally approached the Reckoner. In that time, he had not moved so much as a muscle, and Ahriman took the opportunity to study him and the inconstant streamers of aether-light that clung to him like corposant.

  He had great power, that much was clear, but he was of mortal scale, hunched over in pale blue robes threaded with gold symbols of mystic significance. No face was visible beneath his hood, only the vague suggestion of depthless blackness and a pair of hollow eyes.

  In one hand, he held a long staff, topped with a beaked skull wound with boiled leather and packed with sickly fragrances, like the plague-doctors of Old Earth. His other arm was hidden within many folds of fabric, suggestive of proportions that were insidiously wrong, as if unnatural anatomy lurked just beneath.

  The Reckoner rapped his staff against the stone floor.

  Dust bloomed and the echoes carried to each of the yawning archways, lingering for longer than they ought to. Sighs of regret blew from them in answer, and dust devils drew inwards on the backs of curious zephyrs.

  The Thousand Sons halted, and the Reckoner’s hooded gaze appraised each of them in turn. He nodded slowly, satisfied by whatever he had seen.

  Aforgomon stepped forwards and bowed, a gesture of deference Ahriman had never expected to see the yokai make.

  ‘I bring travellers who bear such sweet sorrows. Abyssal depths of grief and loss to fill entire wings of your halls.’

  ‘Whose extinction do they seek?’ said the Reckoner, his voice a hideous mingling of a corpse’s death rattle and a drowning man’s gurgling. Aforgomon turned and gestured for Ahriman to speak.

  Ahriman hesitated. The creature before him was likely one of the neverborn, a being whose very existence was freighted with lies and deception.

  ‘Extinction?’

  The Reckoner sighed. ‘For every species, idea, dream or belief that takes root, a million others wither on the vine. If they are remembered at all, it is only by the imprints of their dust and bones in rock.’

  ‘But everything is remembered here?’ asked Ahriman, craning his neck to look at the chamber’s soaring scriptwork. ‘Upon these walls, yes?’

  ‘All dead things are known here and every stunted root may be followed back to the moment its thread was cut,’ said the Reckoner.

  ‘Why are so many of the halls empty?’ asked Tolbek, pointing towards a vast archway, through which were visible smooth walls of raw stone.

  ‘They will not be empty for long,’ promised the Reckoner, turning and limping towards the untouched hall. ‘Extinction is not a process with an end, it is an eternal, unending river.’

  Ahriman and his companions followed the Reckoner, and gusting dust devils circled them like watchful hounds protecting a herd of livestock. The winds billowed around the Reckoner, and his robes shifted, as if his body were reshaping itself beneath the fabric.

  ‘We seek a pathway into the past, to a moment of time on Old Earth,’ said Ahriman, struggling to hide his revulsion. ‘We were told that could be found here.’

  ‘All facets of time and space are one,’ said the Reckoner with a slow nod. ‘All are bound by grief, for what is life but one endless and eternal parade of loss? Such are the threads that bind all existence together.’

  In an earlier age, Ahriman might have sought to debate the point with the Reckoner, but his sorrow was too raw and too close to the surface for him to muster any counter.

  They traversed the great hall until they reached the archway, its quoins crafted from blocks the size of Land Raiders. Passing beneath the arch, the passage sloped downwards towards the sound of rushing water in the distance.

  The Reckoner fixed his gaze upon him and the furnaces of his eyes swelled until it seemed they surrounded Ahriman in fire.

  ‘Show me your sorrows,’ he commanded.

  Two titanic guardians had once stood sentinel over this mountain, left by an ancient race that once held the galaxy in the palm of its hand then let it slip away. Portions of wreckage belonging to those towering machines were everywhere in evidence on the ascent into the sun-baked upland valley.

  Lemuel saw gracefully curved shards of what looked like gleaming porcelain glittering like terrazzo scattered over the mountain’s rugged haunches. As they crossed a soaring rock bridge over a deep canyon, he saw the vast, elongated head-section of one of the mountain’s guardians.

  ‘You were a thing of beauty,’ he said, the fallen engine’s proportions and graceful curves speaking to him, even in pieces. ‘And the Thousand Sons destroyed you.’

  The lens of its tapered cockpit section glittered a gorgeous azure that put Lemuel in mind of the watercolour of Terra’s oceans that had hung in his villa in Mobayi.

  ‘One thing they did right, then,’ said Olgyr Widdowsyn, spitting a wad of reeking sputum. It dropped over two hundred metres to land, with pinpoint accuracy, in the centre of the downed machine’s eye.

  ‘Really? Even your Legion isn’t without some aesthetic sensibilities,’ said Lemuel, gesturing to the ornate leather knotwork on Widdowsyn’s helm, and on his belt, and the wolf-carved bronze of his sword belt. ‘Surely you can appreciate this?’

  ‘It was xenos,’ grunted Olgyr Widdowsyn. ‘It pleases me that it’s dead.’

  ‘Just because it was made by alien hands means it can’t be beautiful?’

  Widdowsyn nodded and gave Lemuel a shove between his shoulder blades that felt like a punch. Jolts of searing pain lanced down Lemuel’s arm to his elbow.

  ‘Ja, you do understand,’ said Widdowsyn. ‘Now keep climbing.’

  Lemuel rubbed h
is shoulder, already imagining bruising swelling from the impact of Widdowsyn’s fist. One more pain to add to the laundry list of hurts. The nerves in the stump of his severed arm had healed poorly, leaving a phantom pain that woke him in the night, reaching for a hand that wasn’t there. At least the splints on his legs were gone, but Widdowsyn had set them just crooked enough to make even walking on level surfaces painful.

  Climbing this mountain was a special kind of agony. Every step sent spikes of pain shooting up his spine and into regions he couldn’t imagine were connected.

  The sun beat down remorselessly, just as he remembered from the last time he had visited this dungheap of a planet. The air was dry and every step kicked up salt dust that parched his throat and set his breath to a rasping wheeze.

  Back when they were still brothers and the world had made sense, the Thousand Sons had marched into the mountain with the Space Wolves at their side. Lemuel could barely believe that was only a few short years ago. So much had happened. The galaxy was no longer the same place.

  What changes might the next few years bring?

  Far ahead, Bödvar Bjarki led the way, alongside the giant warrior in burnished plate of unmarked silver. Lemuel had never seen his like before, but sensed great power emanating from him. Behind them came a chained Legion warrior clad in a simple bodyglove, escorted by Sister Caesaria and surrounded by a cohort of Thallaxi.

  Lemuel could not remember if he knew this warrior, but the cursive form of his tattoos spoke of Prospero’s sensibilities.

  Had the Wolves captured him on Kamiti Sona as well?

  Most likely, but why bring him to Aghoru?

  More painted cybernetics marched on the flanks – hunchbacked things with spindle-limbs and smooth skull-plates that glitched with low-level static and the threat of imminent violence.

  Red-robed Mechanicum handlers bent over the floating devices that controlled them, and Lemuel heard them communicate via clicking, binaric cant. He couldn’t understand what they said, but it was clear they were arguing.

  A hundred metres ahead, walking alongside Yasu Nagasena was Chaiya. Lemuel had tried to climb higher and faster to speak to her, but Olgyr Widdowsyn had clamped a hand on his shoulder and simply said, ‘No.’

  She’d looked back at him once with a look of such withering contempt that, for once, he was glad of the Wolf’s refusal to allow him more than a metre from his side.

  ‘That one does not like you, I think,’ observed Widdowsyn.

  ‘No,’ agreed Lemuel. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘Once she did? Was she your woman?’

  ‘No, Chaiya was Camille’s wom– Camille’s lover.’

  Widdowsyn nodded. ‘The witch taken by the red sorcerers.’

  ‘She wasn’t a witch,’ snapped Lemuel.

  ‘But she had powers, ja? Like you?’

  ‘Powers, yes, but not like mine.’

  ‘Then she was a witch,’ said Widdowsyn, reaching up to touch a furred talisman hanging at his gorget. ‘What could she do?’

  Lemuel remembered spending hours listening to Camille as she gingerly touched unearthed finds from archaeological digs. Household objects mostly – items of everyday use without the risk of carrying dangerous or painful memories.

  ‘She was a psychometric,’ said Lemuel. ‘She could touch an object and tell you where it came from, who had used it and when. She could tell the story of all the lives it had touched and what it meant to them.’

  Widdowsyn paused and shielded his eyes from the sun.

  ‘So why does her woman now hate you?’

  ‘I did something very bad,’ answered Lemuel, but said no more, unwilling to relive the moment when he made a mother kill her own son. ‘Something for which I will have to answer one day.’

  They marched for another five hours into the burning cauldron of the mountain, stopping only to allow the non-legionaries to drink and briefly rest in the shadow of the cybernetics. Lemuel’s coal-dark skin shimmered in the heat, soaked in sweat and badly burned. The sun was three hours past its zenith by the time they reached their destination.

  By now, Lemuel had all but tuned out anything but his own misery. Both his legs were stumps of fiery pain, his spine a white-hot column of agony that near blinded him. His head pounded with heatstroke.

  He lurched forwards into Olgyr Widdowsyn’s back and looked up in confusion, the brightness of the sun dazzling on the legionary’s frost-grey plate. Lemuel worked up just enough moisture in his mouth to speak.

  ‘Why have we stopped?’

  ‘We’re here,’ said Widdowsyn.

  Lemuel’s mouth fell open at the sight before him: a wide crater of vitrified rock that lay like a shallow basin before an immense gouge in the cliffs that almost split the mountain in two. The flank of the mountain had been bisected as cleanly as if an orbital laser had sliced through its exact centre line and carved a precise V-shaped cleft.

  But no weapon devised by the Martian priesthood had ever been so accurate or so thorough. The heart of the mountain was laid bare, the mountain’s geological history exposed for all to see. Veined strata of rock that had never before seen the sun glittered, and the savants of the Mechanicum geologicus might have learned Aghoru’s deepest secrets had they been given the time to study the mountain’s heart.

  At the centre of the crater stood an incongruous pillar of black rock, like a volcanic plug left isolated after the softer rock encasing it had been worn away by aeons of erosion.

  It seemed for an instant that Lemuel saw two figures atop the rock spire, one a giant of copper skin, the other a fallen son lying supine in his arms. Lemuel blinked away the sweat gumming his eyes, and the two figures vanished.

  Bödvar Bjarki and the warrior in the burnished plate led them through the crater, with Sister Caesaria and her captured son of Magnus. They passed the spire of black rock towards the gouge cut into the mountain, and all thoughts of fatigue fled Lemuel as he lifted his eyes to their eventual destination.

  Carved into the cleft of the mountain was a magnificent set of stairs wrought from palest marble veined with gold and blue. Statues of armoured warriors, robed scholars, crowned kings and learned thinkers lined the ascent.

  ‘Was it like this before?’ asked Widdowsyn.

  Lemuel had not climbed this high when he last came to Aghoru, but Ahriman had described the encounter with the mountain’s guardians in exhaustive detail. In none of those accounts had the Chief Librarian described anything remotely like this.

  He shook his head, his eyes following the stairs as they pierced the heart of the mountain.

  ‘What do you think is at the end of the stairs?’ he asked.

  ‘The Crimson King,’ answered Widdowsyn. ‘Who else would carve a mountain as big as Asaheim for his throne?’

  The inferno fell away from Ahriman, and he found himself alone in absolute darkness. An emptiness so profound he could not even begin to grasp its enormity. He searched for some visual anchor, some means of orienting himself in this endless expanse of black emptiness.

  Where was he?

  Given his starting place, a neverborn hall in the depths of the Great Ocean, that was next to impossible to answer.

  A hot breath of wind touched him, redolent with the twin tastes of war – smoke and burned metal. It blew again, drawing him onwards.

  Was this the beginning of the journey into Terra’s past, to the ruins of Old Earth? Star-faring legends told of crews swept into past and future by the raging tides of the Great Ocean, but even in the most reliable accounts of such things, those voyages were calamitous affairs, full of madness and tempests.

  This was a voyage that would not begin without payment.

  Aforgomon had warned him the price would be sorrow, but what did that mean? As if by asking the question, an answer of sorts presented itself.

  In the blink of an eye the da
rkness was gone, and Ahriman found himself standing beneath a brazen sun that beat down like a fiery hammer upon the anvil of the earth. A great throng of people surrounded him: thousands of men, women and children. They milled aimlessly through a makeshift encampment that sprawled over the hills surrounding a marble-walled city of golden spires and clay-tiled domes.

  A pall of smoke hung low over the eastern and southern horizons. Lightning flickered in petrochemical clouds to the north, and striated clouds of atomic fallout shed their toxic ash over the ruins of a defeated enemy in the west.

  Surrounded by war, yet somehow this city had escaped its ruinous effects, the gates intact and its walls neither pockmarked by shell impacts nor vitrified by high-energy lasers. A memory tugged at Ahriman, one he could barely believe was his own – one that time and his transformation into a legionary had rendered as insubstantial as mist.

  ‘I know this place,’ said Ahriman.

  ‘Of course you do, dung-brain. It’s Susa,’ said a voice beside him.

  Ahriman turned to see a young boy of around ten summers standing beside him, his features as familiar to him as his own. He held Ahriman’s hand, his face a mixture of innocence and hope that twisted a knife of guilt and loss in his belly.

  Ahriman drew in a shocked breath.

  ‘Ohrmuzd…’ he said.

  And with his brother’s name spoken, the scene twisted and changed once more, the ancient city of the Achaemenid empire vanishing like a desert mirage. In its place, a ridge of snow-capped peaks running across the roof of the world. Ahriman and a pack of young boys in training chitons ran the slender ridge, sprinting from ice-slick boulders to leap clefts in the rock.

  Ahriman ran with the pack, feeling a lightness and youthful strength to his body he had all but forgotten. He laughed as he ran, his lungs burning as they fought to draw breath from the thin, high air.

  ‘Hurry up, Ahzek!’ shouted Ohrmuzd, apparently untroubled by the altitude. His brother was ahead of the frontrunners by ten lengths or more, his mahogany skin and jet-black hair contrasting starkly with the whiteness of the snow.