Was this death?
Lemuel had always feared this moment. He had raged against his wife’s terminal illness, traversing the globe many times over in search of a cure for her sickness.
Now that death was coming for him he found he was not afraid. Was this what Malika had known when she begged him not to waste their last days in a futile search for a cure?
A grey shadow moved before him. He couldn’t see it clearly.
Lemuel struggled to focus, blinking away tears.
A young boy reaching for him, a tiny hand extended.
His eyes were empty and dead, a purple-yellow weal around his neck where his mother had strangled him.
I as good as put my hands on his neck.
The boy reached out to him. What was he called?
A slew of names flashed into Lemuel’s mind. Unknown names. Places, people or things, he could not tell.
Pharos. Phaeron.
No. Pheres. Yes, Pheres – that was it.
‘Leave me,’ hissed Lemuel with his last breath. ‘I killed you. I killed you…’
‘No,’ said a voice too deep and too resonant to be that of a youth. ‘You may yet save us all.’
The boy grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pulled. Astonishingly, Lemuel felt himself moving, dragged out from beneath the crushing weight of Widdowsyn’s prostrate form. Lemuel fought against the boy’s strength, knowing that only more pain awaited him in this world.
Breath heaved back into Lemuel’s lungs, a sucking draught of electrically charged air. Lightning danced around him, a crackling dome of it rippling overhead. His vision blurred with the rush of oxygen to his brain.
He stumbled, but the boy held him upright.
No, not a boy.
The warrior of the Thousand Sons sat him upright, ripping open his tunic. Agony flared along his legs and up his spine. Lemuel blinked away tears of pain and twisted in his saviour’s grip. Muttering to himself, the warrior moved his hands across Lemuel’s chest as if searching for injuries. Lemuel felt wetness and looked down. Blood covered his skin, dripping down his chest from where the warrior had touched him.
‘What are you doing?’ he gasped.
‘Hold still,’ said the legionary, glancing over his shoulder. ‘I don’t have long.’
Lemuel followed his gaze and his heart hammered in terror.
In the heart of the arena, Magnus was ablaze with light.
The Crimson King floated with his feet angled downwards, a metre above sand that was even now turning to glass. His armour burned like molten gold, too bright to look upon. His arms were outstretched and light flared from them like the wings of an avenging angel come down from some celestial realm to wreak vengeance upon a disloyal kingdom.
Any semblance of corporeality was shed now at battle’s end. This Magnus needed no flesh; he was immaterial energy unbound.
And this was but a shard of a greater whole.
Bodies lay strewn around the primarch – bodies of flesh and blood. Bodies of iron and ceramite. Mortal, Mechanicum and Legion. The Wolf pack lay broken. Sister Caesaria lay still, her armour a smoking, molten ruin.
Even Promus and Nagasena were down.
Dead or alive, Lemuel couldn’t tell.
The legionary shook him, his gaze unrelenting.
‘Are you a good man?’ asked the Thousand Sons legionary.
‘What?’
‘Quickly. Are you a good man?’
‘No,’ said Lemuel.
‘Were you ever a good man?’
‘Once, maybe. I don’t know,’ said Lemuel.
The warrior shrugged and said, ‘For both our sakes, I hope that will be enough.’
He hauled Lemuel to his feet as Magnus drifted towards them.
‘Menkaura,’ said the Crimson King. ‘Of course it would be you. Who else of my sons might glimpse what was to come?’
‘Only Ahriman. Or maybe Amon,’ said Menkaura, and Lemuel felt the tip of the legionary’s thumb tracing a cursive pattern on the back of his neck, an ever-decreasing spiral. ‘But they are too blinded by love to see the truth. And even had they seen what I saw, they would not have had the courage to try to stop you.’
Magnus circled in the air, surveying the carnage around him.
‘Malcador’s finest could not do that,’ he said. ‘What makes you think you can?’
‘Because, like you, I was a diligent student,’ said Menkaura. ‘And I too have delved into proscribed texts.’
Lemuel twisted in Menkaura’s grip, lifting his hands to shield them from the star-bright radiance of the primarch’s soul-shard. He had sat in the presence of Magnus the Red before, heard him tell tales of lost Prospero, but this was not the same person. This was no grand, fatherly raconteur; this was the fiery aspect of Magnus consumed by anger, bitterness and hate.
‘Please,’ he sobbed, hearing Menkaura whisper strange words that made him flinch. ‘Don’t.’
‘What is that?’ said Magnus, his form rippling with aether-fire and his eye narrowing as he caught the scent of something awry. ‘The Malus Codicium?’
‘In servitutem abduco…’ began Menkaura.
Magnus flew at his son in a rage.
‘Don’t you dare…’
Killing light blazed from his clawed hands.
Menkaura pressed his thumb hard into the back of Lemuel’s neck, completing the spiral pattern he had been tracing.
‘I bind thee fast forever into this host!’ yelled Menkaura.
Lemuel screamed as Magnus swept them into his fiery embrace.
He felt himself falling.
His will tore away, unhoused from its seat of consciousness. A deposed king of his own flesh.
Lemuel was falling, falling into himself, dropping into an abyssal chasm from which there could be no return.
But he did not fall alone.
He fell with a fiery angel.
Ahzek Ahriman, Chief Librarian of the Thousand Sons Legion
Eighteen
Kadmus
Bindings
Renewed
Ahriman sat opposite the great king. He blinked away a shimmer of aether-fire haloing the man’s head and moved his mind into the fourth enumeration as he studied his face. The man’s bone structure was unusual, which was to be expected from a face millennia distant from his own. The king’s olive skin was smooth, his dark hair neatly trimmed and his beard freshly oiled.
He was the very image of King Kadmus.
Yet it was the eyes that revealed the truth.
The light of wheeling galaxies danced in the depths of each iris, the gleam of vast knowledge that could never be entirely obscured. Power clung to this mortal disguise, locked away behind a will of iron, but there nonetheless.
‘Do you like my library?’ asked King Kadmus. ‘I have nearly ten thousand books, gathered from all across the empire. There are works of all the great scholars of Thebes and Samothrace, and even a scholarly work from Sparta, if you can believe that! One is even bound in the hide of the dragon I slew at the Ismenian spring.’
‘A dragon?’
‘A fierce beast indeed,’ said the king, placing a long, serpent-carved heqa staff on the table. ‘It killed a great many of my people before I was able to bring it down and sow its teeth.’
‘The birth of the Spartoi,’ said Ahriman, intrigued despite the sudden appearance of a staff from thin air.
‘But slaying the beast was a deed I would come to rue.’
‘How so?’ asked Ahriman, knowing he could not indulge his father’s delusion for much longer.
‘Unbeknownst to me, the serpent was sacred to Ares, and the war-god cursed my rule with ill-fortune, plagues, rebellions and war.’
‘You were not the only one to sow the teeth of the dragon, were you?’ said Ahriman, baiting the trap.
‘
No. Iason, the centaur’s stepson, took some with him from Thessaly and sowed them in Colchis…’
The king’s eyes flickered at his careless mention of that ancient place. Its namesake was a similarly blighted place, where dark mutterings of gods and cults had twisted a brother once dear to Magnus.
Ahriman leaned forwards and placed his hands palms down on the table. He stared into the king’s eyes, seeking to appeal to his gene-sire lurking behind them.
‘Father, it is time to come home,’ he said.
‘I am home,’ said Kadmus. ‘This is where I belong, cataloguing my books and making sure I memorise every one. If I can commit one book to memory every day, then it will only take a little under thirty years to read them all.’
His words trailed off. ‘But each time I finish one, three more appear. It is most confusing. There is so much to learn, so much to know. My greatest fear is that I will not live to know them all.’
‘You said something similar within the Obsidian Tower,’ said Ahriman.
‘The Obsidian Tower? Is that in Phoenicia?’
‘No, it is your sanctum upon the Planet of the Sorcerers.’
The king’s features darkened and he opened his book once again. How long could Magnus maintain this cognitive dissonance? How long before this facade cracked and the colossal power behind the mask was revealed? What fury might be unleashed when this fantasy became unsustainable? As dangerous as it might be, Ahriman knew he had to irrevocably shatter his father’s fiction.
‘Now you are trying to confuse me,’ said the king, staring intently at the pages of his book, his hands curling into fists. ‘I know of no such place. You should go now, I think.’
‘I am not leaving here without you, father,’ said Ahriman.
‘Mistress Shivani warned me you would seek to make me your prisoner,’ said Kadmus, scanning the pages of the book. ‘I told her she was wrong. I told her my sons would only come as fellow seekers after knowledge.’
Ahriman hid his excitement at the king’s acknowledgement of him as one of his sons. He reached across the table and placed his hand atop the book the king was reading.
‘We do not have long, father. The past is obdurate and does not tolerate things that ought not to be here. If you stay, you will become a formless ghost. I beg you, come with me. I can make you whole again.’
The king shook his head, fear and anger warring on his features. Ahriman drew back his hand as he saw the latter emotion gain the ascendency.
‘I should have listened to Mistress Shivani,’ said King Kadmus. ‘She told me to kill you as soon as I saw you.’
The ancient king rose from the table and swept up his staff, its length shimmering as it filled with aether power. His form expanded as the demigod within shed its illusory refuge in scraps of disintegrating mist. Olive skin darkened to ruddy crimson and hair grew wild as his eyes swelled to become one great orb that swam with colours known and unseen.
The shard of Magnus stood revealed, robed as the peerless scholar Ahriman remembered from their many sojourns in the towering libraries of Tizca. Though a fragment of a much greater whole, this Magnus could still destroy them all.
He had a momentary sense of aether build-up before a wave of pure force erupted from the primarch. It hurled the three of them back against the bookshelves. Timber splintered under the impact and books fell in a rain of parchment and worn leather.
Tolbek was first to his feet, his aura blazing with the instinctive urge to strike back. Flames built at his fists.
‘Stop!’ commanded Ahriman. ‘We are not here to fight.’
Hathor Maat plunged the air around Tolbek’s fire to sub-zero levels and the flames died instantly. The Pyrae adept rounded on him, but the gleaming serpent-wound staff of his gene-sire flashed into the space between them.
The three legionaries faced their primarch, awed by the sheer majesty of his being. This was their primarch as they wished him to be, aglow with knowledge and the wisdom to wield it, vibrant, energised and sure of purpose.
‘My lord,’ said Ahriman, dropping to one knee. The others followed his example. ‘We are your sons, and we are here to help.’
‘I do not need your help,’ said Magnus, lowering his staff.
‘But we need yours,’ said Ahriman. ‘The Legion is dying, just as you are dying.’
‘You are wrong,’ said Magnus.
‘No,’ said Ahriman. ‘Without us, you will fade until nothing remains, and without our father, we will wither on the vine, doomed to madness and mutation.’
‘If that is true, then I can do nothing to change that fate. Nobody can.’
‘I refuse to accept that,’ said Ahriman, rising slowly to his feet. ‘You are Magnus the Red! You are the Crimson King, Master of Prospero, and the greatest mind the galaxy has ever known. There is nothing beyond your reach.’
The primarch shook his head.
‘I once thought as you do, my son,’ he said. ‘I believed I knew everything, that I was more enlightened than any of my brothers. More visionary than even my father. How foolish that now seems – how arrogant. There is always more to know, more to learn, and every act of learning must come with the humility to know that however much is learned, it is never enough…’
‘Is that why you remain here, hiding in an ancient library like a coward?’
‘Do you seek to anger me, Ahzek?’
‘Would that help?’
‘No,’ said Magnus, turning and walking around the edge of the library, running his fingers over the spines of the priceless texts. ‘This aspect of me is beyond anger, beyond jealousy and bitterness. It is the part of me that seeks knowledge simply for the sake of its acquisition. It is the part of me that felt your discord as you drew near and sought to heal the rifts between you. I hoped it would allow you to avoid the fates awaiting you at one another’s hands.’
At least Ahriman now knew from whence had come the gift of brotherhood in the passage through the mountain.
He stepped towards Magnus. ‘It is that aspect of my father we need most. The portion of your psyche that remains on the Planet of the Sorcerers is breaking apart. He feels the great geometries of his mind unravelling with every passing breath. He acts as you do, trying to remember all that was lost on Prospero, but it is impossible in his splintered state. Only when you are made whole again can we be restored.’
‘I am sorry, Ahzek,’ said Magnus, turning to face him once more, ‘but I… I cannot return. All I see on that path is an eternity of war and horror, death and torment. It is inevitable that all great things must end so why fight it?’
Ahriman slammed his fist down on the table.
‘Because some things are worth fighting for!’ he cried. ‘The end may come, yes, but we will not allow the galaxy to fall to ignorance without a struggle. We will rage at the death of reason sweeping humanity and hold fast to the lone torch of illumination as darkness closes in. It may be extinguished, it may be torn down by the baying, idiot mob, but at least we will have kept it aloft and alight as long as possible. Can you say the same, father? Hiding alone in a library that will soon be burned to ash?’
Ahriman paused as he saw his father’s look of shock.
‘Yes, this mountain and all within it will soon be ash. You don’t remember?’
‘No,’ said Magnus. ‘I… I do not.’
Ahriman nodded and stepped around the circular table. ‘Soon these mountains will be ablaze from the archipelago towers of the Aegean Valley to the Gulf of Lepanto. Nothing will remain of the great king’s works, but you will endure. You will remain alone in the darkness below Mount Cithaeron with nothing but dust and cinders pouring through your fingers until your spirit is naught but breath on the wind.’
Magnus circled in opposition to him, and it broke Ahriman’s heart to see his father so distraught. His father turned to look at the books stacked on the w
alls, reaching for them as, one by one, they began to fade like echoes receding into the past.
‘I can’t hold on to them,’ said Magnus, sinking to his knees as a tear ran down his bronzed cheek. ‘I can feel them fading. Like old friends walking away into a fog…’
Ahriman reached his father and placed a hand upon his shoulder, feeling the profound grief wracking his immaterial body. To feel every aspect of your soul peeling away, layer by layer, memory by memory… That was a new death every day.
He held his heqa staff out to Magnus.
‘Come back with me, father,’ he said.
Magnus nodded and gripped the ebony staff.
‘You will bring me back to what I was?’ he asked.
‘I will,’ promised Ahriman.
‘Then I will come with you.’
And the soul-shard of Magnus poured into Ahriman.
Ahriman opened his eyes and gasped to see the world as he had never seen it before. He stood once again in the Halls of Extinction, on the banks of the flowing dark river. Its waters were aflame with coruscating temporal energies that burned like the deepest cold of the void.
He stumbled away from the water’s edge and would have fallen but for the steadying arm of Hathor Maat. Ahriman flinched at the contact, seeing a momentary flash, like twin comets of light blazing from the warrior.
Ahriman heard voices. Muted, idiot things. He felt bodies in motion around him, slow-moving sacks of witless meat and bone encased in brittle skin-shells that could be so easily unmade. He lurched away from their abrasive voices, weaving and stumbling like a drunk, blinking away after-images of existences spent at a thousand times the speed of life.
The power filling him was magnificent and unimaginable.
Ahriman saw all the sharp edges of the world. Everything was too clear, too bright and too real for him to process.
He saw a million details in every glance.
The ever-diminishing fractal edges of the rocks.
Iridescent rainbows within the spray of water droplets.
Music in the black river of future, past and present.
‘I can see everything…’ gasped Ahriman. ‘I feel it…’
The Crimson King Page 32