The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  The less he saw of the ever-blackening yokai the better.

  Groans and creaks transferred inwards from the hull through the vessel’s colossal superstructure as the tides of the Great Ocean bore it towards an uncertain future.

  Ahriman turned into a wide passageway lined with hooded statues, above which were mounted kite shields bearing the heraldic crests of the magisterial Navigator Houses of Terra. Each statue was dusty, every shield shawled in black cloth as though in mourning.

  He followed the passageway to the end, crossing the molten remains of numerous warding runes arranged in apotropaic arcs. The doors they had sealed opened before him with a wave of his staff. Once, such rune-graven barriers would have denied entry to all but the most powerful neverborn creatures.

  Now all they did was slow Ahriman’s arrival.

  The final door opened and he ascended the revealed staircase. At the top was another warded door, this one marked with chalk lines and hung with fluttering strips of faded oath paper. Trinkets and talismans, gifts offered to the chamber’s occupant to see them safely through the empyrean to their destination. Strange to think of such superstitions aboard a vessel like this.

  The door slid open and the shimmering, boiling, undersea glow of the immaterium spilled out a tide of variegated colours. The shadows fled the frothing streams of illumination, but Ahriman was renewed in its light.

  When the Osiris Panthea still served the Imperium, this had been its Ocularis Chamber, where its Navigator guided the ship through the inconstant tides of the Great Ocean.

  Ahriman paused at the threshold, as he saw the chamber was already occupied.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ asked Ahriman.

  ‘Waiting for you,’ said Aforgomon, reclining on the couch where the ship’s Navigator would lie back and stare deep into the warp. The yokai swung its legs from the couch, and Ahriman’s skin crawled at the sight of how badly its once flawless body had been corrupted by the thing inside it.

  The markings of invocatus were all but obscured, and crazed patterns of rust and corrosion wormed their way out from within. Its head tilted at an angle, an exposed hydraulic mechanism hanging from its rusted gorget like a tumour.

  ‘I guard my solitary time as a grox-mare guards its young,’ said Ahriman. ‘Leave now.’

  Aforgomon wagged a finger at Ahriman, and he saw it was one of only three that remained on its hand.

  ‘Come now, Ahzek. We have matters to discuss, you and I.’

  ‘We do not,’ said Ahriman. ‘Go.’

  ‘I will leave soon enough,’ said Aforgomon, rising from the Navigator’s couch to stand before Ahriman. ‘But not before I remind you of the pact we swore in blood at the heart of the Torquetum. You owe a debt to me. Or have you forgotten I saved you all from the Voydes of Drekhye?’

  ‘I have not forgotten,’ said Ahriman.

  ‘Just as well,’ said Aforgomon, peeling a strip of paint from the upper surfaces of its chest. Flakes of gold and silver fluttered to the floor. ‘It never goes well for mortals who fail to live up to their end of a bargain with my kind.’

  Ahriman laughed and held up his heqa staff before the daemon. It flinched from the gleam of light at its heart.

  ‘You dare threaten me? You know the power I have now?’

  Ahriman leaned forwards, smelling the sweet stench of corruption wafting from the corroded mechanisms within the yokai’s body.

  ‘You disgust me,’ said Ahriman, circling Aforgomon. ‘Almost nothing remains of the machine to which you are bound. A strong breath and you will be no more than dust in the wind.’

  ‘You of all people should know that the decrepitude of this host body is no reflection of my power.’

  Ahriman shrugged. ‘As above, so below. You cannot hide your weakness from me, daemon. My eyes are clearer than ever before. You hold on to this reality by the tips of your claws. One misstep and you will be dragged howling into oblivion with the rest of your kind for a thousand years or more.’

  ‘Then give me what you promised!’ roared Aforgomon. ‘A soul is owed and a soul I will have!’

  Ahriman paused in his circling, and now the door to the chamber was behind Aforgomon. He shook his head.

  ‘What you asked for is meaningless,’ said Ahriman. ‘What was it you demanded? “The prince with eyes of dust, a heart of ice, a soul of mirrors and the face of a god.” Even if I chose to honour a bargain made in extremis, I would not know how to give you what you want.’

  ‘Choose your next actions wisely,’ warned Aforgomon. ‘You made a pact with the neverborn.’

  ‘A pact I now renounce.’

  Ahriman jabbed the tip of his heqa staff into Aforgomon’s torso and pushed. The daemon howled and stumbled away from its touch, blackened hands clasped over a fresh burn in its buckled chestplate.

  ‘Be gone,’ Ahriman commanded.

  The embarkation deck chosen for the interrogation was one of the Arethusa’s smallest, able to berth an Arvus lighter and little else. The chamber had been stripped bare, emptied of everything save a rune-inscribed gibbet at the centre of a circle of powerful wards. Svafnir Rackwulf had cut them into the deck with his null-spear under Sister Caesaria’s precise direction.

  Four remotely activated Tarantula turrets were positioned at the chamber’s corners, undergoing a last round of testing by teams of weapon-servitors. A mix of heavy bolters and multi-meltas, all four were aimed squarely at the gibbet.

  Bjarki, Nagasena and Promus watched the preparations from the mezzanine-level command station, an enclosed promontory of steel and armoured glass, filled with logic engines and berthing machinery. Magos Uexküll’s deck crews had checked every aspect of the controls to ensure each system was in working order. The contents of the deck could be vented into space at a moment’s notice, and all three warriors had been fully instructed in the correct usage of the controls.

  ‘I do not like this,’ said Promus, his arms folded across his chest.

  ‘None of us do, Dio,’ replied Nagasena. ‘But what choice do we have? We need to know where the soul-shards of Magnus are to be found. And we need to know now.’

  Bjarki paced the cramped control room, his fangs bared and cracking his neck as if preparing for a fight.

  ‘How can we trust anything it says?’ asked the Wolf. ‘It is a thing of the Underverse. Lies are its sustenance.’

  ‘You are correct, we cannot trust anything it tells us,’ agreed Nagasena. ‘We will learn what we need because it believes it is cleverer than us. Because it thinks we are beneath its notice.’

  Bjarki grunted and jabbed a thumb at the final preparations going on below. ‘I think it might be right.’

  Promus ignored Bjarki’s jibe and said, ‘Elaborate, Yasu.’

  Nagasena took hold of Aoshun’s leather-wrapped grip and said, ‘The thing inside Gaumon is a part of Magnus the Red. It cannot help but believe it is superior to mere mortals. It will seek to toy with Lady Veleda and mock her stunted intellect. She will play to that belief and allow it to think it has her at the mercy of its towering intellect. She will let it berate and condescend until it cannot help but reveal a hidden truth to better display its superiority.’

  ‘You think it won’t see what she attempts?’ said Bjarki.

  ‘Were this Magnus in his entirety, I would not countenance such obvious subterfuge,’ said Nagasena, ‘but this is a fragment of the primarch, a supremely dangerous one, yes, but one ruled by passion and the need to dominate. By using Chaiya as bait for that need, we will turn its power against it.’

  Promus rubbed a hand across his face and let out a long sigh before saying, ‘It is a grave risk we take here.’

  ‘If anything starts to look like it is going wrong, this can be ended in a heartbeat,’ said Nagasena, moving to the controls for the integrity field. ‘The deck can be vented into the void with one pull of a
lever. The Arethusa is presenting its flank to the gas giant below. Anything blasted from the ship will be vaporised in seconds.’

  Promus took a last look through the armourglass to the deck below as the weapon teams moved out, leaving the Tarantula weapons primed and ready.

  ‘Dio?’ asked Nagasena, when the moment stretched. ‘The Arethusa is your ship. The word is yours to give or deny. Do we proceed?’

  Promus stood unmoving, and Nagasena could imagine him running through a hundred potential scenarios at once. The Ultramarines had a name for this process.

  Practical. Theoretical.

  What Nagasena was suggesting was dangerous, but would the theoretical gain outweigh the very practical risk?

  ‘Do it,’ said Promus.

  Twenty

  Daemonhost

  Ashes to ashes

  Dark prince

  ‘I’m going to kill you all. You know that, yes?’

  The thing bound in the upright metal cage spoke with Lemuel’s voice, but Chaiya knew it wasn’t him. It sounded like someone copying his voice after hearing a distorted vox-capture.

  Its voice was a poor copy, but it was the eyes that revealed the greatest difference. Until they had soured in Kamiti Sona, Lemuel’s eyes had always been a honeyed brown, kind and filled with welcome.

  Now they were cruel and soulless, devoid of humanity.

  Lady Veleda had explained what had happened to Lemuel, but the idea that a portion of the primarch she had once loved now resided within him was too much to take. It was Lemuel’s flesh, mahogany-brown skin layered over muscle and bone, but the will animating it was utterly inhuman.

  The locked gibbet held it rigid and unmoving, like a soldier standing to attention, but Chaiya felt the tension vibrating just below the surface. Lemuel shimmered as though a heart of molten light burned at his core. Writhing veins strained against his skin as if under tremendous pressure from within.

  ‘But I’m going to start with you,’ said Lemuel, his black eyes fixed on Lady Veleda as she arranged herself on a mat placed by JambikSosruko. ‘I’ll pull your spine out by the root and use that deformed skull of yours as a mace.’

  The diminutive woman chuckled, a throaty rasp of amusement, and indicated the hulking shapes behind them.

  ‘I think Jambik Sosruko have something to say about that,’ she said. ‘He do good job of ripping your head off neck.’

  Chaiya turned and looked up into the broad, flattened features of Lady Veleda’s constant protector. The huge migou wore armour formed of banded torques and a heavy carapace of moulded bronze shawled with a cloak of reeking fur. The creature could be a cousin to the two legionaries flanking it – one a flame-haired warrior armed with a long-hafted spear with a serrated blade, the other a chimeric giant of metal, meat and war-plate.

  Like Chaiya and Lady Veleda, the three warriors wore humming Mechanicum signum-seals that would mark them as friendlies to the sentry guns stationed around the deck.

  ‘That aberrant freak of genetics? Please.’

  ‘If not him, then Helblind and Rackwulf finish job,’ said Lady Veleda, lifting a rolled-leaf cheroot and a single match from a small table the migou placed next to her with a delicacy of touch that belied his brutish scale. A deck of cards sat at the edge of the table, next to what looked like a muslin-draped tea set of cups, pots and a ceramic jar.

  Lady Veleda scratched the match to life with her thumbnail and lit the end of her cheroot. She inhaled deeply and blew a cloud of blue smoke towards Lemuel. Chaiya coughed at the foul reek of toxins, but at least it masked the stale-oil stink of their protectors.

  ‘Russ’ dogs couldn’t finish the job on Prospero – what makes you think they can do it here?’

  Chaiya flinched at the naming of her razed home world, the loss an open wound in her heart that would never heal. She squeezed her eyes closed, bunching her hands into fists. Lady Veleda had warned her not to show any emotion before the thing wearing Lemuel’s flesh. It would scent any weakness like a psychneuein drawn to an unguarded mind.

  Lady Veleda took another hit from her cheroot.

  ‘Because they do it right now, if I ask. They want to kill you. Very much they do. Lost many brothers on Prospero. Killing you make them very happy, I think.’ She turned. ‘You be happy to kill Magnus?’

  ‘Happy as a hunter knee-deep in jorgunaur blood,’ said Helblind, scraping his frosted axe along the side edge of his crux-shield.

  ‘And you, Svafnir Rackwulf?’

  The giant warrior rapped the haft of his barbed spear on the deck and nodded.

  ‘Very happy,’ he said. ‘Give the word and my spear will cleave his heart.’

  Lady Veleda grinned and said, ‘You see? You live or you die on word I give. Or not. Your choice.’

  ‘So why haven’t you given that word?’ said Lemuel with a grin that stretched so wide it split the skin at the corners of his mouth. Runnels of blood dripped down his chin. ‘If everyone aboard this ship wants me dead, yet I still draw breath, I have to imagine I have something you want, yes? Now what might that be?’

  ‘You know what I want,’ said Lady Veleda.

  ‘You want to know where the other shards of my soul are?’

  ‘Yes. You want to tell me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘If you were chained in the deepest gaol and only recently gained your freedom, would you let someone put you back?’

  ‘You were chained?’ asked Lady Veleda.

  ‘Of course! Who recounts tales of Magnus the warrior?’ snarled Lemuel. ‘Who remembers the great duels he fought, the mighty foes he slew? Who speaks of him in the same breath as Angron or the Lion when they tell of the martial prowess of the primarchs?’

  ‘No one,’ said Lady Veleda.

  ‘So why would I tell you anything?’

  ‘It not us looking to put your soul back together.’

  ‘No, you just want to destroy it.’

  ‘You rather be nothing than put back in chains, I think.’

  Lemuel did not answer and Lady Veleda sighed.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ she said, lifting the cards from the table and spreading them, face down, before her. ‘We do this hard way.’

  ‘Cartomancy?’ chuckled Lemuel, glaring with contempt at the worn deck. ‘What have you come to when you must use such black deceits to find your way?’

  ‘My cards not ordinary cards,’ said Lady Veleda, turning them over at random. ‘They hear all. Know all. Don’t believe me? Speak and I tell what truths they hear.’

  Chaiya saw each of the revealed cards had turned edges and were faded with strange designs – cups, wands and other, more esoteric, symbols. She saw toppling stone towers, great warriors and all manner of unfamiliar beasts.

  ‘That deck will tell you nothing,’ said Lemuel. ‘Ahriman had a deck just like that, for all the good it did him. Etteilla was a fraud and your cards are copies of a fake.’

  Lady Veleda blew out a series of perfect smoke rings.

  ‘Think you so? Cards led us to you on mountain.’

  ‘Because I let them,’ said Lemuel. ‘You think I wanted to remain trapped upon a ruined gateway to Edinnu?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not. But cards listened to body you stuck in. And here we are. Who knows what they hear now, eh?’

  Chaiya listened to Lady Veleda and Lemuel speak as if they were merchants haggling over the price of fish. She sensed a battle being played out behind their every utterance, but had not the clarity of thought to understand it.

  Lady Veleda turned her cards and placed those she didn’t want back in the deck. She turned over a card showing a lightning-struck tower with a skeletal reaper falling from its battlements.

  ‘Too obvious,’ she said and replaced it in the deck.

  Chaiya kept her gaze fixed on Lady Veleda as she worked
her way through the cards.

  ‘Look at me, Chaiya,’ said Lemuel.

  Her gut knotted in terror and she felt her heart pounding within her chest. She shook her head.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I don’t know you,’ she said.

  ‘Of course you do. Look at me.’

  ‘You can look, Prospero’s daughter,’ said Lady Veleda, resting a tiny hand on Chaiya’s forearm as she dealt another card. ‘Magnus-thing not harm you. Caesaria say Rackwulf’s runes strong.’

  ‘I don’t want to look,’ said Chaiya, biting her bottom lip in terror. ‘After what Lem did, I can’t look at him. I just can’t. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Come now, girl,’ said the thing wearing Lemuel’s face, sounding almost disappointed. ‘You’d be dead or worse if not for Lemuel. The cannibal corpse things of Kamiti Sona would have gnawed your eyes out and licked the inside of your skull clean if he hadn’t nudged that mother into doing what she’d secretly always wanted to do. The monsters would have flayed you alive and worn your skin as you watched Camille die. Are you telling me that’s what you’d rather have happened?’

  Reluctantly, Chaiya raised her head and swallowed hard.

  ‘No,’ she said softly, finally meeting Lemuel’s gaze.

  ‘No,’ agreed the black-eyed monster. ‘He saved that boy years of misery and pain. Saved his mother the burden of caring for the mewling little wretch after he ruined her life by being born. Poor little Chaiya. You get to live and all it cost was the life of a worthless brat she hated anyway. Sounds like you got a good deal, girl.’

  ‘I didn’t hate that boy.’

  ‘Don’t lie,’ said Lemuel with a gurgling chuckle that made her want to vomit. ‘Go on telling yourself you didn’t, but I know everything Lemuel knows, all the things you told him when Camille wasn’t around. You hated that child for crying every night, for spoiling the little fantasies of better lives and better places you clung to. You hated him for reminding you every moment of every day that you were trapped in a nightmare of your own making.’

  ‘No. I didn’t,’ said Chaiya, tears flowing down her cheeks.