The Crimson King

by Graham McNeill

  He recognised the voice. Olgyr Widdowsyn.

  ‘No,’ said Bjarki’s voice, exhausted beyond endurance by the cost of keeping the cascade of debris from obliterating them all. ‘Release him. It is not his wyrd to die here, though I wish it were.’

  Lemuel opened his mouth to speak, but Widdowsyn leaned over his shoulder and shook his head. The Wolf’s face was streaked with blood and burns.

  ‘You get to live, but you don’t speak, daemonhost,’ he said, pushing Lemuel over onto his stomach. Lemuel screamed in pain and rolled onto his back, searching for any sign of a friendly face but finding none.

  The three Wolves stood implacable and unbowed, while Dio Promus lay bloodied on his back, his armour molten and part-fused to his ruined flesh. A waxen seal bearing a fragment of burned oath paper fluttered at his pauldrons. That Promus still lived was a miracle, but Lemuel had seen legionaries suffer the most grievous of hurts and endure.

  The swordsman, Nagasena, lay unconscious at the edge of the crater, still gripping a gleaming sword tightly despite the terrible burns on his arms. Camille and Chaiya did their best to tend to his injuries, and Lemuel’s heart soared to see them reunited. He raised a hand towards them. Chaiya whispered in Camille’s ear and his former colleague looked over. Any thoughts of rekindled friendship were stilled by her look of utter hatred.

  Lemuel looked away as Bödvar Bjarki knelt before him.

  The Wolf reached out, and Lemuel flinched, expecting pain, but Bjarki simply placed a hand over his heart. He felt the chill touch of Fenris spread through him, and the Rune Priest shook his head in wonderment.

  ‘This mortal is no daemonhost, not any more,’ said Bjarki. ‘The soul of the Crimson King is gone. And no other fiend will ever claim his flesh. This one is a wyrd-wraith now, forever illuminated from within against the darkness of the creatures of the Underverse.’

  Bjarki rose and approached Promus, saying, ‘Can you stand?’

  ‘Stand? Why?’ said the former Ultramarine with a voice utterly traumatised by pain.

  ‘Because you’ll need to look me in the eye when you answer my next question.’

  Promus nodded slowly and Lemuel winced at the agony he saw in the warrior’s face as he used his shattered bolter to push himself upright. The lower portion of his right leg was missing, and he fell back with a grunt.

  Bjarki nodded to Widdowsyn, who bent to assist the struggling warrior to his feet. Promus nodded his thanks as the Wolf helped him upright.

  ‘What is your question?’ asked Promus, meeting Bjarki’s cold and flinty gaze.

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Is what true?’

  ‘That you are a murderer of our kind,’ said Bjarki. ‘That you have taken the lives of brother legionaries loyal to the Allfather?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Promus.

  ‘Do not lie to me,’ said Bjarki, stepping in close to Promus, and though the wounded warrior was half a head taller, Lemuel saw he was the lesser of the two.

  ‘The creature with the red sorcerers,’ said Bjarki, placing a hand over Promus’ heart. ‘It told us what you have done. It smelt the guilt of murder upon you.’

  Promus sneered. ‘A creature of the warp? You cannot trust anything such a creature might say.’

  ‘Ja, normally I would agree with you, but the best liars are those who hide their lies among the truth, and you have been lying to me since we met, Dio Promus. So tell me truthfully, what exactly is it you do for Malcador?’

  Bjarki tapped the shredded length of oath paper fixed to his armour with wax imprinted with the Sigillite’s seal.

  ‘I know what we do for him, but I have to know what calling would be so great that a warrior of Ultramar would forsake the colours of his Legion.’

  ‘A calling you would never understand.’

  ‘Ah, yes, because I am just a savage from a death world?’

  ‘No, because your loyalty to your gene-sire would never permit you to do what I must.’

  Bjarki almost laughed, but caught himself with a grimace of anger. ‘You have no idea what the Sixth Legion can do. Did Prospero teach you nothing?’

  ‘It taught me more than you know.’

  ‘Then tell me if what the creature said is true. And, remember, I will know if you lie.’

  Promus met Bjarki’s gaze and Lemuel saw Promus’ realisation of the truth in the Rune Priest’s words. A lie would be unravelled in the space between heartbeats.

  ‘It is true,’ said Promus, ‘I have taken the lives of brother legionaries loyal to the Emperor.’

  The horror of the answer drove the breath from Lemuel’s chest. Even Bjarki, who had expected this answer, seemed shocked. The only response the Wolf could muster was a single question.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I will not say,’ said Promus.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I swore an oath to never reveal my duty,’ said Promus with a burdened heart. ‘An oath more binding than that I took before Lord Guilliman in the Praetorium of Macragge. One I cannot now break, even in the face of my executors.’

  Bjarki said nothing, his head hung low over his chest and Lemuel saw he was weighing the consequences of what Promus had confessed.

  ‘I am a loyal servant of Terra,’ said Promus. ‘That is all I can tell you.’

  Bjarki gave a nod to Svafnir Rackwulf and said, ‘No, that is not enough. Do you remember you once asked if I was to stand at your side and slay you if you turned traitor?’

  Promus nodded. ‘On Kamiti Sona.’

  ‘Ja,’ said Bjarki. ‘I told you that we did not relish such tasks, but the Wolf King commanded us, so we obeyed.’

  Promus opened his mouth to reply, but before he could speak, Svafnir Rackwulf rammed his spear through him. The barbed adamantium blade severed his spine and clove his sole functioning heart. Rackwulf twisted the haft of his weapon, and pushed it deeper until its barbed tip burst from the centre of Promus’ chest.

  Bjarki kept his eyes locked with Promus’ and Lemuel felt something indefinable pass between them.

  Rackwulf wrenched his spear free of the former Ultramarine and Promus fell forwards with a crash of armour. Lemuel climbed to his feet and limped towards Bjarki.

  The Rune Priest turned as he approached.

  ‘You think I was wrong?’

  ‘No,’ said Lemuel.

  ‘I think I should kill you too, just to be sure.’

  ‘You aren’t going to do that.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Bjarki.

  ‘Do you know why?’

  Bjarki shrugged. ‘Wyrd is strange like that. Some who die are not meant to follow their path to the end. Others who have done much to deserve to die endure.’

  The Wolf lowered himself to the ground and sat back on his haunches, letting the exhaustion of the battle seep out of him in waves.

  ‘We failed,’ he said. ‘In every way possible. The red sorcerers will restore their father and he will rise more powerful than ever before.’

  Lemuel shook his head and bent to pull the tattered oath seal from Promus’ armour.

  ‘No, he will be less.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I had the soul of the Crimson King within me,’ said Lemuel. ‘I touched his thoughts and his fears. There is a piece of his soul he cannot yet reclaim, the very best part, I think. Without it he will have all the power of Magnus the Red, but without the good that once lay within him.’

  Bjarki stood. ‘You know this for certain?’

  ‘I do,’ said Lemuel.

  ‘Then our mission is not yet done,’ said Bjarki.

  Lemuel turned the oath paper he had taken from the dead warrior before him and read the scorched remnants of his name and deeds.

  ‘He was once an honourable man,’ he said. ‘And I shall honour him.’

>   Bjarki gripped his arm. ‘You will return with us to Terra. The Sigillite must hear what you know, Lemuel.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘That is no longer my name,’ he said.

  He folded the oath paper and gripped it tight in his palm.

  ‘Call me Promeus.’

  Ahriman blinked.

  Escaping Prospero’s doom to the Planet of the Sorcerers had been an agonising fall through a maelstrom of howling madness, but the translation from Nikaea was like waking from sleep.

  The grand stage of Tizca’s dark mirror conjured by Lemuel was gone, but a storm yet raged around him. Ahriman let out an aether-hot breath and saw he stood in the last remains of a broken city of cyclopean menhirs and towering megaliths, a place that reeked of blood and death.

  Tolbek and Sanakht looked around in wonderment at their new surroundings. Menkaura was with them once more, the seer down on his knees, clutching his head and weeping blood from his ruined eye sockets. Ignis stood over the fallen body of an orange-lacquered cybernetic, nodding as if he had foreseen this exact circumstance.

  The warbands lost in the labyrinth were also returned with Ahriman, and he saw Onuris Hex, as well as Kiu and the others. Their auras were all but extinguished, and Ahriman wondered what dark corners of their souls had been bared within the labyrinth? But such mysteries would have to wait, for he had brought them all from one world’s ruin to another.

  The Thousand Sons they had left behind stood at the perimeter of a circle of hard-packed earth enclosed by the ring of vast stones. Power billowed around them as they held back a world-ending tempest of oblivion with barriers of overlapping kine shields. None turned to acknowledge their arrival, every scrap of their attention focused on defying the oncoming armageddon.

  Ahriman’s breath caught in his throat as he saw what had become of his primarch in his absence.

  ‘We were too late,’ he whispered, and the words glittered on his breath before falling like dust from his lips.

  The corpse of Magnus the Red sat locked within a throne fashioned from interleaved vines of gold. Amon knelt before his gene-sire, swathed in rags and clad in armour patched with rust and antiquity.

  Ahriman moved towards the withered corpse of Magnus, but Tolbek stepped in front of him and placed a burning fist at the centre of his breastplate.

  ‘You gave one of our own to a daemon,’ said the Pyrae adept, his eyes eager for violence. ‘I will not forget that, and neither will our brothers.’

  ‘I did what had to be done,’ snapped Ahriman, feeling the forces within his heqa staff pulling him onwards. ‘And I would do it again. Now get out of my way.’

  Tolbek held his arm a moment longer before releasing him.

  ‘When the Warmaster’s campaign is won, there will be a reckoning between us, Ahzek Ahriman,’ promised Tolbek.

  ‘So be it. Now move, I need to save our father.’

  Tolbek stepped aside and Ahriman jogged towards the support throne and the slumped form of the primarch. Sanakht appeared at his side, and Ahriman shook his head.

  ‘You too, Sanakht?’ he said. ‘Are you going to threaten me as well?’

  ‘No,’ said the swordsman. ‘You had an impossible choice to make. Betray your brother or save our father. I could not have made that choice, but that is not what troubles me.’

  Ahriman sensed evasion in Sanakht’s words and said, ‘Then what does?’

  ‘The ease with which you made it,’ said Sanakht. ‘I wonder who else you might sacrifice to obtain what you want if the prize is great enough. Menkaura? Ignis? Me?’

  Ahriman did not answer, and slowed his pace as they approached their father’s golden tomb. Amon looked up, and Ahriman tried to hide his shock as he saw the equerry’s ravaged features.

  Ahriman had little idea of how long their quest had taken, but from the look of Amon, centuries must have passed. His features were like weathered oak, both eyes unseeing with opaque cataracts.

  Despair touched Ahriman.

  Were they already too late?

  Was the Warmaster’s rebellion already over? Had Terra fallen or were the armies of Horus shattered in defeat, licking their wounds in some backwater system?

  ‘Ahriman? Is that really you?’ said Amon, his voice little more than a parched desert whisper.

  ‘It is I, brother,’ he said as Sanakht knelt to help the blinded Amon to his feet. The equerry’s face contorted in pain, and Ahriman remembered the terrible damage the daemon of dust in the guise of the Wolf King had wrought upon him.

  Amon reached up and touched Ahriman’s face, as if unwilling to yet believe he was real. He wept as his fingers made contact with a being of flesh and blood, and not false hope.

  ‘I never dreamed you would return, brother,’ said Amon.

  ‘I am here,’ replied Ahriman.

  ‘Did you…?’

  Ahriman held up his heqa staff, and the milky cataracts bled from Amon’s eyes as the power of the Crimson King’s soul radiated from the pale wood. Amon blinked and his eyes widened as he saw for the first time in who knew how long.

  ‘Brother!’ he cried and took Ahriman’s hand in the warrior’s grip, wrist to wrist. ‘You are a wonder to me!’

  ‘And you to me,’ said Ahriman, looking up at the husked body of their father. ‘I will hear of all that has happened in due time, but first…’

  ‘Aye,’ said Amon, turning and guiding Ahriman towards the throne.

  From a distance, his father’s condition had been terrible to behold, but up close the horror was even greater. Like a mummified body, the Crimson King was a revenant of ossified flesh, drained of all vitality. His once mighty body was shrunken and black, as though decaying from the inside out.

  ‘Are we too late?’ asked Sanakht, echoing Ahriman’s earlier thought. ‘Is he already… dead?’

  ‘No,’ said Ahriman. ‘He yet lives, I am sure of it.’

  Ahriman rose into the fifth enumeration, and pushed his mind down into the leather-tough flesh of his father’s body. His outer skin was withered and long-dead, like the surface of an ancient and petrified tree.

  Deeper he plunged, past necrotic and lifeless organs he could not identify, seeing highways of blood vessels and networks of sensory pathways beyond anything he could have imagined. The craft of the Emperor’s gene-wrights was masterful to behold, but he had no time to spend admiring their work.

  Onwards he dived, sensing a pulse of life deep within the shell of his father, an ember on the verge of extinguishing.

  Ahriman…?+

  The pulse of thought was so faint, Ahriman wasn’t sure he had even heard it at first. He paused in his psychic voyage through his father’s body and waited for the voice to come again.

  Ahriman…?+

  Yes! Father!+

  Am I dead?+

  No.+

  I think… I think I was dying, yes?+

  You were, but I am here now.+

  Where did you go?+

  To bring back your soul.+

  My soul?+

  Yes,+ said Ahriman, and allowed the soul-shards bound within his staff to flow outwards. They surged from within, roaring like a flood tide as they used him as a conduit.

  Like attracts like.

  Ahriman screamed as the combined aspects of the Crimson King poured through him to where they belonged. The power was immense, and Ahriman felt himself being pulled apart from within as they bloated his fragile psyche. For an instant he almost felt pity for Lemuel, a mere mortal whose fragile flesh had somehow managed to bear such a burden.

  As though filling a well, the shards of Magnus’ soul spread through his flesh as the most potent of panaceas. What it touched it renewed, and what it renewed was reborn. Like a great and powerful animal shaking off a long hibernation, the Crimson King shed the dust of ages.

  Ahr
iman felt the last of the power contained within his staff bleed out and he gasped, pulling his mind back into his skull with a cry of pain. To have flown so close to the heart of a star would leave repercussions like nothing he had ever experienced before, but that was a price he would pay as often as necessary to renew his father.

  He staggered away from the imprisoning throne, as the twisting vines of gold cracked and burned away like dust in the wind.

  As above, so below.

  The deathly hue drained from Magnus’ skin and the bronzed, ruddy heat of his flesh restored itself. Atrophied muscles swelled with growth, becoming mighty once again. A deep rumble built within the breast of the Crimson King and armour that was layered with a patina of verdigris and rust shone with the lustre of metal freshly forged.

  His mighty head lifted and the lank, matted hair became lustrous once again – a mane of scarlet banded by a crown of gold.

  Finally his eye opened, and Ahriman sank to the ground.

  Tears fell with unabashed joy at the sight of his father’s clear and lucid sight. The pupil swirled with colours undreamed and, even newly awakened, it saw further and deeper than Ahriman’s ever would.

  Further even, perhaps, than it had before.

  Magnus rose from the support throne and it collapsed into broken shards, leaving him standing over them all, a god restored to his towering majesty. The primarch stood taller now, a being of limitless power unburdened by any notions of restraint or by weight of conscience. His soul was restored, but Ahriman knew that the best part of it, the true and loyal heart of him, remained lost.

  Golden light blazed from him, and as it spread across the circle of menhirs, the storms beyond were stilled as the great will that had kept oblivion at bay set order upon his kingdom once again. Beyond the titanic stones, the world was remaking itself, its protean form given shape by the desires of the Crimson King.

  The Thousand Sons turned from their labours, drained but elated to see their father once again – brighter, stronger and more energised than ever before.

  They gathered in their hundreds to witness their father’s rebirth, and Ahriman could only guess at how long it had been since they had seen him like this. Their steps were leaden, and he felt their exhaustion. They marched like captives newly freed from a lifetime of incarceration, or mindless automata cut from their command cortex.