The Crimson King Page 13

  ‘A small weakness, surely?’

  Promus shook his head. ‘A warrior’s worth can be measured greater or lesser, but no weakness can be counted small. Not now, not with so much at stake. The Chosen of Titan must be beyond temptations. All temptations.’

  Videns stowed his slate within the folds of his robes and bowed to Promus.

  ‘Apologies, Librarian Promus,’ he said. ‘I had high hopes for this incursion, but it seems I was wrong.’

  Promus spun and hauled Videns from the deck, residual pain fuelling his anger at the Statisticator’s error.

  ‘Do you understand what your being wrong has cost? Do you? Think of all this warrior could have done, every traitor he might yet have killed? Do you truly understand?’

  Videns struggled in the Librarian’s grip, his inhuman anatomy squirming beneath his robes. A bark of fear squalled from his augmitter.

  ‘Librarian Promus, please! Statistical prognostication, for all its empirical clarity, is not perfect.’

  ‘Your previous assertions speak to the contrary,’ said Promus, tightening his grip. ‘Numbers do not lie when you are proven correct, but are conveniently imperfect when you err.’

  ‘No method of prognostication is without its flaws,’ said Videns in a rush. ‘Prophecy, augurs, haruspicy, cartomancy, all are subject to interpretation and variations!’

  Promus had not the stomach for Videns’ excuses and increased the pressure on the half-man’s neck still further. Metal deformed with a groan of plasteel and the hiss of straining pneumatics. The brass loupes on the tech-priest’s faceplate spun frantically.

  ‘Librarian!’ cried Videns. ‘He wakes!’

  Promus dropped the magos to the deck, knowing the anger he felt was misplaced and not entirely his own. He saw his own face reflected in the brushed steel of Viden’s mask and turned away in disgust.

  Varaestus Sarilo was stirring, his eyelids fluttering as the violation of his memories overcame the biological mechanisms keeping him sedated. He groaned, fists bunching as combat-glands doused his muscles in stimms.

  Promus laid a hand on Sarilo’s skull, almost tenderly.

  ‘Forgive me, brother,’ he said.

  Then vaporised the legionary’s brain with thoughts of fire.

  They left the chambers of the Medicae Astartes. Promus sealed the doors behind him with profound regret. The shadowed hall beyond was dark and silent, no longer a place of healing, but a sepulchre.

  ‘Damn you, Malcador…’ he whispered, placing his hand on the door’s cold metal.

  His eyes fell upon the dull silver of his arm. The curve of his vambrace was gunmetal grey, no longer the cobalt-blue of the XIII. The removal of his Legion colours had been traumatic, but at times like this he was glad of their absence. His brothers in Ultramar would never countenance the cold logic of Malcador’s plan.

  They would see what was done here as a gross betrayal, but they did not know what he knew. They had not seen what he had. They had not listened to Magnus the Red’s grandiloquence as he stood in the arena of Nikaea and refuted the accusations of sorcery laid against him.

  Promus remembered that day all too well.

  Volcanic heat, reflections in vitrified glass labyrinths.

  Righteousness swelling within his breast as he stood shoulder to shoulder with his fellow warrior-mystics.

  Elikas, Umojen, Zharost, Chief Librarians all.

  And Targutai Yesugei, foremost Stormseer of the White Scars.

  The Chogorian had spoken with the wisdom of Ptolemy, and the odd syntax of his savagely accented Gothic belied the insight of his words. Each Librarian had added to Yesugei’s oration, building an argument founded on logic, reason and evidence.

  But they had been deceived.

  Even Yesugei, wisest amongst them, had not seen what Magnus concealed behind his mask of good intent.

  Promus’ gauntlet clenched into a fist.

  ‘You lied to us,’ he whispered through gritted teeth.

  The master of the Arethusa, Magos Umwelt Uexküll, met them in the stained-glass narthex of the medicae decks. He watched the spindle-limbed Vorax automata prowling the Zhivago’s infirmary vaults, his steel-dust body draped in the shadow of a statue representing a wounded soldier and the Emperor.

  More accurately, Uexküll’s cybernetic proxy awaited them.

  Wrought from modified Lorica Thallax exo-armour and Kastelan parts, this Ursarax was a mechanised shock trooper of pneumatic limbs and fibre-bundle muscles. No mere robot, its augmented combat-chassis was normally hardwired to the excised cerebrum and nervous system of an indentured tech-thrall.

  The high magos himself remained aboard the Arethusa, an atrophied revenant of neurodegenerative maladies entombed within a mobile gibbet-harness. In lieu of physical presence, Uexküll projected his consciousness into the hulking Ursarax’s war-body through the mystic artes of cybertheurgy.

  The orange-lacquered Ursarax looked up as Promus and Videns approached, soft light from the electro-flambeaux dancing across its metallic body. Painted serpents writhed across the gleaming, piston-driven armour, and someone had painted a crimson skull across its faceplate. Mind impulse cables ran in cornrows across the elongated crown, linking Uexküll’s sensorium to the brutalised cortex within.

  Promus hated Uexküll’s proxy. The constant agony of the living being enslaved within left a raw, bloody taste in his mouth, as though he were chewing glass splinters.

  ‘Where is the candidate?’ asked Uexküll, his voice a patchwork assembly of previous vox-samples that were all that remained of his once stentorian tones.

  ‘He was not suitable.’

  ‘Regrettable,’ said Uexküll. ‘Disposal protocols apply. Vorax contingents have the crew quarantined in the lower decks ready for termination, and I have exloaded instructions for a random warp jump to the Zhivago’s logic engines.’

  The anger that almost ended Videns surged through Promus, but his psychic hood swiftly dissipated the sensation. On a ship of wounded souls, where suffering and misery abounded, strong emotions were blood in the water to the things beyond the veil.

  He took a breath and turned from the proxy. ‘Do what you must – I am done here.’

  ‘Not so,’ said Uexküll. ‘A ship draws near.’

  The stitched-together syllables made it hard to lift any nuance from Uexküll’s voice, but Promus immediately sensed his displeasure that this ship was in such close proximity.

  ‘How did it get so close without us detecting it?’

  ‘Because it is the Doramaar,’ said Uexküll. ‘Rumour has it that a warrior of the Nineteenth has its helm.’

  Promus cursed silently.

  ‘Nagasena is here,’ he said.

  The hazed curve of the Planet of the Sorcerers slid from the oculus bay as the Khemet turned its prow away. Ahriman watched it diminish with curious sadness.

  ‘I hate the world you brought us to,’ he said under his breath, ‘but each time I leave, I fear I might never return.’

  The Khemet’s command bridge tapered to the elliptical oculus, with heavy beams of Prosperine serpentwood following the golden ratio as they arched over flagstones of dark slate. Polished granite busts of previous shipmasters rested in crystalline sepulchres, their haughty gaze ensuring each successor was worthy of commanding so fine a vessel.

  Legion warriors and bronze-armoured thralls stood before marble obelisks cut with glyphic formulae and set with glowing dataslates. Each thrall boasted an empty eye socket, a self-inflicted devotion where a shard of Tizcan glass had gouged away the orb in imitation of the Crimson King.

  At the heart of the bridge was the Khemet’s scrying pool, sunk in a tiled shaft before the oculus bay. Menkaura and Sanakht stood whispering at its edge, looking down to where a conjoined ring of shaven-headed neophytes encircled the pool.

  These were the E
nvisioned, elevated thralls who read the tides of the Great Ocean echoing within the restless waters of the pool to guide the vessel. Pavoni artes had rendered their faces eyeless and fused the bones of their hands together in an unbroken séance circle.

  ‘Do we have a vector?’ asked Ahriman.

  ‘We have a heading to take us out of the Eye,’ said Menkaura, without turning from his study of the pool. ‘But neither I nor the Envisioned see a specific destination. It is most vexing.’

  Ahriman nodded and returned to the shipmaster’s throne, where the Book of Magnus lay chained upon the command lectern.

  He placed a hand upon his primarch’s grimoire, feeling the immense power within. Beyond the power, he felt the yearning for wholeness, a yearning inextricably linked to the mortal whose hand had written it.

  ‘Mahavastu Kallimakus,’ he whispered. ‘Is that who we will find on this first road?’

  ‘Ahzek?’ said Menkaura.

  Ahriman looked up. ‘A heading is all we need for now,’ he said. ‘What I saw in the Pyramid of Photep will guide our steps towards the first of our sire’s soul-shards.’

  Already Ahriman felt the thrumming tension in the Khemet’s superstructure, a guided flow of aether energy borne from prow to stern by crystals grown in the Reflecting Caves and Athanaean raptures inscribed in every bulkhead.

  ‘Your ship feels it too,’ said Aforgomon, emerging from the shadows at the rear of the command bridge. The daemon’s yokai body stood behind Ahriman’s throne. ‘The potential of this moment fills its steel bones. It strains to be under way.’

  The presence of the bound daemon was a dull ache in Ahriman’s soul, one he had unsuccessfully tried to ignore. His first instinct had been to break the invocatus bindings on the yokai’s skull and cast the daemon out, but Magnus’ will in this matter was clear.

  ‘Your hate for me is palpable,’ said Aforgomon, ‘but you know you will fail without me. Can the same be said for the others in this ragged host you have assembled? Fulgrim’s treacherous bladesman, fellow warbands whose only connection is that they witnessed their father fall a second time, and a pair of insane god-engines. Not to mention the beasts and renegades. If this rabble is what Magnus believes will save him, then the Lords of Ruin chose wisely when they made Horus Lupercal their champion.’

  ‘Do not speak his name,’ said Ahriman. ‘You don’t get to say the Crimson King’s name in my presence.’

  ‘And what of the others you will betray?’ said Aforgomon in a playful whisper. ‘What of Memunim and Kiu, Menkaura, Sanakht and Hathor Maat? Do I get to say their names?’

  ‘What are you talking about? They are my brothers. I would never betray them.’

  ‘Now they are your brothers,’ agreed the daemon. ‘But who can say what they will be to you in a few months time? Or a year? What will they be to you in ten years? Or even ten thousand years? Surely you are not arrogant enough to imagine you will enjoy the primarch’s favour forever? You must know others vie for your exalted position.’

  Aforgomon moved around the throne and took a seat next to Ahriman, upon the stone bench reserved for the Khemet’s first officer, traditionally an adept of the Athanaeans.

  ‘Do you recall Shrike?’ asked Aforgomon.

  The abrupt change of tack surprised Ahriman.

  ‘You mean Heliosa?’

  The daemon waved a dismissive hand. Ahriman noted the paint peeling back on its digits, the corruption of the thing within manifesting without. ‘An insipid name when a far bloodier one suits what happened there so much better. But, yes, Heliosa. Where Magnus and Leman Russ almost came to blows before the Great Library.’

  ‘Of course I remember that world. What of it?’

  ‘It was a planet rich in unique flora and fauna,’ said Aforgomon. ‘Or at least it was before the Word Bearers fleet bombed it to dust a year after you left.’

  That caught Ahriman’s attention.

  ‘Lorgar destroyed Heliosa?’

  ‘Yes, didn’t you know?’

  ‘No.’

  Aforgomon shrugged, as if the destruction of an entire planet was a matter of little consequence. ‘Then this may interest you. Among the planet’s many – now extinct – species was a particularly vicious breed of raptor that nested in clifftop eyries on Phoenix Crag’s northern coastline. A mother raptor produced three chicks from every clutch of eggs. No more, no less, and she would watch her newborns to see which chick emerged the strongest. After a few days, one would turn on its siblings, trying to push them out of the nest. The weaker chicks fought back, of course, but in the end they were defeated and fell from the nest to die.’

  ‘The mother let one of her offspring murder the others?’

  Aforgomon nodded. ‘She would coolly observe this life-or-death struggle, but she would never intervene, waiting to see which of her offspring was most worthy to fly at her side.’

  Ahriman smiled at the transparency of the daemon’s gambit.

  ‘Magnus may have given you a new body,’ said Ahriman, ‘but this attempt to sow discord is farcical.’

  ‘The minutia of mortal interactions are yet new to me,’ laughed the unapologetic daemon, the sound hideously vital for something mechanical, something the very antithesis of life. ‘It is the curse of all things to be true to their nature.’

  ‘Your lies will not work on me,’ said Ahriman.

  The daemon traced the lines cut into its mechanised body, as though contemplating what falsehood to attempt next.

  ‘You should know that my essence is a much-feared aspect of the Pantheon, what the neverborn seers call fatewoven – pure unpredictability and chaos. All ages of great change are chains of fatewoven moments, instants where the smallest decision will have enormous consequences. A thing expected to be negative will actually be positive, something assumed constant is revealed to be finite, what mortals believe to be eternal suddenly vanishes. Even you must see that this is an age of fatewoven times like no other.’

  The daemon leaned towards Ahriman, close enough for him to smell the sour reek of the magicks binding it and see the perfect patterning of the grooves cut in its ceramic body.

  ‘My essence of chaos is the bane of seers,’ said Aforgomon, ‘so the only sane response to fatewoven moments is to embrace them and allow them to mould you anew. Then, what at first may seem disastrous and perverse becomes wondrous.’

  ‘I have not the stomach for any more of your lies.’

  Though it had no face, the daemon radiated disappointment, as though Ahriman had failed to grasp some fundamental truth.

  ‘Very well,’ it said, rising from the bench. ‘But consider all the fatewoven moments in your own life and think on where and when you might have embraced them to know miracles.’

  ‘There is a flaw in your reasoning,’ said Ahriman. ‘Your talk of embracing these changes only works with the benefit of hindsight. I suspect they would not be so easy to recognise in moments of crisis.’

  ‘We shall see,’ said the daemon. ‘You think I seek to betray you? Perhaps I do, but you should know I am not the only scorpion on your back.’

  Ahriman turned from the daemon.

  ‘Get off my damn bridge,’ he said.

  Jambik Sosruko placed four delicate cups on the table, two on either side of a painted ceramic pot. Tales of heroes were rendered in hair-fine strokes of pale blue oxide around the pot’s circumference, and such was the artist’s skill that their rise and fall could be followed in endlessly repeating cycles.

  Yasu Nagasena let his eyes follow the epic scenes painted on the pot, struggling to conceal his surprise at the master of the Arethusa’s shocking appearance. The Sigillite had, of course, informed him of Magos Uexküll’s affliction, but to see what it had done to him in the flesh was something else entirely.

  The shipmaster’s body was an immobile revenant of mummified flesh, but Nagasena remembe
red him entirely differently. Four years had passed since he had last seen Uexküll, four years in which degenerating motor neurons had unravelled autonomous control of his body.

  A full-body gibbet-harness enclosed his useless limbs, and a network of electro-stimulation cables, mechanised lungs and gurgling intravenous tubes sustained his atrophied physique. A humming MIU implant replaced the entire rear half of his skull and afforded him locomotive control of the harness, but nothing close to the smooth ease he had once known. Uexküll’s face was fixed and expressionless, but his eyes, still organic after all he had endured, remained alive with fierce intelligence.

  ‘Greetings, Yasu,’ said Uexküll, his synthetic voice also a ghost of its former glory. ‘I have one rule. Do not pity me. My body is much changed, true, but I am still me. I would consider it a grave insult were you to view or treat me otherwise.’

  ‘As you wish,’ said Nagasena, turning his attention to Dio Promus – unarmoured, but entirely formidable in a bodyglove and slate-grey chiton. His flinty gaze was unwavering, but Nagasena felt no intimidation. They had crossed paths twice before, and though neither had been in any hurry for a third encounter, Malcador cared nothing for their reservations.

  Promus did not speak, his attention focused on Nagasena’s three companions.

  The first was a legionary with alabaster skin marred by childhood brand marks and a shadow of black hair. His name was Antaka Cyvaan and he had once been a Librarian of the Raven Guard. Now he wore the bare brushed steel of a knight without a Legion. The equal of Promus in scale, Cyvaan somehow managed to appear slender in comparison to the former Ultramarine.

  Nagasena’s eyes narrowed as he saw Promus would not return Cyvaan’s gaze. Promus sensed the scrutiny, and his eyes filled with ice.

  The second and third of Nagasena’s companions came as a pair, though for all they were apart they might as well be counted as a single being.

  Lady Veleda was a congenital dwarf with wrinkled, nut-brown skin and the open features of the Indoi Kush. No one knew her true age, but she claimed to have witnessed the Lightning Bearer raise the Eagle at the Declaration of Unity, and Nagasena believed her. She sat to his left, short fingers tapping an irregular tattoo on the polished surface of the table as if to music only she could hear.