Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero Read online

  'He wants to die,' Falk said, tossing the weeping, soiled governor onto the bloodied floor of a gunship. 'But he's going to live, alone and in chains in an iron cell for the rest of his life.'

  Vashti Eshkol and Tessza Rom had escaped on a battered Mechanicum tender, angry and bewildered at being forced to leave Morningstar while there were yet people to save. Niko Ashkali was secured aboard a XV Legion gunship, still recovering from her ordeal of being stranded at Zharrukin.

  Magnus' last sight of Morningstar's surface had been of a world tearing itself apart, of a city engulfed in madness and of jeering traitors standing atop the flaming bastions of his brother's fortress. This was not how I saw this ending.

  He took a breath, realising that Perturabo had spoken to him. 'What?' he said, looking into the cold, flinty eyes of his brother. 'I asked if you're absolutely sure about this?'

  'I am sure,' said Magnus. 'Throne, I wish I was not.'

  Perturabo sighed. 'And you said I had a cruel streak.'

  'This is not cruelty.'

  'Only if you're right.' 'I am.'

  Perturabo sneered. 'Always so certain.'

  'It has to be this way,' replied Magnus, placing a protective hand over the book chained at his waist. 'It is the only way to be sure no seeds of Shai-Tan's apocalyptic vision are allowed to flower elsewhere. Remember, I saw inside it. I saw how deep its hate runs.'

  Perturabo folded his arms. 'Bitter experience has taught my Legion to bear moments like this. Can you say the same of yours?'

  'You have no idea what my Legion can bear,' said Magnus.

  'Perhaps not, but this will scar them forever.'

  'Scars heal,' said Magnus.

  'But they leave a mark. Your sons will remember this.'

  'They have endured worse,' said Magnus, lost in black memory of screams and warriors begging to die. 'They will forget this as they forgot that.'

  He sensed Perturabo's puzzlement, but did not elaborate. Now was not the time for reminiscing over past sins.

  'Do it,' he said.

  Perturabo nodded to his Iron Warriors. 'Open fire.'

  The Iron Blood shuddered as every one of its weapon batteries unleashed hell. The vessels of both Legions followed suit, illuminating the void with murderous ordnance and killing fire from a thousand guns.

  Magnus forced himself to watch as the refugee fleet burned, every last ship gutted by endless broadsides of macro-cannons, lances and wave after wave of atomic torpedoes. The barrage continued for two hours until nothing remained.

  The wreckage tumbled back to Morningstar's surface as world-ending weapons of Exterminatus fell from orbit.

  'All is dust,' said Magnus.

  The Planet of the Sorcerers

  Time unknown

  'I still hear the dead of Morningstar screaming,' said Magnus, clawing a handful of ash from the crater within the Pyramid of Photep. Cold winds blew around him, spiteful zephyrs blowing in between the vast and twisted spars of the buckled structure.

  'We are the dead of Morningstar.'

  Magnus let the ash fall from his fingers and looked up.

  The power that once wore the face of Atharva beneath Morningstar was transformed. Its face changed with each blink, every breath. It was a man, a woman, old and young, every race and colour.

  'You look different,' he said.

  'This is a world where the only constant is inconstancy.'

  'I ought to have left you on Morningstar,' said Magnus, brushing the dust and glass around him.

  'Perhaps,' said Shai-Tan, looking out over the fallen beauty and shattered ruins of Tizca. 'But Magnus the Red can never resist the call of knowledge, even when he knows it should be left alone.'

  'Your pain was so deep,' said Magnus, making fists in the dust, his knuckles grating on metal. 'I felt what they did to you and I was moved to pity. I was a weak, naive fool. You damned a world as vengeance for your pain. Of all the souls to escape Morningstar's destruction, why was it yours?'

  'Because you look to save what cannot be saved, to undo what cannot be undone,' said Shai-Tan, kneeling before him. That is your weakness. What was it you said? 'When you love something with every fragment of your soul…''

  'You will sacrifice anything to save it,' finished Magnus.

  'Tell me, what would you sacrifice to cheat fate and save your sons?'

  'My life,' said Magnus without hesitation.

  'You gave that on Prospero,' said Shai-Tan. 'What else?'

  'I have nothing else to offer.'

  Shai-Tan joined him in sweeping dust and glass from the crater. 'There is a way to take yourself from the board, to remove your sons from the sight of hungry gods.'

  Magnus nodded slowly and cast his mind back to the aftermath of his abandonment of Morningstar.

  'I remember transferring from the Iron Blood to the Photep and watching the life-eater virus spread over the planet's surface. I watched toxins turn what was once a verdant world of blue and gold and green to a necrotic mass of brown and mottled purple. But even that vanished when the Photep fired a lance strike to ignite the atmosphere and begin the global firestorm.'

  'Such apocalyptic endings have become more common of late,' said Shai-Tan. 'If you hope I will mourn Morningstar's doom, you will be disappointed.'

  'I do not hope for that,' said Magnus.

  'Then do you tell of it because that was not your last sight of Morningstar?' said Shai-Tan. 'I felt your return, many years after the life-eater was dead. How could I not? You descended to the surface and excavated Zharrukin's ruins.'

  'Yes.'

  'To find the arcane machinery aboard the Shai-Tan?'

  Magnus nodded. 'Yes.'

  'So the tale is not complete?'

  'No tale is ever complete,' said Magnus. 'The time you spent in my grimoire should have taught you that. As one story ends, another unfolds.'

  'And as death follows life, so rebirth follows death,' said Shai-Tan, kneeling beside Magnus to sweep the last of the debris from the base of the crater.

  Though Magnus had known what he would see, the sight of the rusted hatch and its armourglass portal still took his breath away. Emblazoned at the centre of the hatch was a vectored arrow, encircled by a stylised circle and wreath.

  The sigil of Morningstar.

  'No,' he said, pushing himself to his feet. 'I was wrong - there is no rebirth to be had below in that place of horror.'

  'There will be,' said Shai-Tan. 'One day.'

  'I will never open that damned ship,' said Magnus.

  'No, your favoured son will open it when you cast him aside, and he has nowhere left to turn,' said Shai-Tan. 'When he will show you how wrong you have been all this time.'

  The echo of the Emperor's words sent a shiver of dark prescience through Magnus.

  He glimpsed a lightning-wreathed tower, a cabal of sorcerers…

  Betrayal and death in equal measure.

  Magnus turned and walked away as Shai-Tan called after him.

  'All will be dust, Magnus. All will be dust.'

  He did not turn back.

  About the Author

  Graham McNeill has written many Horus Heresy novels, including Vengeful Spirit and his New York Times bestsellers A Thousand Sons and the novella The Reflection Crack'd, which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham's Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now six novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written a Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus. For Warhammer, he has written the Time of Legends trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award.

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