The Crimson King Read online

  Yet for all Tolbek’s brusqueness, Ahriman had been wondering the same thing. The reply to their hail from the Khemet had been binaric only, no vox or pict.

  A set of coordinates and a precise time.

  Ahriman had a flash of premonition and rose to his feet as a seamless panel slid open in the curvature of the ring. A curiously angled set of steps was revealed – midnight-black marble with traceries of sapphire veins. Sanakht’s jackal and hawk blades flashed from their sheaths, glittering white and black. Lucius had his sword drawn fractionally faster, and his loathsome whip coiled in the air like a serpent.

  ‘Perhaps this is them?’ said Sobek.

  Ahriman blinked away the disorientating impression that the steps within were somehow inverted as a group of figures wrought from chrome and jet emerged. Their heads were featureless ceramic ovoids with mercury-bright sigils glittering like brands at their centre. No two were alike, and Ahriman saw crude goetic echoes in their arrangement.

  Names? Perhaps drawn from the seventy-two daemons evoked by the Scribe of Baphomet?

  ‘Ah, of course,’ said Menkaura, turning to Sanakht. ‘Your Athanaean’s inability to discern the thoughts behind the vox becomes clear.’

  ‘Robots?’ said Hathor Maat, casting his gaze over the porcelain-skulled automata. ‘They sent robots?’

  Ahriman heard his sneer, an all too common reaction from the Pavoni adept since their harrowing on Prospero.

  The automata advanced on the Thousand Sons, the smoothness of their movements telling of the love and craft that had gone into their creation. Such purity of purpose brought to mind the duel between Lucius and Sanakht, the instant before the scarred swordsman launched his final blow.

  Ahriman’s seersight saw black flames within the automata.

  He shook his head. ‘These are not robots.’

  Yokai.

  Ahriman recognised the sigil as a word form belonging to a long-vanished empire of Old Earth, a mythical creature of some kind, but its deeper meaning eluded him.

  Atharva would have known. His abrasive Corvidae brother had been fascinated by the legends of the Dragon Nations. He would have told them everything there was to know of the yokai: etymological analysis of the name, folk tales and all manner of esoteric trivia. But Atharva had left the Legion decades ago to join the Crusader Host and was almost certainly incarcerated somewhere on Terra. Perhaps he was the lucky one, spared the humbling at the hands of the Wolves. The Thousand Sons wore the shame of their defeat like a shroud, and the Crimson King was yet to decree when their mourning would end.

  Or if it ever would.

  Hathor Maat had dismissed the nine yokai as robots, and the comparison was inescapable. Though crafted in imitation of perfected human anatomy, like the legendary king of the Myrmidons, their blue-steel forms were still undeniably mechanical. Slender-limbed and graceful, Ahriman saw implacable strength in their forms coupled to aetheric energies burning within each skull.

  ‘If they’re not robots, what are they?’ asked Lucius, the warp energy within the yokai invisible to him.

  ‘Perhaps something similar to the goylem of the Six Orders?’ suggested Sobek.

  ‘These are neither crude nor unshaped,’ replied Ahriman.

  ‘So much more than robots,’ said Sanakht, his silver-faced death mask helm reflecting the automata’s aetheric fire. ‘More akin to tutelaries summoned into exquisite host bodies.’

  ‘Tutelaries?’ spat Tolbek, his hand tightening on the inlaid serpent-scale grip of his sword. The light of his helm lenses flickered with immaterial flame.

  ‘What’s a tutelary?’ asked Lucius as his whip twitched in anticipation of violence.

  Amon had counselled against allowing the Phoenician’s warrior to be part of this venture. Ahriman and the primarch’s equerry seldom agreed these days, yet on this they were in accord. But watching Lucius hack his way through the crystal forest to Sanakht’s tower, Ahriman had seen how closely the hateful swordsman’s fate was bound to theirs.

  All the pieces matter.

  ‘Warp entities,’ said Menkaura. ‘Boon companions, or so we believed, called from the Great Ocean to boost our powers, aid our divinations and shed light on the mysteries.’

  ‘Let me guess, they turned on you?’

  Menkaura nodded. ‘Indeed they did. How did you know?’

  ‘You can only keep a dog on a leash so long before it remembers it’s a wolf,’ said Lucius, the fingers on his sword hand flexing. ‘Should we be worried?’

  ‘I do not believe so,’ said Ahriman, studying the invocatus formulae etched around the bright sigils. ‘These are compelled to obedience where ours were allowed to come and go as they pleased.’

  ‘Then the Torquetum’s observers show more caution then we ever did,’ said Menkaura.

  The yokai halted before the Thousand Sons, and Ahriman resisted the urge to rise into a more warlike enumeration. After Prospero, his natural inclination had turned from inquisition to suspicion. He awaited some form of communication. His armour could translate binaric quickly enough for legitimate conversation, but as he formed his words in the machine-cant of the Mechanicum, another figure emerged from the ring’s structure.

  Compact and with an economy of movement that put Sanakht to shame, she was swathed in a simple devotional robe of saffron, cinched at the waist by a black sash. Her face was open and ascetically androgynous, with a skull shaven bare save for a trio of braided scalp locks hanging down to the backs of her knees.

  One eye was cataract-blind, the other swimming with colour, as though coated with a film of petrochemicals. A practitioner of the artes – one whose power was great, yet altered by immaterial energies.

  The yokai parted and she bowed deeply.

  ‘Greetings, travellers,’ she said. ‘I am Temelucha, Mistress of the Tartaruchi.’

  Ahriman returned her bow. ‘And I am Ahzek Ahriman–’

  He almost added proud son of Magnus the Red, but settled instead for, ‘a warrior of the Crimson King.’

  Temelucha smiled, pretending not to notice his hesitation.

  ‘My order knows of you and Magnus the Red,’ she said. ‘The Great Ocean echoes to your sire’s name.’

  Wary now, Ahriman hid his surprise and said, ‘You know our purpose in coming here?’

  Temelucha bowed again and gestured to the opening through which she and the yokai had emerged.

  ‘The same reason that draws all travellers with questions to the Torquetum,’ she said, her warp-sheened eye glittering with witch-fire. ‘You seek answers from the Iron Oculus.’

  Following Temelucha and the yokai through the portal, Ahriman felt a wrenching sense of dislocation, a bilious tremor in the belly, like a starship crashing from the Great Ocean. His auto-senses shrieked with static, distorting his every sense as its systems struggled to form an image in his visor.

  A savage rush of vertigo slammed through Ahriman, and he gripped his heqa staff tightly. The need to vomit climbed his gullet, and he unsnapped the seals of his helm, tearing it from his gorget to draw in a sucking breath.

  ‘Take a moment to balance your elements and the feeling will pass,’ said Temelucha.

  Ahriman nodded, not yet trusting he could speak without sounding like a fool. His thoughts were scattered like knucklebones in a casting, and he eased his mind into the ordered thought forms of the lower enumerations before opening his eyes.

  The breath caught in his throat as he found himself at the centre of a glass platform adrift in an endlessly unfolding tesseract of crystalline stairways, rising and falling or intersecting at impossible angles, defying perspective like the mythical works of the Niderlanter Knight.

  Distant figures endlessly climbed with weary steps, but skewed angles and dazzling reflections quickly obscured them. Ahriman shook off a curious melancholy at the sight and turned to his more immediate
surroundings.

  The platform was translucent and enneagonal, with one of the yokai at each of its edges. Their placement was that of the symbol of Thothmes, a potent ward to secure those within from scrying.

  His companions surrounded him, all but Lucius similarly beset by the disorientating change in their surroundings. Sobek was on his knees, eyes wide and body taut as he struggled to remove his helmet.

  Sobek?+ said Ahriman in an urgent mind-pulse.

  His Practicus nodded and used his eye-topped staff to push himself to his feet. Sobek’s skin was pale and drawn, his flesh waxy.

  Sobek?+ repeated Ahriman. +Are you effective?+

  I am,+ confirmed Sobek, bending to retrieve his helm.

  Ahriman turned from Sobek as Sanakht’s voice whispered in his mind, hidden and subtle.

  Do you see? The inscriptions below our feet?+

  Ahriman looked down. The depths of the glass was filled with coiled golden script, rippling as though viewed through water.

  Raptures?+ he managed. +I do not recognise them.+

  Look closer,+ pressed Sanakht.

  Ahriman stretched out his will, attempting to impose a measure of solidity to the formulae swimming within the glass, but they resisted easy interpretation. He exhaled slowly and rose into the third enumeration, his clarity returning as his mind’s eye picked out arrangements he did recognise.

  Athanaean constructions?+

  Variant rapture forms of those we use to craft phantasms in the minds of enemy warriors,+ replied Sanakht with an almost imperceptible nod. +Amid such impossible surroundings, we should not take even that which appears incontrovertibly real at face value.’

  Good advice,+ replied Ahriman, lifting his gaze to the edge of the platform and seeing vast processional stairs rise up before him, each step cohering the exact instant his eyes beheld it.

  Unlike the tessellated stairs surrounding them, these climbed arrow-straight for hundreds of metres towards a magnificent structure: an ornamented temple with a many-tiered tower of multiple upturned eaves. Its silver-and-jade pillared facade was monolithic, with a black gate of lacquered wood at its centre. Stone dragons stood watch at either end of its eaves, and once again Ahriman wished he’d shared Atharva’s enthusiasms for the cultures of Old Earth.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Ahriman.

  ‘It is the Kyaung, the Silver Pavilion, wherein dwells the Iron Oculus,’ explained Temelucha. ‘It is what you came for.’

  That was truer than she knew, but Ahriman chose not to elaborate on the Crimson King’s purpose in sending them here.

  He nodded and said, ‘We are ready.’

  Ahriman climbed the stairs alongside Temelucha, looking to unmask the raptures the plaza below had wrought, but he could see nothing beyond the myriad shifting stairways and the looming temple. Great power had gone into the creation of this phantasmagoria, and Ahriman took a moment to study its presumed architect.

  Temelucha’s skin was sunless, her curious eye a sign of great control over her abilities. To have endured so obvious a mutation and its attendant consequences while retaining her humanity spoke volumes as to her strength of will.

  Ahriman’s warriors climbed behind him in echelon: Sobek, Hathor Maat and Sanakht to his left, Menkaura, Tolbek and Lucius to his right. The yokai flanked them, the warp entities bound to their mechanised bodies guttering like banked furnaces. Despite the tutelaries’ betrayal, a shocking reversal that had gutted the Thousand Sons’ defence of Prospero, Ahriman still missed Aaetpio’s soothing presence.

  ‘Might I ask a question?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Temelucha, ‘but the Iron Oculus has the answers you seek. I fear I will be a poor substitute.’

  ‘A modest answer,’ said Ahriman with a short bow, ‘but one I am disinclined to accept.’

  Temelucha smiled. ‘Ask and I will endeavour to answer.’

  ‘You said you were the Mistress of the Tartaruchi,’ said Ahriman, gesturing to the temple above. ‘The name implies a role of guardianship.’

  ‘You have read the Akhmim Gospels of Esdras, Master Ahzek,’ said Temelucha.

  ‘The Syriac translation, many years ago,’ replied Ahriman, understanding Temelucha was merely stating a fact, not asking a question. ‘That copy has, sadly, been lost.’

  ‘When the wolves brought the fire?’

  Ahriman nodded.

  Prospero’s fall was a raw wound to his heart, but the pain came not from its doom, rather the horror of what had been lost in the ashes. An incalculable repository of hard-won knowledge and earned experience burned like the priceless texts of Persepolis; millennia of accumulated wisdom torn from existence in a wilful act of intellectual vandalism.

  ‘Prospero’s death was a loss to all mankind, not just the Thousand Sons,’ said Ahriman, and the pain of such woeful understatement almost broke his heart anew.

  ‘The Iron Oculus tells us that knowledge is never lost,’ said Temelucha without breaking stride. ‘It can fade like forgotten tales that sink into the mire of memory, remembered only by lonely spinners of verse, until it is needed and rises once more into dreams.’

  ‘Poetic, but you did not answer my question.’

  ‘You did not ask a question,’ pointed out Temelucha.

  ‘Very well,’ said Ahriman. ‘Is the Iron Oculus your prisoner?’

  Temelucha smiled and said, ‘The writings of Esdras claim the Tartaruchi were once angels, and that their vengeful god set them before the gates of an infernal prison to guard against the return of a great devil.’

  She gave Ahriman the look of a scholar jaded by too many garlanded histories to be impressed by such ancient hyperbole.

  ‘Once again, you evade answering.’

  Irritation, quickly masked, shadowed Temelucha’s face. Clearly she was unused to her words being so carefully scrutinised, but had likely never met warrior-scholars of the Thousand Sons.

  ‘The Iron Oculus is shackled to the Torquetum, yes, but through no design of ours.’

  ‘So someone imprisoned it?’

  ‘Perhaps, but the Iron Oculus never speaks of itself.’

  ‘And you do not ask?’

  ‘What would be the benefit?’

  ‘Knowledge,’ said Ahriman. ‘The rendering of things unknown into fact. To trust the words of so powerful a captive without knowing why it was imprisoned seems somewhat incautious.’

  ‘We have faith in our purpose,’ replied Temelucha.

  ‘Faith?’ said Ahriman, unable to keep the venom that had been building within him since Prospero’s death from his voice. ‘All faith teaches is the virtue of not questioning, of blindly accepting dogma and holding things as sacred merely because they were deemed so in an earlier age by less enlightened souls.’

  ‘Then why are you here if not in faith that your questions will be answered?’

  ‘It is not faith that brings me here.’

  ‘Then what does?’

  ‘The will of the Crimson King,’ said Ahriman as they reached the top of the stairs and the majesty of the Silver Pavilion.

  A plaza of frost-rimed cobbles spread before the temple, and snow fell in flurries of glittering dust. Flakes landed on Ahriman’s armour, glistening for a fleeting moment before melting like teardrops.

  More of the Tartaruchi awaited them, eight adepts clad in loose-fitting robes of deepest blue and each bearing a unique symbol stitched over their heart. Their arms were bare and heavily tattooed, a mix of fractal spirals, number sequences and recursive labyrinths.

  Like Temelucha, their eyes were warp-touched – one blinded, the other all-seeing. The symbolism was not lost on Ahriman. He wondered if the Tartaruchi were aware of the Prosperine significance of their mutation. A second thought came on the heel of the first.

  Had Magnus the Red been here before?

  Arrayed to left
and right, like regiments on a parade ground, hundreds of yokai stood in ordered ranks, motionless but for the aetheric flames within them. Temelucha marched between the mechanised host bodies as the other members of her order joined her.

  No introductions were offered, nor did Ahriman seek any.

  The lacquered black gate swung open at Temelucha’s approach, and a pillared hall of porphyry and jade was revealed. Cold light and reflections danced within.

  Ahriman followed the Mistress of the Tartaruchi inside, seeing that the entire space of the Silver Pavilion was given over to a multitude of crystal-fronted cabinets, arrayed like trophies in a museum of conquest. The Thousand Sons spread out, examining the displays with scholarly interest. Some cabinets contained elaborately wrought weapons, others artefacts of non-human origin, but most contained freakish skeletal remains.

  Ahriman threaded a path between the exhibits, marvelling at the incredible diversity, intuitively knowing this was but a fraction of what the structure contained.

  His steps carried him deeper inside, his gaze flitting between the ever more varied items on display: a gleaming endoskeleton surmounted by a silver death’s head helm with lambent green eyes and a geometric rune at its forehead; a series of arthropodal creatures with biomechanical stilt-legs; captured nebulae of glittering vapour-light held in jewelled vacuum flasks. The deeper he penetrated, the more obvious it became that the internal dimensions of the temple were subtly wrong.

  Like Ceryiadha’s gardens of rock and bleached gravel, laid out according to the Sakuteiki’s exacting specifications, aspects of the museum’s contents were revealed or obscured relative to the viewer’s perspective. What was visible from one vantage point was hidden from another, and entirely new exhibits were revealed.

  Perhaps the entirety of the Silver Pavilion was on display; he just had to be positioned correctly within its multi-dimensional space to see it.

  Ahriman paused beside a cabinet in which an exquisite suit of bone-white armour was encased. The fluid grace of its artifice spoke of eldar craft, and Ahriman sensed ageless, silent fury chained within. The helm was crafted as a howling spectre, with a blood-red plume coiled on a shoulder guard like a serpent poised to strike.