The Crimson King Read online

  ‘Surely here we can find a way to undo our curse,’ said Ahriman, turning back to the Iron Oculus. ‘Is that not why you scour the galaxy and send us forth to retrieve these artefacts, these madmen and seers? Is that not why we gather all knowledge?’

  Magnus shook his head sadly. ‘No, my son. That is not why you gather these things.’

  ‘Then why?’ demanded Ahriman.

  ‘Watch your tone, Ahriman,’ said Amon, his hand clasping the hilt of his khopesh. Magnus raised a hand to still his equerry’s ire.

  ‘I assumed you understood,’ said Magnus as the hooded scribes resumed their work and the Hall of Amun Re echoed to the scratching of quills. ‘For the sake of knowledge itself. For wisdom’s preservation I collect the truth of all things, because what I have discovered must never be forgotten. It must be set down for the generations yet to come, for upon such knowledge does the greatness and hope for humanity’s future rest.’

  Magnus led Ahriman deeper into the maze of tables, letting his fingers brush trailing parchments. And where they travelled, words flowed in streams of enlightenment. None of the scribes looked up from their labours, for which Ahriman was suddenly and profoundly grateful.

  ‘The future?’ he said. ‘Our Legion is on the verge of extinction. Unless you help me save it, we have no future.’

  Ahriman’s frustration boiled over and he swept stacked parchments from the nearest table, scattering them to the marbled floor.

  ‘Leave the keeping of records for when Horus and the Emperor cease their war-making! Then there will be time enough for others to rebuild and relearn what might have been lost!’

  ‘You speak of others?’ said Magnus, returning the papers to the table with a snap of his fingers. ‘To whom among my brothers or the Imperium would you entrust so monumental a task? The Lion? True, he is a scholar at heart, but too wedded to his mysteries. He would pick and choose what knowledge to reveal, keeping the greatest secrets for himself. Roboute? Too hidebound to see the virtue in unrestricted freedom of knowledge. Nor would Rogal, Jaghatai or Corvus share my vision. And Vulkan is too rooted in earth and rock to lift his gaze to the stars. I might once have trusted Sanguinius, but he walks a path that leads only to blood and madness.’

  ‘You speak only of our enemies,’ said Ahriman. ‘Those who seek our destruction.’

  ‘Sadly, yes,’ said Magnus, pausing beside one of the hooded scribes. ‘Horus has aligned himself with the broken and the lost, and what appetite have such creatures for learning?’

  Ahriman said nothing, watching the scribe’s quill dart across the page, the cursive nature of the letters horribly familiar. He had devoted years of study to it in the book that hung from Magnus’ belt.

  ‘Who are they?’ he asked. ‘What are they writing?’

  ‘Shards of my remembered self,’ said Magnus. ‘Every piece of me that recalls a volume from Prospero and every missive I have read. All the things I have seen and learned that are yet within me. I must set it all down before the sun sets and all that I am is forgotten.’

  ‘No,’ said Ahriman as the scribe lifted his head. ‘I do not want to see.’

  ‘You must, for of all my sons, you need to make your peace with the reality of our plight most of all.’

  Ahriman shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Look,’ said Magnus and Ahriman obeyed.

  The scribe pulled back his hood, and Ahriman saw the face of Magnus the Red, but ravaged and gaunt as though drained of vitality. The scribe with his father’s visage stared back at him, his single eye unblinking and without comprehension. Ahriman tore his gaze from this monstrous doppelganger as every one of the scribes revealed himself to be a splintered fragment of the Crimson King’s soul.

  The sight of the primarch broken into pieces was heartbreaking, a violation of something beautiful and divine.

  ‘I need to remember it all,’ said Magnus, and now Ahriman heard the soul-sick weariness in his father’s voice, an echoing quality that grew with each breath. ‘Before the end.’

  Silence.

  To a warrior of the Athanaeans, there was no such thing. A telepath endured a cacophony of stray thoughts every moment of every day. The greatest practitioners were those able to pluck meaning from the tumult without going entirely mad.

  Here in the crystal forest was as close to silence as Sanakht had ever experienced. It was why he had raised his tower here, a gracile spire of fluted ivory and mother-of-pearl like a narwhal’s horn.

  Blue fire burned atop its cupola, sending capering shadows dancing through the glittering forest surrounding it. Slender-limbed trees of lambent glass swayed in sighing winds that made music through their branches. Giggling sparks of ignis fatuus leapt from branch to branch, mindless scraps that buzzed like insects within Sanakht’s mind.

  ‘Do you really think you can hide from me?’ called Sanakht.

  The darting sprites carried his words through the trees, but no reply was forthcoming. Not that Sanakht had expected one.

  Lucius was too wily to fall for so transparent a ruse.

  ‘Your thoughts betray you, swordsman,’ he said. ‘I can hear them roaring in your skull. How can you stand it?’

  Sanakht held his swords low at his thighs, twin blades of black and white trailing corposant as he stepped lightly between the trees. They parted before him, easing his passage as they would hinder his quarry.

  He moved in perfect balance, his awareness of his surroundings attuned to anything out of place. His focus before him was pin-sharp, his peripheral vision alert to movement where there should only be stillness.

  The swordsmen’s last duel had seen Lucius victorious, Sanakht’s power to read minds useless against such inhuman speed. Ahriman’s intervention had prevented Lucius from killing him, but left a debt of blades between them.

  Was this the time for it to be settled?

  A ripple of amusement rustled through the trees. Spiteful laughter. Lucius or some capricious sprite? Sanakht turned in a low circle, his swords slowly rising as he extended his thoughts through the forest.

  There. Ahead and to the left.

  A jagged spike of lethal intent. A mind so attuned to killing it was a blade itself. Lucius was a master of murder, but he was too egotistical, too narcissistic and too much in love with death to completely mask his towering arrogance.

  ‘There you are,’ whispered Sanakht.

  He slowed his breathing, rolling his shoulders and lifting his thoughts to the third enumeration. Some in the Legion favoured the eighth for battle, but Sanakht preferred the clarity of the lower enumerations. The world around him became sickeningly sharp, every detail achingly more real.

  The irony of that was not lost on Sanakht.

  Whisper-thin branches became lethal monofilaments, every gritty fragment a fractal of interlocking geometric planes. Every exhalation became a weather system of infinite complexity churned by breath. Motes of dust became cometary in shafts of light, leaving vortices of displaced radiance in their wake.

  ‘I’m not trying to hide from you,’ came a voice.

  Its source was ambiguous, seeming to come from every direction and none. Sanakht adopted a combat stance, still circling, still moving forwards as he scanned the trees for anything out of place. Anything that might give him a clue to Lucius’ position.

  ‘I want you to find me.’

  ‘Then show yourself,’ said Sanakht. ‘Let us finish this.’

  ‘Show myself?’ Lucius laughed. ‘I’ll do better than that. You want to look inside my mind, go ahead.’

  The horror of his thoughts slammed into Sanakht. His mind buckled at the force of it all – hot knives, tearing hooks and violated flesh. A cavalcade of perversity masquerading as passion. Grotesqueries of flayed meat and bone, toxic abominations that revelled in self-inflicted deformities. Daemonic horrors once thought of as repugnant now welcomed to s
tave off the banality of existence.

  …a woman who wore her scars on the inside…

  …broken glass cutting the meat of his face…

  …flayed things revelling in their agonies…

  …emerald-hued ghosts on a doomed alien world…

  …a raven-winged warrior with plunging swords…

  This last memory drove Sanakht to his knees with repercussive pain. His vision greyed as twin spears of white heat plunged past his collarbones and into his chest cavity.

  ‘How are you alive?’ he gasped. ‘The raven’s blades should have killed you!’ He rose through the enumerations to cast out the loathsome touch of the swordsman’s wretched mind.

  ‘That’s what I came here to find out,’ said Lucius, springing from a haze of light before Sanakht. His sword cut the air in a silver arc. A decapitating strike.

  Arrogant and ostentatious.

  Sanakht rolled and brought his swords up in a scissoring movement. He caught the descending blade and twisted. Lucius spun away to keep hold of his weapon, swaying aside from Sanakht’s return strike.

  ‘Very good,’ said Sanakht. ‘You almost had me.’

  ‘Did you like what you saw?’ said Lucius, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as they circled one another.

  ‘It was… instructional,’ said Sanakht. ‘What happened to your Legion? The things I saw…’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ said Lucius, his scarred face alive in the light of the trees.

  ‘You did that to yourself, didn’t you? The scars.’

  ‘I did,’ agreed Lucius, his sword spinning in a figure of eight. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Would you believe it was because of a woman?’

  ‘The painter?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘Did you kill her?’

  ‘You saw inside my mind – you tell me.’

  Sanakht shook his head as the bad taste of a memory that wasn’t his swam to the surface. ‘You didn’t need to – she was ready to do it to herself.’

  ‘What can I say? I have that effect on–’

  Sanakht didn’t let him finish. He launched himself at Lucius, his black-bladed sword lancing for the swordsman’s neck. Lucius sidestepped, his sword sweeping down to block the crystal blade. Sanakht spun on his heel and cracked his elbow against Lucius’ cheek.

  He reeled, and Sanakht gave him no chance to recover. Sweeping his opponent’s blade to the side, he punched Lucius full in the face with the quillons of his sword. Bone cracked.

  Lucius sprang away, spitting a mouthful of blood. He grinned and his lizard-like tongue swept over sharpened teeth.

  But Sanakht wasn’t done yet. There would be no warrior’s banter between blows. Not this time. He pressed the attack, pushing past the filth of Lucius’ uppermost thoughts to read the unconscious reflexes empowering him.

  Sanakht had underestimated Lucius the last time they had crossed blades, but he would never do so again.

  Lucius backed away, his speed and control no match for the purity of Sanakht’s preternaturally sharpened skills. Lucius was keeping the blades of dark and light from his neck, but it could not last.

  When the end came, it came quickly.

  Sanakht’s black blade sliced into Lucius’ side. A leg hooked behind his knee and the swordsman was falling backwards. He landed hard and Sanakht was on him a heartbeat later. Crouched over his chest, Sanakht pinned Lucius’ sword arm with one knee and pressed the other down on his neck.

  The powered edge of Sanakht’s sword blistered the skin of Lucius’ throat.

  ‘I told you I would defeat you.’

  ‘If you die too, does it count as a victory?’ said Lucius.

  Sanakht looked down and saw the tip of Lucius’ sword poised just below his ribs at the thinnest section of his armour. A single thrust and it would tear through his lungs and hearts before erupting from his gullet.

  ‘What say you, Sanakht, do we die together?’ asked Lucius, increasing the pressure of his blade. ‘I’ve already done it once, but it didn’t take. Will you be so fortunate?’

  Sanakht uncoiled from his crouch, his swords spinning in his grip as he sheathed them. Lucius sprang to his feet, massaging the scorched patch of skin at his neck.

  ‘One apiece, then,’ he said.

  Sanakht didn’t reply, his attention drawn heavenwards as the sky split and three gothic leviathans dropped through the clouds. Warp lightning haloed their sickled prows and empyreal fire burned on sigils etched into their armoured flanks.

  ‘The Photep,’ said Sanakht, hardly daring to believe what he was seeing could be real. ‘The Ankhtowë and Kymmeru…’

  ‘Friends of yours?’ asked Lucius.

  ‘The Photep was the Crimson King’s flagship,’ said Sanakht. ‘Despatched from Prospero on the eve of the Wolves’ attack.’

  Yet more vessels joined the three battle-barges: strike cruisers, frigates, destroyers and flocks of Stormbirds. All bearing the red-and-ivory livery of the Thousand Sons.

  ‘The lost fleets have returned,’ said Sanakht.

  Magnus and Amon watched the return of the Legion fleets from the workshop beneath the peak of the equerry’s clockwork pyramid. Dozens of vessels bearing full battle companies of Thousand Sons cut through the storm clouds on a constant bearing towards the Obsidian Tower.

  ‘I never thought to see so beautiful a sight,’ said Amon.

  ‘Nor I, my friend,’ said Magnus. ‘Nor I.’

  Amon looked askance at his primarch.

  ‘You did not send them?’ he asked.

  ‘No. This is not my doing.’

  ‘Then how can they be here?’

  Magnus did not answer and to Amon’s surprise turned from the fleets, walking back into the workshop. Amon lingered a moment longer, counting the returning warships and tallying the likely numbers they brought back to the Legion.

  Three thousand at least, perhaps even five.

  He turned from the glorious vision of a restored Legion fleet and followed Magnus. Though raised by psychic might and wrought from aether, the space within his sanctum was as real as any in the material universe. Every sense carried memory: the feel of its brass structure, the ticking behind moulded brass panels, the smell and taste of alchymical components.

  Thaumaturgical charts hung from the angled walls, alongside overfilled bookshelves, printed tables of ephemeris and charts of conflicting observations concerning the nine suns. Amon’s workbenches were heaped with broken astrolabes, equatorium and hideously complex astrarium. Deformed skeletons and knucklebones lay side by side on wooden boards carved with sigils of prognostication.

  At the centre of the chamber sat a flat, oval boulder hewn from the rock of the Reflecting Caves. A chunk of black spinel set at its heart resembled the dilated pupil of an eye.

  ‘Are the tides still ranged against you?’ said Magnus, kneeling before the icon and staring into its depths.

  ‘The Great Ocean yet favours the Pyrae, my lord,’ said Amon, unrolling measurements of celestial oceanics and currents akin to an ancient seafaring chart. ‘But our time will come again.’

  ‘Yes, I expect it will,’ agreed Magnus, standing and moving through the workshop, pausing now and then to examine the broken tools of divination. He grinned as he lifted a crystal sphere and rubbed a palm over its curves, blowing dust from its surface.

  ‘My lord?’ said Amon.

  ‘Yes?’ said Magnus, replacing the crystal ball.

  ‘Only three of the flagships you despatched have returned.’

  ‘Yes, I saw that,’ said Magnus, moving to a skeleton shaped by infernal evolution. ‘The Scion of Prospero is missing.’

  ‘Do you know where it is?’

  ‘The ghosts of Tizca say we will never s
ee it again. They say it goes to die at the world of the Sovereign Queen.’

  ‘I know of no such world.’

  ‘Nor I,’ said Magnus, discarding the skeleton and picking up a wire-frame orrery. ‘Does that surprise you?’

  ‘At any other time, it would have, yes,’ admitted Amon. ‘But now? Knowing what I know of the wound Russ smote you? No, it does not, and I fear for what that means.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘For all of us,’ said Amon, taking an aexactor’s ledger from a bookcase of black ash. ‘It is why I asked you here.’

  He swept aside a collection of cracked lenses and crystalline loupes from a workbench and opened the book. Magnus joined him and scanned the endless columned numbers and encoded script.

  ‘A Liber Prospero?’ said Magnus.

  ‘Yes, an index of all the knowledge we have been able to save from Prospero so far. And all the knowledge I believe we can save.’

  ‘Why are you showing me this?’ asked Magnus.

  ‘Because even if we save everything listed in this book, it will only be a fraction of what we once knew.’

  Amon looked up. ‘But you already know that, don’t you?’

  Magnus sighed and closed the Liber Prospero.

  ‘Of course I know.’

  Amon returned to the Icon of the Corvidae, walking a circle around it while holding one palm over the dark spinel at its centre. The image of a vast pyramid of shimmering glass, chrome and steel appeared, so real he felt he could reach out and touch it.

  ‘The Pyramid of Photep,’ said Magnus.

  Sunlight played across the glittering pyramid, its glass glowing amber in a typical Prosperine sunset. Shadows of clouds passed over its surface and Amon saw Tizca’s gold-and-marble glory reflected in the mirror facade.

  That same pyramid was now a rusting steel skeleton, a sagging, corroded ruin in the wastelands, haunted by bitter echoes and ghosts of Prospero’s death.

  Amon felt an ache of loss such as he had not felt since coming to this terrible world. Rebuilding the libraries had consumed his every thought and, until now, kept grief at bay.

  ‘I remember the pyramid’s construction,’ said Amon, and now the sounds of seabirds filled the workshop. Warm siroccos fluttered the charts on the walls. ‘You could have raised it overnight, my lord, but as Ahzek is fond of pointing out, there is virtue in the act of doing something by hand.’