Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero

  Ahriman knew Forrix was correct, yet he could not help but rail against the notion of an individual's survival being a matter of unfeeling calculations. The members of the nascent Order of Ruin within the Thousand Sons were also fascinated with numbers, but their interest leaned more towards cosmological significance.

  This was different.

  This was the end result of a cold, logical, brute-force arithmetic of death.

  'But you could speed this process, couldn't you?' said Forrix, and Ahriman needed no psychic powers to know what the Iron Warrior was going to say next. 'Your Legion's… abilities. You could employ them to look into these peoples' minds and identify those with hostile intent.'

  Ahriman shook his head. 'You have no idea of the complexity of what you are suggesting.'

  'I've seen you do it already, right before that madman's host attacked the crowds on the Boulevard of Firmaments.'

  'That was different.'

  'How so?'

  'He was one mind among many, his emotions monstrously heightened, and his thoughts like a beacon on a clear night.'

  'Are you saying you cannot do it?'

  'No, only that such a feat is not as easy as you imagine.'

  'But you can do it?'

  'Yes.'

  'Show me,' said Forrix, nodding towards the refugees.

  Ahriman saw he wasn't going to escape without a demonstration of his powers, as if they were some kind of parlour trick instead of the result of years of study and training.

  'Very well,' he said, easing his mind into the Enumerations.

  He had not been entirely honest with Forrix. What he was attempting was simple enough, but the Thousand Sons were yet to reveal the full extent of what they could do. Fear of the unknown was an all too human characteristic, even among the Legions, and Magnus had yet to decide how and when such a revelation would be made.

  Ahriman slowed his breathing and allowed the confused, tangled morass of mortal thoughts to wash over him. A yammering tide of internal monologues broke like a surge tide against his mental defences. It was easy enough to withstand - mortal thoughts were like the yapping of an irritating animal, full of basic wants and needs, and devoid of the clarity that only Prospero's teachings could instill.

  Forrix's mind stood out like an inviolable rock in a tempestuous ocean, untouched and impermeable. Ahriman resisted the temptation to brush the Iron Warrior's mind, already knowing what he would see: hard-edged purpose and certainty, unbending devotion to duty and a slavish obedience to his primarch.

  Blessed is the mind too small for doubt, thought Ahriman.

  The sentiment was unworthy of him. Forrix was a warrior of great honour and courage, a legionary whom he would be proud to have at his side when the fires of the last great battle were closing in.

  And, more than that, Ahriman suspected he and Forrix were becoming friends, which had surprised him, until he thought of Magnus and Perturabo's friendship.

  Were they subconsciously emulating their gene-sires? Did a primarch's behaviour have so profound an impact on his sons that they unwittingly aped it? Taking that thought to its furthest logical extreme offered some intriguing prospects for moral debate.

  If a primarch was to exhibit morally questionable behaviour, would some of his sons blindly follow him? Would all of them?

  Would Ahriman?

  As if that thought were a key to some infernal lock of the future, Ahriman's neck snapped back and he looked to the sky in horror as his Corvidae senses flared. An agonising veil of red fell over his sight, a bloody eclipse of things yet to be.

  Flames burned from here to the horizon.

  A world ablaze.

  Figures writhed in the firelight. Legionaries in the livery of the Iron Warriors, impossibly alive and in endless torment. He saw Forrix, his skin blackened and flesh running like wax as a torrent of impacts tore him apart.

  Screaming in an agony that would never end.

  The vast, cyclopean bulk of something impossible to comprehend loomed over its burning empire, the sound of its laughter screeching, cruel and inhuman. Metal glinted in the sky from a thousand falling blades. Liquid fire rained down in a deluge and mountains ran molten beneath it.

  The world tilted as if at some immense impact.

  A hammer of the gods slamming down.

  The impact threw Ahriman from his vision and he cried out as a hideous sensation of vertigo blurred his vision. He felt himself falling until Forrix caught him and lowered him to his knees. The Iron Warrior's aura blazed with readiness to fight.

  'What did you see?' demanded Forrix. 'Is there an imminent threat?'

  Ahriman tried to answer, but the horror of the destruction he had witnessed rendered him mute. It made him want to weep, to tear his hair and curse the stupidity of man.

  'I saw you die. I saw this place destroyed,' he said, steadying himself with a palm flat on the ground.

  'Destroyed? How?'

  'I do not know,' said Ahriman, fighting to slow his racing heartbeat. 'But it was no vision of natural catastrophe - it was an engineered doom.'

  'Engineered? You mean an attack?'

  Ahriman nodded, blinking as he looked up and the world-consuming fires of his aether vision faded. The natural streetscape and the slow-moving columns of refugees swam back into focus.

  'What I saw… It was an apocalypse of man's own devising.'

  'When will this apocalypse happen?'

  'Soon.'

  'Soon? When exactly?' demanded Forrix, his Legion's hatred of ambiguity shining through in his bellicose aura.

  'I cannot say exactly!' snapped Ahriman.

  He heard the click of Forrix opening the vox to his fellow legionaries and reached up to grip the Iron Warrior's arm.

  'Wait… The men who brought the fire…' he said. 'I sensed their minds. They were not filled with hate, not at all…'

  'Then what? Madness?'

  Ahriman felt the frightened stares of curious onlookers and sensed their unease at the sight of a fallen legionary.

  Which of them would it be?

  'Of a sort,' he said, rising unsteadily to his feet, mentally reciting the Mandalic Catechism to centre himself.

  'What do you mean?' asked Forrix.

  'It was love,' said Ahriman. 'It was rapture.'

  * * *

  The lascannon blast struck Magnus just below his heart.

  His surprise was total. He had no time to raise a kine shield. Pain ripped through him.

  The beam burned with the heat of a sun. A stinking mist of instantly vaporised blood and tissue enveloped him. He inhaled a draught of red mist, an aerosolised breath of his own body.

  Magnus had never been hurt before. Not truly.

  He had allowed himself to suffer cuts and bruises when it suited his purposes to allow his sons to see him bleed alongside them, but nothing like this. He had even suffered more severe wounds to better understand the experience, but that had been entirely controlled.

  Only as the superheated beam destroyed his flesh did he fully appreciate how cowardly that had been.

  He dropped Konrad Vargha as the supplicants surrounding him scattered in screaming panic. High-calibre shells from sponson-mounted assault weapons raked them, cutting down a score of people almost immediately and wounding dozens more.

  The Red Dragons were slaughtering their own people.

  Anger gave Magnus focus and he drew a kine shield about him as easily as a mortal man might pull a cloak tighter in a cold wind.

  The second lascannon shot bent around him like light through water. He ripped the weapon from its sponson mount with a flick of thought. Fire erupted from the Baneblade's flank as arcing lightning flared from ruptured power lines.

  Magnus felt the elation of the mind at the gunner's position behind the super-heavy tank's prow-mounted cannon. His arm pistoned out as its shortened barrel blazed with fire and smoke.

  The siege shell was moving at fifteen hundred metres per second, but Magnus swept his arm to the sid
e and the shell slammed into the foundry wall behind him.

  It detonated in a devastating blast, and the already weakened walls of the ruined structure came down in a roaring cascade of debris. Magnus heard screams as people taking shelter from the rogue vehicles were crushed by falling masonry. He threw kine shields over as many as he could, but it wasn't enough to save them all.

  The ground heaved as an aftershock rumbled far below the surface, toppling what few structures were left standing. Magnus took that power and drew it into himself, grunting as the world's pain suffused his flesh. He thrust his hand forwards and an up-armoured Rhino crumpled as though in the grip of an invisible Titan. Metal shrieked and spat fire as the vehicle's entire mass was compacted down to a perfect sphere no more than a metre in diameter.

  Magnus clenched his fist and swung his arm to the side, slamming the unimaginably dense mass of metal like a wrecking ball. He smashed another Rhino flat before hammering the wreckage into a pair of Chimeras. The vehicles hurtled through the air, vanishing over the cliffs of the sea docks.

  More las-bolts and solid slugs raked him. Most skidded away from his psi-shield, but others clipped his armour, grazed his flesh or - in one case - exploded against his ribs.

  Magnus fell to one knee, his protection dissolving into scraps of hard air. Another shot took him high on the shoulder, spinning him around and almost knocking him onto his back. Iridescent blood sheeted his armour, the metal reshaping itself around the wound.

  The Executioner swerved around the wrecks of its fellows, looking to flank him. Its turret cannon swung around as its hull weapons fired into the sheltering civilians.

  The Baneblade came straight at him.

  It ground over the smashed remains of a headless statue, crushing the likeness of an Imperial grandee to powder beneath its titanic weight. The turret-mounted battle cannon lowered and Magnus sensed the crew within - the driver alight with manic glee, the commander exhilarated at the prospect of slaying so mighty a foe, its gunners vying for the chance to take the kill-shot. Their auras blazed with the passions common to all mortals in the crucible of combat.

  Magnus rammed his power into their skulls, tearing at the myriad webs of synaptic connections within. They screamed in his mind as he twisted their thoughts like a team of riggers hauling on a mainsail, making them his puppets.

  The Baneblade swung about and slammed into the flanking Executioner, crumpling its red-painted hull and driving it up onto one track. The tank tipped over and the Baneblade punched it forwards twenty metres until finally driving it hard against a wall of debris. The super-heavy tank's tracks ripped up rock and dust as the driver gunned the engines. Reeking smoke belched from its protesting drive unit.

  Magnus sent a pulse of thought to the Baneblade's gunners and both tanks vanished in a series of percussive fireballs as they fired every weapon system. The Executioner was obliterated instantly, and the force of the point-blank blasts ripped open the Baneblade's glacis. It rolled back from the carnage, its front armour peeled open and thick black smoke belching from within.

  Screaming bodies tumbled from the flames.

  Magnus let them burn.

  He saw the outline of the last tank through the smoke and fire of the Baneblade's death. He expected it to retreat, to flee the destruction, but instead it roared towards him, spraying mass-reactive rounds from its cupola mount. Magnus turned them to wisps of perfumed air and lifted the tank from the ground with an outstretched hand.

  The tracks spun and the fusillade of gunfire continued. Magnus stood immobile before a wall of burning tanks, surrounded by the dead and the dying. The insanity of the last moments filled his mind with a fury like nothing he had ever known.

  He pulled the tank apart: every rivet unmoored, every screw unthreaded, every welded seam undone Nothing was destroyed or damaged, and with enough time and patience, a Techmarine could have rebuilt the tank.

  At the heart of the disassembled vehicle the tank's crewmen drifted like a pair of spacefarers adrift in zero gravity. The gunner reached for his sidearm. Magnus increased his core temperature by a thousand degrees between heartbeats. The man exploded in a flash of superheated, blood-rich vapour.

  He pulled the driver of the vehicle towards him, bolls and washers spinning away as his flailing arms tried to resist the inexorable force reeling him in. He held the man before him in the air and ripped his helmet off with a thought. The face before him was ordinary, but what had he expected to see? The face of a monster? Someone who could be seen to be evil for what he had done?

  No, this was simply a man. His skin had the pallid, oily sheen common to tankers, but Magnus saw none of the awe and dread common to mortals when they first laid eyes on him. Even Roboutc and Rogal, primarchs of a comprehensible nature to mortal sensibilities, still elicited wonder.

  'Finish me!' he screamed. 'I must die!'

  'You will die,' promised Magnus. 'But first you are going to tell me why you were trying to kill the planetary governor.'

  The man laughed, his system thick with intoxicants, his mind afire with burning certainty. 'The Great Dying is upon us,' he said, the words pouring out of him in a rush. 'The end of days is to be welcomed, not feared! You and your devil warriors are keeping us from the rapture we were promised when the Night of Nights fell upon the galaxy. The chosen people were lifted up, but our world endured. We were kept from our rightful place at the side of the Stormlord. We have kept to the faith and this is our time, as was foretold in the Book of Leviathan. We will die in the fire as Morningstar falls and we will be reborn. So it was written, so shall it be Hail Shaitan!'

  Now Magnus understood the man's lack of awe. This was not confessional; it was the preaching of a zealot. His sense of wonder was already invested in a power beyond the reach of measure or accountability, an invented power that could never be called into question because It could never be seen or touched.

  Blind faith was his armour against any doubt.

  'I came here to save you people,' said Magnus.

  'We do not need saving,' spat the man. 'We do not want saving You are a devil, one of the fallen angels, and the Stormlord's retribution will be mighty when His fire turns on you and your faithless sons.'

  'I almost feel sorry for you,' said Magnus. 'You have been fed banal lies and told it was golden truth.'

  'No, for I have seen the truth. When death takes me I will be numbered among the blessed.'

  'You think death will be your salvation?'

  'I know it will be.'

  'Then I am doing you a favour,' said Magnus, and snapped the man's neck.

  He dropped the corpse and let the suspended parts of the Rhino fall the ground. They clattered to the ruins in a rain of glittering metal as the few survivors of the treacherous attack emerged in ones and twos from the flaming rubble.

  Magnus ignored them, too focused on trying to restore his aetheric balance The power of the world he had taken into his body was still there, its vast and awesome potential like pressure building behind a cracking dam. With such power he could achieve almost anything and the temptation to wield it was almost too great to resist, for what craven heart could feel and see infinity then turn from it?

  He took in a furnace-hot breath, letting the pain, anger, frustration and the savage pleasure he had taken in the act of murder settle within his flesh. This borrowed power would likely destroy him without the proper ritual cleansing to allow it to dissipate back into the warp.

  No, the repercussions of this day would not easily fade.

  The survivors of Attar flowed around Magnus like water around a rock. They bent to retrieve Konrad Vargha and bore him between them like a fallen martyr. The man groaned in his unconsciousness, kept from agony by Magnus' Pavoni arts.

  Magnus exhaled slowly, letting his senses spread over the city once more He felt the presences of his legionaries, already working their way back to the Stormbirds with as many other survivors as they could rescue.

  +My lord?+ Phosis T'kar sensed h
is master's damaged presence and was instantly aware that something singular and profound had occurred. +Are you… hurt?+

  +Not in any way that matters. Ready the gunships. We are leaving this city.+

  +Do you have the planetary governor?+

  +I do,+ said Magnus.

  +Is he alive?+

  +He is,+ said Magnus. +Fix on my location. I have other survivors.+

  +Yes, my lord. On our way.+

  Magnus felt Phosis T'kar's confusion. The warrior had been told that his primarch was all but a god, immortal and undying, a wise and noble exemplar of all that was good in humanity.

  Now he knew different.

  So, too, did Magnus.

  'Do we open it?' asked Hathor Maat.

  It seemed like a foolish question, but Atharva had no readily available answer. Of course, he wanted to open it, but should he? In time, the hatch would undoubtedly be opened, but the more pertinent question was: should they open it now?

  'We should wait,' he said at last. 'Bring in specialised cutting equipment. Stasis capsules, hermetic vault-chests and pressure suits. We can have no contamination of the site.'

  He sensed Hathor Maat's impatience and looked back up the shaft. Niko Ashkali's head and shoulders were silhouetted in a square of light high above. The magna-storm and seismic activity had made the stairs bolted to the walls of the shaft too dangerous to use, so, much to her chagrin, she was forced to watch the Thousand Sons drop down until the safety of what lay below could be established.

  'Wait?' said Hathor Maat. 'In case you hadn't noticed, this planet is on a countdown to extinction.'

  'I know that, but if we are reckless we risk losing everything this ship may teach us of Morningstar's past.'

  'And if we hesitate, we could lose it anyway. It's calm just now, but who knows how long that will last? Come on, Atharva, we have to open it!'

  'Do not pretend your desire to open this is in service of future posterity,' said Atharva. 'You just want to be the first to uncover what lies within.'