The Last Son of Prospero - Chris Wraight Read online

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Revuel Arvida, Fourth Fellowship of the Legion, my lord. Your Legion.’

  ‘My Legion are all dead.’

  ‘No, lord! No, they are not. I have seen them. And I saw you with them. I am sure of it.’ Arvida paused, confusion slowing his thoughts. ‘But then… How are you here? Where is this place?’

  The earth shook briefly, disturbed by a tremor in the veins of rock below. Something like laughter rippled around the chamber.

  ‘I do not remember you,’ the giant said. ‘Nor do I remember my name.’

  ‘You are Magnus, the Crimson King. My liege, I have suffered much to see you again.’

  The giant took that in slowly. In the flickering light of the single flame, he seemed translucent, like a shadow in winter. His great shoulders were hunched, his armour tarnished. The sigils upon his golden battleplate were all burned out, as if someone had taken a torch to them.

  ‘That was one of my names,’ the giant admitted at length. ‘It no longer fits me.’

  ‘The others are alive,’ Arvida insisted. ‘They can be found. Where are we? I have travelled through the empyrean, and I have seen the new Prospero forged in the abyss. There must be a path to it.’

  The giant made no movement. Torpor dragged on his limbs. He looked into the heart of the flame moodily.

  ‘Not for me,’ he said. ‘I ordered them all away. I left the gates open.’

  Arvida remembered that. He remembered Kalliston telling him the command to leave had been given, but it was so long ago, lost in a world that had been destroyed and remade.

  ‘Why, lord?’ he asked, curiosity burning within him despite everything. He edged closer to his gene-sire, still on his knees. ‘Why did you do it? If we had all been there, the whole Legion, then even the Wolves–’

  ‘It was just.’ The giant looked tormented, confused, as if recalling things from a dream that had already faded from memory. ‘What they did to us, it was just. They were the punishment.’

  ‘For what crime?’

  ‘Oh, there were crimes.’ The giant leaned forward, closer, keeping the flame cupped tight. ‘I tried to cure you. I reached out, and I was answered. And then I had to warn my Father…’ His lone eye suddenly lit up, and the flame flickered into greater life. ‘But that broke me. I am not what you think.’

  ‘You are the Crimson King.’

  ‘No. He is gone. All that remain are… aspects.’

  Arvida remembered something then – a warrior in gold and ivory, long ago, who had told him something similar, but it was so hard to remember, for the noises kept making the earth shake and he could hardly see and his head was full of the laughter of the things that were trying to burrow through the rock and get to him…

  ‘We are on Terra,’ said the giant, lifting his chin. ‘That is where I came, to warn my Father. The rest of me went back, but I remained.’

  ‘Then I can help you,’ said Arvida, urgently. ‘I can help to restore you. I can show you the way they went.’

  The giant smiled sadly. ‘But you are not really here. Do you not see it, Corvidae? This is your death-dream.’

  Arvida hesitated. He looked down at his hands. They looked solid enough. He could feel his hearts beating under his ribs, and could taste the loamy air of what must have been Terra’s bedrock, the catacombs beneath the Imperial Palace.

  ‘Where is your tutelary?’ the giant asked him, now wryly amused.

  ‘We are never apart,’ said Arvida, cautiously.

  ‘You are often apart. Until now you were apart for so long that you almost forgot his name.’ The giant smiled again, but this time it was crooked. ‘Such a conceit, those intelligences that whispered to us for so long. He’s close behind you now, and I can hear him getting closer. He’s pawing at the threshold. Do you see the danger?’

  Arvida shrank back. ‘He was my guide.’

  ‘Or you were his. Come, you know how the Ocean is. Who leads whom? When all this is done, will it be that he was your tutelary, or were you his?’

  Arvida began to feel cold. The clawing from under the earth was growing more intense. The soil began to tremble beneath his fingers, shifting like water.

  ‘I am not dead yet,’ he murmured.

  ‘The moment comes,’ said the giant.

  The rock began to crack. Dust fell on both of them, and the roots of the world trembled. Arvida reached out, trying to grasp on to something solid. Ianius was gone. The flame guttered out, plunging him into utter blackness.

  ‘I found you!’ he cried, knowing how much it had cost, suddenly desperate not to lose it.

  ‘You did,’ said the voice in the dark, now growing in authority despite the collapse of all around them. ‘So worry not – where you are going now, I can follow.’

  The Khan drew his tulwar, and the green light of the machines glittered on the curved edge of the blade.

  ‘Get away from him,’ he ordered.

  But Malcador looked up, out at the arcane columns that towered over the slab, at the coils and the sigil-daubed ritual plates. The runes were glowing now, racing out of control. Aether-traps blew, showering the floor of the chamber with smashed crystal.

  ‘Too late,’ the Sigillite said, an edge of awe in his cracked voice, and he started to back away. ‘He comes.’

  The Khan pushed the Sigillite aside and reached out for the medicae slab.

  He never made it. The aegis broke with a scream of torn atmosphere, hurling menials to the floor and cracking the stone flags. The chamber’s interior erupted into eye-burning light, and the machines blew apart in unison. Hassan was thrown hard into the far wall, and Malcador was bent double. The Khan barely kept his feet, leaning steeply against the hurricane of raw energy.

  Arvida’s body was swamped in a nova of numinous light-spores, his outline lost behind a howl and a shriek of warp-rage. A chorus of screaming tore out – the roars of a tortured legionary, the bellows of a far deeper pain, and something else again, all overlapped, jumbled into a fractured mess of agony.

  Malcador gained his feet, bracing his staff against the maelstrom and squinting into the inferno. ‘The shard is here,’ he breathed.

  The dazzle of aether-brilliance blew itself out, revealing the husks of destroyed medicae stations at its epicentre – a broken slab, and a lone creature, man-shaped, staggering amidst the wreckage. It burned like the sun, a white hole in the world’s fabric, writhing and shimmering, its shifting outline thundering like the planet’s winds unleashed. It was screaming still, its back arched in the pain of its reanimation, its limbs jerking, its eyes streaming with strands of curling plasma.

  The Khan strode towards it, fighting as if against a gale. ‘Sorcerer!’ he cried, holding out his empty hand. ‘Come back to us!’

  Malcador placed his staff-heel on to the chamber’s floor, setting it against the tearing winds. ‘No,’ he muttered, signalling discreetly to the cowled figures recovering their positions all across the chamber. ‘He must not fight it.’

  At the sound of those words, the creature that had been Arvida suddenly turned. Its blazing eyes locked onto the Sigillite. It seemed to swell, to grow, sucking energy towards itself until it was nigh as huge as the Khan himself. It roared in pain and fury, threw its lightning-crowned fists out wide and sent a wall of kinetic force crashing into Malcador, hurling him across the buckling chamber floor.

  The Sigillite struggled to get back to his knees, his face streaked with blood, his robes billowing. The unholy creation poured its soul out in a maelstrom of misery and anguish, stripping the runes from the metalwork, blistering the bronzed casings of the cracked warp-machines. The fires raged, and its empty eyes sprayed raw starlight, bleaching the stone as white as phosphor.

  Malcador gasped against the cold power of it, but his disappointment was tinged with fear. ‘Enough. His body cannot contai
n it.’

  At some unseen psychic command, the ruined devices roared back to life. The coils crackled with plasma, the aether-traps started rattling again. Great runes embedded on the chamber walls flared into life, and the surviving menials screamed out a broken chorus of banishment and protection. A shudder rippled through the air, and tendrils of black-edged force crackled out from iron vanes embedded in the chamber’s roof.

  Stasis enveloped the abomination, crushing it back on its heels, stripping the air from its lungs and boiling it away. Malcador rose to his full height, and his staff now swam with overlapping layers of distortion. More hammered-iron runes surged into visibility, flaming in their stone-carved channels, their occult resonance drowning the furnace at the chamber’s heart.

  The onslaught abated. The waves of shriving force lessened; the figure at their heart reeled. A rapid flurry of changes swept across its diaphanous outer shell, cavalcades of faces, one after the other. Its limbs flexed and swelled and retreated, boiling like magma. Its mouth opened in a rictus of despair, and gouts of boiling flesh-matter slipped from its churning shoulders.

  ‘It was worth the attempt,’ the Sigillite said darkly, moving towards it, preparing the death-strike that would condemn them both. ‘But it ends now.’

  The sky was alive with souls. The dark rocks reflected them in glassy facets; the air shook from their elemental anger. Lightning as thick as tree boles, neon-silver, crashed among the soulstorm, fusing them, melding them, churning the sea of sentience into the raw stuff of Chaos. The stars wheeled overhead, faster than imagination, but they were no stars ever glimpsed by mortals.

  Arvida held his blade, backing away, his heel slipping on the blood-slick rock. The spectre came after him, vast and shimmering, a glowing, fractured thing of pure psychic projection.

  ‘Why resist?’ it asked, its single eye burning with cold fire. It carried a flame-wreathed sword that cleaved the air around it. ‘You know who I am, now.’

  Arvida retreated further. On the far horizon was a dark tower, its sheer flanks riven by storms, its summit lost in the torment of the warp.

  ‘I know only what you told me,’ said Arvida, warily, trying to clear his head, trying to make sense of the torment, the whirl of energy pulsing through his veins. He felt as if he might split apart, dissipated into flying atoms, and yet his armour was still intact; his blade still hummed with a nimbus of luminous force. ‘And you are not what you were.’

  The spectre came after him, towering into the storm-racked skies, its rippling crown snagging at the pull of burning souls.

  ‘I am potential. Just as you are, my son.’

  ‘I am no one’s son,’ said Arvida, and the words sent shards of ice into his heart. ‘I spurned those who would have taken me, and I never sought those I lost. Not hard enough, at least.’ His head was thick, his veins hot. It felt like he was on fire, being consumed from within, gnawed away by ancient magicks, and yet he could still stand, he could still hold a blade, he could still defy.

  ‘You have been in pain for too long,’ the spectre said, sweeping higher, closer. ‘Let it end.’

  He remembered more. He remembered the long, long nights in shattered Tizca. He remembered the coming of the sons of Chogoris, and the dragon-helmed one who severed the dark. He remembered the long war of loss, the tarot deck that he took from its master and gave to his friend.

  And he remembered the path into hell that had taken that friend’s life, snuffing out a great and noble soul on the altar of survival. Through it all, the pain, the pain, constant and unwavering, never letting him rest, never letting him grow. His only mantra had been to keep going, to keep fighting, never to trust, never to find sanctuary.

  There had been his friend’s words. I hope you can stop running now, brother.

  Arvida felt the rocks shift under his weight. He half-turned to see a crevasse opening up at his back, wide and yawning, falling away into darkness. The storm crashed overhead. The souls screamed. The stars wheeled faster.

  He held his ground on the edge, watching doom catch up with him.

  ‘You have nowhere else to go. I told you – this is your death-dream.’ The spectre’s profile sheared, sliding, flickering.

  ‘I did not fight on Prospero,’ Arvida said, feeling the shame of it all over again. ‘I had to live long enough to reach Terra.’

  ‘You are on Terra.’

  ‘And it is not enough.’

  The spectre’s sword was lifted now, its long curved blade like the one borne by the dragon-warrior, and for a moment Arvida thought he heard the Khan’s voice amid the storm, crying out in rage just as he had done when Yesugei had sacrificed himself.

  ‘You have tried to preserve it,’ the spectre said. ‘You kept your armour, but the others who survived will leave that behind. You were the last son of Prospero, but it means nothing now. Prospero is no more, and all must change.’

  ‘Except you,’ said Arvida. ‘They wish to preserve you.’

  ‘It cannot be done.’

  ‘Then all is for naught.’

  ‘Nothing I did was for naught.’ The spectre’s blade disintegrated then, sliding out of existence like a sigh, and the ghost extended its empty hand. ‘Where is your tutelary, my son?’

  Arvida whirled around, suddenly feeling the lack again, but the black skies only screamed back at him. ‘I never asked him what he was,’ he said, bewildered. ‘We asked them so many questions, but never that.’

  He was tired now. The exhaustion of years seeped into him. The spectre came closer, reaching out for him, and the strange stars turned wildly above it.

  ‘You know the answer, though.’

  The spectre slid over him, draining his agony, excising it all in a slough of blessed annihilation.

  ‘You are Corvidae. You have always known the answer.’

  Even then, he could have resisted.

  ‘What remains, then?’ he asked, his consciousness finally slipping away, caught between the grief and the anguish of it. ‘After this, what remains?’

  ‘Rebirth,’ said the broken shard of Magnus the Red.

  The Khan leapt forwards, throwing himself at the rows of warp-machines and crystal columns, smashing them, ripping out cables and demolishing the aether-traps.

  Malcador lurched after him. ‘It failed!’ he cried, trying to restrain him even as the choristers scattered before the rampaging primarch. ‘It cannot be allowed–’

  ‘He was my ward!’ roared the Khan, shaking the Sigillite off and toppling a rune-scored column. He spun around, powered blade in hand, obliterating the rows of bubbling philtre vials. ‘He was under my countenance!’ The glowing sigils blew out into smoking lumps of metal, the lightning-vanes cracked. ‘And he will have his chance!’

  The Sigillite moved to intervene, his staff making the air ripple, only to face the Khan’s crackling tulwar.

  ‘One more step,’ the primarch warned, his voice as cold as the void, ‘and your head will crown a spike on the roads to Khum Karta.’

  Startled, Malcador pulled back, then snapped his gaze over to the reeling abomination.

  ‘Jaghatai, what have you done?’ he asked, his voice low.

  The Khan turned to look at it. Hassan, dragging himself to his feet, gazed at it. Held in check by the primarch’s promise of violence, the remaining menials cowered in fear, silent and staring.

  Freed of the suppression fields and null-wards, the agonised amalgam was moving again. The thing’s features morphed, running into one another in a fluidity of pain. Tremendous energy pulsed within it, spilling out of its mouth, its eyes, its outstretched fingers, but there was no control. It was a riot of purples, blues and other colours that had no name.

  ‘You know me, brother, sorcerer,’ the Khan said, coming closer yet, weathering the fires that spat and splintered. ‘You crossed the realm of the gods. You are not ended here.’r />
  The creature shrank back, clutching at invisible nightmares, and the fires began to gutter. The kaleidoscope of faces slowed, until there were only two left – a bloated flesh-changed horror and a one-eyed ghost, melding into one another and back again with bewildering speed.

  Malcador limped closer, a mix of foreboding and curiosity on his withered face, but made no further move to interfere.

  The creature began to change again, blotching and erupting. Its skin blackened, burning with psionic fire, sucking inwards then blowing out in smaller eruptions of blood and bone. Its screaming became truly pitiable then, a mewl of existential terror. Its shell flexed obscenely, as if trying to accommodate something too great for mortal bounds. Flesh melded, sinews knitted, bone cracked and re-formed, all forged under the white-hot burn of the undiluted empyrean.

  Slowly, though, the overspill of energy furled back, solidifying into hard knots of matter. The creature crouched low, lost in its own world of destruction and creation, sporadic flames still running down its spine.

  Jerkily, haltingly, it stood again, pulling itself to its full height, casting off the slough of suffocating warpfire, and revealed itself, at the end, to be a man.

  He was whole. He was living. He had a stocky, vigorous frame, bull-necked, with an angular jaw, taut flesh over heavy bones. The sores were gone, the lesions healed. He was naked, all his tattered robes burned away, and his body was the slab-muscled hulk of a legionary. One eye was swollen, little more than a slit amid puffed scar tissue, while the other was hale. Power crackled across his new-made skin, a play of potency that hurt to look upon. The air trembled around him, shimmering like the heat-distortion of Prospero’s old deserts.

  When he looked up, the agony had gone.

  Malcador said nothing. The last debris from the aether-traps clattered to the stone. The blood-cyclers ticked to a halt. The devotional flames wavered in their bowls.

  The Khan looked hard at the figure before him. The face was at once Arvida’s and not Arvida’s, at once Magnus’ and not Magnus’. There was no primarch there, but also no mortal man. They faced one another for the space of many heartbeats, neither moving, neither speaking.