Magnus the Red: Master of Prospero (The Horus Heresy Primarchs Book 3) by Graham McNeill

Author:Graham McNeill [McNeill, Graham]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2017-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

Seven

even in death • matters theosophical • a god falls

Returning to flesh was never easy.

Like a slave freed of its fetters and then forced back into servitude by a trusted friend, the spirit felt betrayal as its cage of meat and bone enfolded it once more. Its vengeance was repercussive pain, a bone-deep ache and weariness that took longer to fade the farther and freer the soul had flown.

Ahriman awoke in an acrid, chemical-rich fog.

He blinked away after-images of exploding fighter jets and reached up to run a hand over his face. His palm came away bloody.

When had he removed his helmet?

It lay beside him, scorched and torn by impacts.

Where was he?

A rush of sensory information came to him. Metal railings, the stench of blood and the acrid reek of propellant gases. Fyceline and lapping powder. He heard thousands of screaming voices and a deep, rumbling vibration that felt like the beginnings of a world-shattering earthquake.

He was propped up against the crew barrier of a mobile artillery piece, a Hydra by the looks of it, its barrels bleeding heat and drooling smoke, its breech buckled and spewing fumes both toxic and flammable.

Slumped before him was a figure he only recognised as Forrix due to the configuration of his aura. The Iron Warrior’s armour was all but gone, the ceramite plates fused with his flesh and running like wax across his body. His skin was roasted black with vapour flash and what looked like plasma burns or melta flare. His breathing was the ragged, embattled hikes of collapsing lungs.

Forrix lifted his head, and Ahriman saw one eye was a fused, milky-white of burn tissue. The other swam with incomprehension before recognition set in.

‘Ahriman...’ wheezed Forrix. ‘Apologies. I swore no harm would come to you while I watched over you.’

Ahriman pushed himself to his feet and swept his gaze around him. The Hydra was a steel island amid a sea of corpses. At least two hundred bodies surrounded it, each one clad in the red livery of Morningstar. He read the scene in an instant, knowing Forrix had killed them all in defence of him and this solitary bastion.

‘You kept me alive, my friend,’ said Ahriman, kneeling by Forrix and placing a palm on his ruined chest. The Iron Warrior flinched, his every nerve on fire. Ahriman reached deep inside himself and used his Pavoni arts to blunt Forrix’s pain. It was the least he could do to ease the man’s passage into death.

Forrix shook his head and clamped a fused fist around Ahriman’s gauntlet.

‘No,’ he said. ‘A legionary of the Fourth… never… turns from pain.’

‘Not even in death?’

‘Especially not… then,’ said Forrix, tilting his head to look into the sky. ‘Anyway, you would be… wasting… your powers.’

Ahriman looked up just as the drifting clouds of propellant parted, pushed aside by clashing gravitic waves to reveal the blasted underside of the Lux Ferem. A drizzle of torn metal fell from the mass-conveyor’s belly as it sank back to the ground.

A sick sense of inevitability settled in Ahriman’s gut.

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