“PROSPERO IS A paradise,” began Ahriman, “a wondrous planet of light and beauty. Its mountains are soaring fangs of brilliant white, its forests verdant beyond imagining and its oceans teem with life. It is a world returned to glory, but it was not always so. Long before the coming of Magnus, Prospero was all but abandoned.”

Ahriman lifted a box of cold iron from the top shelf of his bookcase and placed it on the desk before Lemuel. He opened the lid to reveal a grotesque skull of alien origin, its surface dark and glossy as though coated in lacquer. Elongated, with extended mandibles and two enormous eye-sockets behind them, it was insectoid and utterly repellent.

“What’s that?” asked Lemuel, curling his lip in revulsion.

“This is a preserved exo-skull of a psychneuein, an alien predator native to Prospero.”

“And why are you showing it to me?”

“Because without these creatures, the cults of the Thousand Sons would not exist.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ll show you,” said Ahriman, lifting the skull from the box. He held it out to Lemuel and said, “Don’t worry, it is long dead and its residual aura has long since dissipated into the Great Ocean.”

“Still, no thanks. Those mandibles look like they could tear a man’s head off.”

“They could, but that was not what made the psychneuein so dangerous. It was its reproductive cycle that was its most potent weapon. The female psychneuein is drawn to psychic emanations and has a rudimentary fusion of telepathic and telekinetic powers. When fertile, the female psychically projects a clutch of its eggs into the brain of a host being with an unprotected mind, vulnerable to the power of the aether.”

“That’s disgusting,” said Lemuel, genuinely horrified.

“That is not the worst of it.”

“It’s not?”

“Not by a long way,” said Ahriman, with amused relish. “The eggs are small, no larger than a grain of sand, but by morning the following day, they will hatch and begin to feed on the host’s brain. At first the victim feels nothing more than a mild headache, but by afternoon he will be in agony, raving and insane, as his brain is devoured from the inside out. By nightfall, he will be dead, his skull a writhing mass of plump maggots. In the space of a few hours, the grubs have picked the carcass clean and will seek a dark place to hide in which to pupate. By the following day, they will emerge as adults, ready to hunt and reproduce.”

Lemuel felt his guts roil, trying not to imagine the agony of being eaten alive by a host of parasites in his brain.

“What a horrible way to die,” he said, “but I still don’t understand how such vile creatures shaped Prospero and the Thousand Sons?”

“Patience, Lemuel,” cautioned Ahriman, sitting on the edge of the desk. “I am getting to that. You know of Tizca, the City of Light, yes?”

“It is a place I am greatly looking forward to seeing,” said Lemuel.

“You will see it soon enough,” smiled Ahriman. “Tizca is the last outpost of a civilisation wiped out thousands of years ago, a city where the survivors of a planet-wide cataclysm found refuge from the psychneuein. We suspect some freak upsurge in the Great Ocean triggered an explosion of uncontrolled psychic potential within the population, driving the psychneuein into a reproductive feeding frenzy. The civilisation of Prospero collapsed and the survivors fled to a city in the mountains.”

“Tizca,” said Lemuel, thrilled to be learning the lost history of Prospero.

“Yes,” confirmed Ahriman. “For thousands of years, the people of Tizca endured, while all they had built in the millennia since leaving Terra fell to dust. The surface of Prospero is dotted with the remains of their dead culture. Empty cities are now overgrown with forests and vines, the palaces of their kings overrun with wild beasts.”

“How did they survive?”

“They salvaged enough knowledge and equipment from the destruction to construct techno-psychic arrays and sustainable energy sources, which then allowed them to build giant hydroponic gardens deep in the caverns of the ventral mountain ranges.”

“Where you grow the fruit for delightful wines,” said Lemuel, raising his glass in a toast, “but that’s not what I meant. How did they survive the psychneuein?”

Ahriman tapped his head and said, “By developing the very powers that made them so vulnerable. The psychneuein were drawn to Tizca in their thousands, but the survivors were able to train their most gifted psykers to use their minds to erect invisible barriers of pure thought. They were primitive, bombastic powers compared to the subtle arts we employ today, but they kept the creatures at bay. And so, the practitioners of the mysteries remained locked in their limited understanding of the Great Ocean’s power until the coming of Magnus.”

Lemuel leaned in and placed his wine glass on the edge of the desk. The origin myths of the primarchs were often shrouded in allegory and hyperbole, embroidered over time with all manner of fanciful details involving tests of strength, contests of arms or similarly outlandish feats.

To hear of a primarch’s deeds on his home world from a warrior of his Legion would surely be the greatest achievement of any remembrancer, an authentic account as opposed to one embellished by people like the iterators. Lemuel’s pulse rate rose in expectation, and he felt a chill gust at his shoulder, like the breath of an invisible passer-by. He frowned as he saw a shimmer of red in the cut crystal of his wine glass, the hint of a golden eye looking back at him from the liquid.

Lemuel glanced over his shoulder, but there was no one there.

Looking back at his glass, it was simply wine. He shook off the unease the image had conjured. Ahriman was looking at him with an amused expression on his face, as though expecting him to say something.

“You were saying,” said Lemuel, when Ahriman didn’t continue, “about Magnus?”

“I was,” said Ahriman, “but it is not my story to tell.”

Confused, Lemuel sat back in his seat and asked, “Then whose story isit to tell?”

“Mine,” said Magnus, appearing at Lemuel’s shoulder, as if from thin air. “I shall tell it.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Desolation of Prospero/The Fallen Statue/Fresh Summons

IT SEEMED LIKE the grossest insult to be seated in the presence of so mighty a being, but no matter how Lemuel tried to rise, the muscles in his legs wouldn’t obey him. “My lord,” he finally managed.

The primarch wore a long, flowing robe of crimson edged with sable, secured at the waist by a wide leather belt with a jade scarab design at its centre. His curved blade was sheathed across his back, and his bright hair was pulled into a series of elaborate braids entwined like the roots of a giant tree.

Magnus filled the library with his presence, though he appeared to be no bigger than Ahriman. Lemuel blinked away a hazed outline of the primarch and stared into his single eye, its amber iris pinpricked with white magnesium. Where his other should have been was blank flesh, smooth as though it had never known an eye.

“Lemuel Gaumon,” said Magnus, and the syllables of his name flowed like honey from the primarch’s mouth, like a word of power or some hidden language of the ancients.

“That’s… that’s me,” he stammered, knowing he sounded like a simpering idiot, but not caring. “I mean, yes. Yes, my lord. It’s an honour to meet you, I never expected to, I mean…”

His words trailed off as Magnus raised a hand.

“Ahriman was telling you of how I founded the cults of Prospero?”

Lemuel found his voice and said, “He was. I would be honoured if you would take up where he left off.”

The request was audacious, but a newfound confidence filled him with sudden brio. He had the distinct impression that Magnus had not arrived here by accident, that this encounter was as stage-managed as any of Coraline Aseneca’s supposedly improvised theatre performances.