“I shall tell you, for you are a rare man, Lemuel. You have vision to see what a great many people would run from in fear. You have promise, and I intend to see it fulfilled.”

“Thank you, my lord,” said Lemuel, though a tiny warning voice in his head wondered exactly what the primarch meant by that.

Magnus brushed past, touching Lemuel’s shoulder, and the sheer joy of the contact swept any concerns away. Magnus rounded Ahriman’s desk and lifted the gold-backed cards.

“A Visconti-Sforza deck,” said Magnus. “The Visconti di Modroneset if I am not mistaken.”

“You have a good eye, my lord,” said Ahriman, and Lemuel suppressed a snigger, wondering if this was what passed for humour among the Thousand Sons.

Ahriman’s words seemed sincere, and Magnus shuffled through the pack with even greater dexterity than had his Chief Librarian.

“This is the oldest set in existence,” said Magnus, spreading the cards on the desk.

“How can you tell?” asked Lemuel.

Magnus slipped a card from the deck and held up the six of denari. Each of the pips was a golden disc bearing either a fleur-de-lys or a robed figure carrying a long staff.

“The denari suit, which corresponds to what is now known as diamonds, bears the obverse and reverse of the golden florin struck by Magister Visconti sometime in the middle of the second millennium, though the coins he designed were only in circulation for a decade or so.”

Magnus put the card back in the deck and moved over to Ahriman’s bookcase, scanning the contents briefly before turning back to face Lemuel. He smiled, his manner genial and comradely, as though he were sharing a joke instead of a priceless morsel of remembrance.

“When I came to Prospero they said it was as though a comet had borne me to the ground, for the impact I had on them was as great,” said Magnus with an amused smile. “The Tizcan commune, which was the name the survivors of the psychneuein gave to their little enclave, was a place rooted in tradition, but they had some skill in wielding the power of the aether. Of course, they didn’t know it by that name, and the powers they had, while enough to keep the psy-predators at bay, were little more than the enchantments of idiot children.”

“But you taught them how better to use their powers?”

“Not at first,” said Magnus, lifting a golden disk inscribed with cuneiform symbols from Ahriman’s bookshelf. He looked at it for a moment before replacing it with an almost imperceptible shake of his head. As he turned away, Lemuel saw that it was a zodiacal timepiece.

“I was… young back then, and knew little of my true potential, though I had been taught by the greatest tutor of the age.”

“The Emperor?”

Magnus smiled.

“None other,” he said. “I was schooled in the ways of the commune, and I quickly learned everything they had to teach me. In truth, I had outstripped the learning of their greatest scholars within a year of my arrival. Their teachings were too dogmatic, too linear and too limiting for my mind’s potential. My intellect was superior in every way to those that taught me. With my teachings, I knew they could be so much more.”

Lemuel heard arrogance in Magnus’ voice. The primarch’s power was immense and beyond mortal understanding, but there was none of the humility he often heard when talking with Ahriman. Where Ahriman recognised his limits, Magnus clearly felt he had none.

“So how did you teach them?” asked Lemuel.

“I took a walk into the desolation of Prospero. True power comes only to those who have fully tested themselves against their greatest fears. Within the commune, I knew no fear, no hunger or want and had no drive to push my abilities to their full potential. I needed to be tested to the very limits of my powers to see if I even hadlimits. Out in the wilds, I knew I would either find the key to fully unlock my powers or die in the attempt.”

“A somewhat drastic solution, my lord.”

“Was it, Lemuel? Really? Is it not better to reach for the stars and fail than never to try?”

“Stars are giant flaming balls of gas,” said Lemuel with a smile. “They tend to burn people who get too near.”

Ahriman chuckled. “The remembrancer knows his Pseudo-Apollodorus.”

“That he does,” agreed Magnus with a satisfied smile. “But I digress. A year after my coming to Prospero, I walked from the gates of Tizca and marched into the wilderness for nearly forty days. To this day, it is known as the desolation of Prospero, but such a title is a misnomer. You will find the landscape quite beautiful, Lemuel.”

Lemuel’s heart rate spiked, remembering how Ahriman had told him he had seen a vision in which he had been standing on Prospero.

“I am sure I will, my lord,” he said.

Magnus poured a glass of wine and began his tale.

“I WALKED FOR hundreds of miles, travelling roads that passed through broken cities of iron skeletons of tall towers, empty palaces and grand amphitheatres. It was a civilisation of great worth, but it had fallen in a single day, not an uncommon fate among worlds during the madness of Old Night. I came at last to a city, a sprawling ruin at the foot of a cliff that seemed familiar, though I had never before set foot beyond the walls of Tizca. I spent a day and a night wandering its forsaken streets, the shadow-haunted buildings and empty homes that echoed with the last breaths of those who had dwelled within them. It touched me in a way I had not thought possible. These people had lived sure in the knowledge that they had nothing to fear, that they were masters of their destinies. The coming of Old Night changed all that. It had shown them how horribly vulnerable they were. In that moment, I vowed I would master the powers I had at my command, so that I would never fall prey, as they had fallen, to the vagaries of an ever-changing universe. I would face such threats and overcome them.”

Again, Lemuel felt the full force of the primarch’s confidence, as if it was suffusing his skin and invigorating his entire body.

“I climbed a slender pathway up the cliff and came to a bend in the road, where a long-dead sculptor had erected a tall statue of a great bird carved from multicoloured stone. It was a splendid creature with outstretched wings and the graceful neck of a swan. It perched precariously on the edge of the cliff. This statue had endured for thousands of years, rocking and swaying, but always keeping its balance perfectly. But no sooner had I beheld its grandeur than it toppled from its plinth and was dashed to pieces at the bottom of the cliff, far, far below. The sight of that falling statue filled me with an almost inconsolable sense of loss I could not explain. I abandoned my trek into the mountains and returned to the base of the cliff, where, needless to say, the statue lay smashed into many pieces.

“Where it had hit, the ground was covered with a carpet of shards, some small and some large, but shards and shards and more shards for as far as a man could walk in an hour. I spent the whole day just looking at the shards, measuring them and feeling the weight of them, and just pondering why the statue had chosen that moment to fall.”

Magnus paused, his eye misty and distant as he relived the memory.

“You say ‘chosen’ as though the statue had been waiting for you,” said Lemuel. “Isn’t it possible that it was a coincidence?”

“Surely Ahriman has taught you that there are no such things as coincidences.”

“I mentioned it once or twice, yes,” said Ahriman dryly.

“I spent the night there and awoke the next morning full of enthusiasm. I spent many days on this carpet of broken stone shards, and eventually I noticed a very strange thing. There were three large stones on the ground, forming a triangle that was precisely equilateral. I was amazed. Looking further, I found four white stones arranged in a perfect square. Then I saw that by disregarding two of the white stones and thinking of a pair of grey stones a metre over, it was an exact rhombus! And, if I chose this stone, and that stone, and that one, and that one and that one I had a pentagon as large as the triangle. Here a small hexagon, and there a square partially inside the hexagon, a decagon, two triangles interlocked. And then a circle, and a smaller circle within the circle, and a triangle within that which had a red stone, a grey stone and a white stone.