Magnus bowed to the cardinal points of the amphitheatre.

“Thank you for your attention,” he said. “That is all I have to say.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Heresy/The Librarians/Judgement

MAGNUS POURED HIMSELF some water, smiling as he paced the reception room beneath the amphitheatre. The Sekhmet stood to attention, each one sensing that this trial would soon be over. Ahriman’s head still ached and the pressure on his thoughts was making him uneasy, as though it would prove too much for his skull to contain.

With the end of Magnus’ performance, Malcador had called a recess to the proceedings. What had begun in betrayal and infamy had come to triumph, for few could fail to be moved by Magnus’ great oration.

“I will admit to some trepidation when the day’s events became clear to me,” said Magnus, handing a goblet of water to Ahriman. “But I feel confident I have swayed the doubters to our side. Mortarion is too fixed in stone ever to change, but Sanguinius and Fulgrim stand with us. That will count for a great deal.”

“It will, but many others are concealed behind their falsehoods. The masses are behind us, but the judgement could still go against us. I do not understand why we are even here, it is insulting!” spat Ahriman, throwing down his goblet.

“You need to calm yourself, Ahzek,” said Magnus. “There was no choice but to call this conclave. The fearful need reassurance that their voices are being heard. You saw that the Emperor did not want this. Believe me, I feel your anger, but you must keep it in check. It will not serve us here.”

“I know, but it galls me that our fate rests in the hands of such blinkered fools!”

“Be careful,” warned Magnus, moving to stand before him. “You will mind your words. You are as dear to me as any son, but I will not stand to hear insults upon my father’s wisdom. Give in to such impulses and you will only confirm everything they say about us.”

“I apologise, my lord,” said Ahriman, trying to will himself into the lower Enumerations, but the calm of the spheres eluded him. “I mean no disrespect, but it is hard to imagine that others cannot see what we see, and almost impossible to remember what it was like not to know the things we know.”

“The curse of assumed knowledge is a challenge all enlightened individuals face,” said Magnus, softening his tone. “We must remember that we once walked in their shoes and were blind to the truths of the universe. Even I knew nothing of the Great Ocean until my father revealed its glory to me.”

“No,” whispered Ahriman with sudden, instinctive clarity. “You already knew of it. When the Emperor showed you its wonders and dangers you feigned not to know, but you had already peered into its depths and seen them.”

Magnus was at his side in an instant, towering over him with his flesh and eye a seething crimson. Ahriman felt the searing heat of Magnus’ presence, realising that he had crossed a line without knowing it even existed. In that moment, he knew he understood very little about his primarch, and wished that every scrap of knowledge that had passed between them earlier could be washed away.

“Never say that again, ever,” said Magnus, his eye boring into him like a diamond drill.

Ahriman nodded, but behind Magnus’ anger was something else, a wordless fear of buried secrets returning to the light. Ahriman couldn’t see it, but he saw an image of the silver oakleaf cluster he wore on his shoulder-guard.

“Ohrmuzd? Throne, what did you do?” asked Ahriman, as a memory that did not belong to him threatened to surface in his mind. He saw a dreadful bargain, a pact sealed with something older and more monstrous than anything Ahriman could ever imagine.

“I did what I had to,” snapped Magnus, forestalling any further words. “That is all you need to know. Trust me, Ahzek, what was done was done for the right reasons.”

Ahriman wanted to believe that, he neededto believe it, but there was no disguising the vanity and obsession that lay behind the secret bargain. He sought to pierce the shrouds and veils of self-justification and perceive the dark secret that lay beyond, but Magnus plucked the stolen memory from his mind.

“What was it?” demanded Ahriman. “Tell me. What are you hiding from us?”

“Nothing you need know about,” said Magnus, flushed and on the verge of… On the verge of what? Anger? Guilt?

“You have no idea,” he continued. “You can’t know what it was like. The degradation of the gene-seed was too extreme and the corruption in the damaged helices was too complex and mutating too quickly to stabilise. It was… It was…”

“It was what?” asked Ahriman when Magnus didn’t continue.

“The future,” whispered Magnus, his complexion ashen. “I see it. It’s here. It’s…”

Magnus never finished his sentence.

Like the mightiest tree in the forest felled by a single blow, the Primarch of the Thousand Sons dropped to his knees.

As Magnus fell, Ahriman saw a storm of amber fire raging in his eye.

L IGHT FILLED HISvision, fireflies that burst briefly to life and then vanished.

Magnus opened his eyes to see sparks flying as stone chipped stone, and primitive smithing tools shaped a blade of napped flint. He saw the sword take shape, the workmanship little better than that of the pre-Neanderthal civilisations of Old Earth. Yet this was no human artifice, and this craftsmanship was sophisticated and undoubtedly alien. The proportions of the blade and grip were subtly wrong, the hands that fashioned them blue black and downy with a fine comb of russet hair.

Nor was this a normal blade, it was sentient. The word didn’t fit, but it was the most appropriate one Magnus could find. It was forged by alien metallurgists in ways too inhuman to be understood, imbued with the power of the fates.

It was a nemesis weapon, crafted to slay without mercy.

Magnus recoiled from the blade, horrified that an intelligent race would dare craft such a dreadful tool of destruction. What reason could there be to bring such a vile thing into being?

Was this the future or the past? It was impossible to tell with any certainty. Here in the Great Ocean (for where else could he be?) time was a meaningless framework that gave mortal lives a veneer of meaning. This was a realm of immortals, for nothing could ever really live or die here.

Energy was eternal, and as one form ended, another rose in a never-ending cycle of change.

No sooner had he considered the question of past and future than the image splintered into a million shards, spinning in the darkness like a microscopically magnified view of an exploding diamond.

Magnus had ventured deeper into the Great Ocean than anyone other than the Emperor, and he had no fear of his surroundings, only an insatiable desire to know the truth of what he was seeing. Spiteful laughter, like that of a hidden observer, wove around him with the ethereal echoes of a long-departed jester. From its resonances, a chamber resolved out of the darkness, a fire-blackened place of reeking evil and blood.

Arterial spray looped over the walls, and patterns of acrid quicklime on the floor stung his nostrils. Figures moved in the darkness, ghostly and too faint to make out. Magnus reached out to a figure garbed in armour the colour of quarried stone, but the vision faded before he could see more than the tattoos covering the warrior’s scalp.

His odyssey continued, and Magnus allowed himself to be borne upon the rolling tides of the Great Ocean. Briefly, he wondered what had become of his corporeal body, for he knew he had not deliberately loosed his body of light from his flesh. That this had come upon him without warning was unusual, but fear would only make any phantom hazards more tangible.