The Emperor looked upon him – His son, His creation – with eyes that had seen countless suns and civilisations die.
‘Magnus,’ He said.
‘Father,’ breathed the avatar of burning misery in reply.
Part One
Magnus’ Folly
One
The first murder / Thirst / Hunger
Two men cry out in a forgotten age. The roar of the slayer harmonises with the scream of the slain. In this earliest epoch, when humankind still fears spirits of fire and prays to false gods for the sun to rise, the murder of a brother is the darkest of deeds.
Blood marks the man’s face, just as it marks the spear in his clenched fists and the rocks beneath his brother’s body. The wound gouts and sprays – the man tastes the red wine of his brother’s veins, feeling the blood’s heat where it lands on his bearded skin, tasting of metals yet undiscovered and seas yet unseen. As the hot salt of spilt life burns his tongue, the man knows with impossible clarity:
He is the first.
Mankind – in all its myriad forms on the thousandfold path from wretched lizard-thing to warm-blooded mammal – has always fought to survive. Even as hunched ape-creatures and brutish proto-men, it waged insignificant and miserable wars upon itself with fists and teeth and rocks.
Yet this man is the first. Not the first to hate, nor even the first to kill. He is the first to take life in cold blood. He is the first to murder.
His dying brother’s thrashing hand reaches for him, raking dirty nails across his sweating skin. Seeking mercy or vengeance? The man doesn’t know, and in his rage he doesn’t care. He drives the wooden spear deeper into the yielding hardness of meat and against the scrape of bone. Still he screams, still he roars.
The scream of the first murderer cuts through the veil, echoing across reality and unreality alike.
To the things that wait in the warp, mankind will never sing a sweeter song.
Behind the veil, the scream takes a carnival of forms, riotous and infinite in variety. The frail laws of physics that so coldly govern the material universe have no power – here, those binding codes fracture into their separate fictions. Here, time itself goes to die.
On and on it plunges, crashing and dissolving and reforming in the endless storm. It ruptures a cloud-burst of other screams that haven’t yet been cried aloud. It punctures the fire-flesh of shrieking ghosts, adding to the torment of those lost and forsaken souls. It knifes through a disease that was rendered extinct by man-made cures twenty-six thousand years before.
And on. And on. And on. Clashing with moments that haven’t yet happened, that won’t happen for half an eternity. Grinding against events that took place back when the earliest Terran creatures exhaled water and – for the very first time – raked in lungfuls of air.
Behind the veil, there is no when and then. Everything is now. Always and eternally now, in the shifting tides of an infinite malignance.
Lights shine in that malignant black: the lights of sentience that draw the darkness closer. The same lights flare and shriek and dissolve at the merest touch from the forces around them. Dreams and memories take shape only to shatter amidst the claws and jaws manifesting within the nothingness.
The scream plunges on through every whisper of hatred that will ever be spoken by a human mouth or thought by a human mind. It cracks like lightning above the sky of a dying civilisation that will expire before ever grasping the wonder of space flight. It breaks the stone city-bones of a culture gone to dust thousands of years ago.
From its genesis in breath and sound the scream becomes acidic nothingness, then fury and fire. It becomes a memory that burns, a whisper that rends and a prophecy that bleeds.
And it becomes a name. A name that means nothing in any language spoken by any species, living or dead. A name that carries meaning only in the strangled, misfiring thoughts of humans breathing their last breaths, in that precious and terrifying moment when their spirits are caught between one realm and the next.
The name of a creature, a daemon born from the cold rage of one traitorous soul in one treacherous second. Its name is the deed itself, the first murder and the death rattle that followed.
In the creature’s shrieking journey across the warp, it touches the minds of every human who ever was and will ever be, from the long dead to those yet to be born. The daemon is tied to the species with such primal intimacy that every man, woman and child knows its caress – deep in their blood and bones – even if they know nothing of its name.
Billions of them stir in their sleep across the many ages of man, writhing against the unwanted touch of the creature’s birth back in the mists of time.
Millions of them wake, staring into the darkness of mud huts, palatial bedchambers, housing complexes and any one of the countless other structures that humans build for themselves across a million worlds and thousands of years.
One of them, a sleeper on Terra itself, wakes and reaches for a weapon.
Her hand slid along cool silk, inch by subtle inch, until she grasped the familiar ivory handle. Something mechanical was purring in her chamber, a droning song in the shadows.
‘Do not draw the weapon,’ said the voice of her killer. ‘You are said to be an intelligent woman, Minister Zu. I had hoped we might avoid such futility.’
The minister swallowed with a click in her throat. She didn’t release the pistol grip. Her hand felt glued to it by sudden night sweat.
How could he be here? What of her guards? A palace’s worth of warriors waited below, armed to the teeth and paid far beyond the threat of her rivals’ crude bribery. Where were they? And what of her family?
Where are the gods-cursed alarms?
‘Rise, minister.’ The voice was too low, too resonant, to be human, nor did it convey anything in the way of human emotion. If statues could speak, they would speak with this assassin’s voice. ‘You know that if I am here, you are already dead. Nothing will change that now.’
She sat up slowly, though she refused to slacken her grip on the gun. ‘Listen,’ she said to the golden shape in the darkness.
‘Negotiation is equally futile,’ the killer assured her.
‘But–’
‘As is begging.’
That set off a spark within her. She felt her features harden as her temper ignited her courage. ‘I wasn’t going to beg,’ she said, her voice cold.
‘My apologies then.’ The figure made no move.
‘What of my guards?’
‘You know what I am, Koja Zu. You can choose to die alone, or you can resist the inevitable and I will leave this palace only after killing everyone who resides within it.’
My son. The thought welled up, bleeding and hot and savage.
‘My son.’ She said the words aloud before she could help herself.
‘He is of an age to serve the Emperor.’
Koja Zu’s hand trembled as it gripped the gun.
‘No,’ she said, and how she loathed herself for the shake in her voice. ‘He’s only four. Please, no. Not the Legions.’
‘He is too young for the Legions. There are other fates, minister.’
Her eyes were adjusting even as her blood ran cold. In the half-light of the hours before dawn she could make out the ornate, overlapping edges of his burnished armour. The suit of golden plate emitted a low thrum, the source of the mechanical purr. In his hands was a long spear, lowered to aim at her. Affixed above the weapon’s arm-length blade was the bulky chassis of a boltgun, clad in reinforced wirework.