by Various
It stank – a pungent mixture of bestial musk, engine oil and the sulphurous discharge of shield generators.
I had seen chieftains of their kind before of course; giant bulls that had roared their defiance to the heavens and charged into battle with reckless abandon. Those monsters were driven by savage lusts of battle, the burning desire to crush, to slay, to destroy and to feed.
This one was different. It was fused with clanking technology, bolted into its armour like one of our lobotomised weapon servitors. Had they learned that from us too?
And its anger was different. The noises it made, the way it moved, the swimming lack of focus in its animal eyes; all of that was different. I knew then that I was seeing what happened to the greenskin when nothing remained but defeat. They did not keep blindly raging, nor did they plead for mercy, nor did they learn at last how to fear their enemy.
They went mad.
‘Bring it down!’ I roared, aiming for its head.
We opened up with everything we had left. We fired rounds directly at it and watched them explode across its shielding. I saw Jochi launch himself into a charge, ducking and wheeling under the fire-lines to bring his blade in close. He was swatted clear with a vicious backhand and sent cartwheeling over the edge of the platform, his breastplate crushed. I saw others try the same, all of them moving with their habitual speed and prowess. None of them even got close – they were crunched aside by those iron gauntlets, knocked to the ground as if they were children. The monster waded forward, flailing with cybernetic arms, vast and monstrous and slobbering with febrile madness.
I holstered my pistol and grasped my guan dao two-handed, already breaking into the charge that would carry me into range. It saw me coming and lurched to meet me, swinging its huge arms in clumsy, devastating sweeps. I dived under one of the gauntlets and twisted around, aiming my glaive into the creature’s wrist.
The biting edges ground up against the shield in a shower of sparks. A sharp bang was followed by a stink of cordite, and the shimmering barrier over the creature’s forearms flickered out.
Before I could take advantage, the beast swung back at me, keeping its other fist low. I tried to scrabble away, but its gauntlet slammed heavily into my side.
I was hurled clear, clattering across the platform, my blade still clutched in my hand. The world spun around me, and I had a brief glimpse of the fortress’s topmost pinnacle above me swinging across the sky.
I skidded to a halt, knowing that the monster would be right behind me. I leapt to my feet and angled my blade back. I connected again, severing one of the cables that looped from its shoulders. Fluid cascaded over me, hot and stinking. As my blade’s disruptor slashed through, it ignited, dousing us both in flaring green flames.
I pressed the attack, zigzagging the guan dao in a blur of speed, going for the active shielding.
I had no chance. For all its huge bulk, it was fast. An iron-clad fist shot out, catching me below the throat and crashing into me with the force of a skidding Rhino. I was sent sprawling for the second time, nearly blacked-out from the impact and hurled hard over to the far side of the platform. I saw the fire-tattered edge coming and blurrily tried to grab on to something. My gauntlet almost closed on a splintered stump of wreckage, but the corroded metal collapsed under my grasp.
I clattered over the edge, my armour gouging sparking trails in the steel. I looked down and saw the sheer sides of the citadel drop away below me, two hundred metres of empty air before the mass of burning structures near ground level.
In that split second, suspended over collapsing shards of rust and about to plummet, I saw death coming for me.
Then a hand grasped my wrist. I was hauled back, away from the crumbling edge, my armour-clad bulk heaved back onto the platform as if I weighed nothing.
As I was dragged back up, I stared – disorientated and fog-visioned – into a pair of glittering eyes set deep in a scarred, brown face. For a split second I gazed into those eyes, rigid with shock.
Then a huge body swept up and over me, followed by the rush of a fur-lined cloak and the sound of boots striding purposefully into combat.
Even then, my mind did not process what had happened. For a moment I did not know what I was seeing.
Then the fog cleared. My senses returned. I looked up, daring to believe, and saw at last who had saved me.
I do not know how he had made it up to the platform undetected. I do not know how long he had been fighting to get there. Perhaps his approach had been masked by the noise and violence of the melee, or perhaps he had been able to conceal his presence somehow.
Nobody was ever able to tell me where he had been while the assault was underway, nor how he had managed to enter combat at just that moment, without warning, without announcement.
I do not know whether he did such things deliberately, to add uncertainty to the shape of the battle, or whether it was just how matters were fated.
None of that mattered. The Khagan, the Great Khan, the complete warrior, the primarch of the V Legion, had unveiled himself at last.
He was there, right before my eyes, on Chondax.
He was there.
My first instinct was to rush into battle at his side, to pick myself up and add my blade to his.
I immediately saw how pointless that would be. He had come with his keshig, a whole phalanx of giants in bone-white Terminator plate, and even they did not come between the Khan and his prey. They hung back around the platform edges, silent and massive, ensuring that nothing – greenskin or White Scar – intervened. Below us, the battle continued unabated, but up on the platform, under the shadow of that massive, ruined alien head, only two warriors fought.
He was tall, lean even in his ivory armour. A heavy crimson cloak hung from his shoulders, lined with mottled irmyet fur and covering the fine gilt curves of the ceramite plates beneath. He carried a dao sabre with a glass-polished blade that flashed in the sun. His shoulder guards were gold, engraved with flowing Khorchin characters and the lightning-strike sigil. Two Chogorian flintlocks nestled at his belt, ancient and opulent, studded with pearls and bearing the guild marks of their long-dead makers.
On Ullanor I had seen him fight from a distance, marvelling at the tremendous destruction he wrought amidst the congested fields of total war. On Chondax I saw him fight at close quarters, and it took my breath away.
I have never, before or since, seen swordsmanship like it. I have never seen such balance, such contained savagery, such unrelenting, remorseless artistry. As he whirled the blade around, sunlight shone from his gilded armour like a halo. There was a cruelty to it, a razor-edged note of aristocratic disdain, but there was also splendour. He handled his blade as though it were a living thing, a spirit he had tamed and now forced to dance.
Yesugei had said that only poets could be true warriors. I understood then what he meant: the Great Khan distilled the sprawling language of combat to its core of dreadful, merciless purity. Nothing was extravagant, nothing was wasteful – every stroke carried the full measure of murder within it, just enough and nothing more.
He hammered the maddened beast back, step by step, forcing it toward the far end of the platform. It raged at him, bellowing in a burbling frenzy of fury and misery. It swung its gauntlets wildly in massive, bone-breaking arcs, hoping to swipe him from the platform as it had done with us.
The Khan stayed close to it, his cloak swirling as he worked back and forth, sending his blade darting out and cutting back, using the long curved edge to carve through the creature’s shambolic armour and bite deep into the addled flesh beneath. Whole sections of shielding were shattered, overloading the generators on the creature’s back and making the tangled wiring burst and pop.
It tried to smash him to the floor with a wild haymaker, and he spun out of the challenge, plunging the edge of the sabre down hard as he moved. The ork’s severed gauntlet-clad fist clanged to the metal, taken cleanly at the wrist and doused in a spray of steaming blood.
The gauntlet crashed against the dao, and I felt the platform shudder from the impact. The Khan held his ground, bracing his sabre two-handed, and the creature’s iron fist cracked open, exposing a bloody, pulpy claw within, striated with cabling and corroded piston-sleeves.
The greenskin was weaponless then. It reeled away from the onslaught, and its roars became weaker and more desperate.
The Khan went after it, maintaining the icy, austere ferocity of his attack. His blade flashed out, slicing a weeping chunk of blubber from the creature’s torso; then it switched back, cutting a long gash across its chest. Armour pieces shattered and fell like rain from its heaving shoulders, mingling with the slurry of blood that pooled and bubbled at its feet.
When the end came, it was quick. The beast rocked back onto its haunches, its stomach streaming blood and its jaws hanging limp. It stared up at its killer, its tiny eyes swimming with fluid and its chest trembling.
The Khan raised the dao high, holding it in both hands, his feet planted firmly.
The greenskin made no move to protect itself. Its damaged face was a piteous, weeping mess, marked by abject wretchedness and bewilderment. It knew what was being destroyed. It knew what had been lost.
I did not like to see that face. It was an ignoble end for something that had fought so hard and for so long.
Then the sword whistled down, trailing lines of gore as it plunged. The beast’s head fell to the platform with a dull, booming thud.
The Khan withdrew his blade with a cold flourish. For a moment he stood over the vanquished warlord, gazing imperiously down at it, his long cloak lifting in the smoke-drifted air.
Then he stooped to retrieve the beast’s head. He swivelled smoothly, holding the agonised skull high above him in one hand. Blood streamed from the beast’s fleshy neck cavity, slapping against the metal floor in thick slops.
‘For the Emperor!’ roared the Khan, and his voice rang out across the bowl and high into the sky.
From below us, from the levels where the fighting still burned, a massed shout of acclimation rose up, overmastering the animal howls of the surviving orks and the crackle and rush of the flames.
I heard them answer him, hurling the same word up into the air, over and over.
Khagan! Khagan! Khagan!
That was the moment when I knew we had won at last. Years of ceaseless campaigning had finally come to an end.
The war on Chondax had ended in the only way it could have ended: with our primarch holding the head of the defeated enemy in his fist, and with the voices of his Legion, the ordu of Chogoris, rising in savage joy toward the vaults of heaven.
I joined them. I cried out his name, my fists clenched with euphoria.
I was glad we had won. I was glad that the white world was cleansed at last, and that the Crusade would grind onward, taking another step on the road toward galactic hegemony.
But that was not the main source of my fervour. I had seen the terrible power of the Great Khan unleashed – the spectacle I had coveted for so long.
It was not a disappointment.
I had seen perfection. I had seen the poetry of destruction. I had seen the paragon of our warrior breed in the full flood of his matchless glory.
My joy was complete.
I met Torghun one more time on Chondax.
It took many hours to subdue the citadel entirely. The greenskins, true to their nature, never stopped fighting. By the time the last of them was hunted down and killed, the fortress had begun to disintegrate around us, consumed by explosions from below and raging fires from above, and we had to withdraw.
I led what remained of my brotherhood out on to the plain at the base of the depression. Many tasks remained for us: we needed to make a tally of the slain, to direct Sangjai to those wounded who might live, to recover what we could of our fleet of damaged mounts for onward transport.
I remember only fleeting impressions from that time. My head was filled with visions of the Khan, and it made me distracted. Even as I worked, I could not shake the images of him in action. I rehearsed the blade-manoeuvres he had made, over and again, running through them in my mind and resolving to adopt those that I could once back in the practice cages.
Amidst all the devastation, with the fortress before us blazing and smoking in its ruin, all I saw was his curved dao flashing in sunlight, his gilded armour moving smoothly under the cloak, his jewel-like eyes that had looked, briefly, into mine.
I would never forget it. One does not forget the fury of living gods.
Other brotherhoods, nearly a dozen of them, had done the same thing as we had and were reordering themselves in the aftermath of the battle. Once the bulk of my brotherhood had been extracted and had regrouped, I went to find Torghun. I guessed that the minghan would disperse quickly, and I did not wish to leave without making the appropriate courtesies.
When I found him, I saw that his brotherhood had fared better than mine. I learned later that they had fought with honour, seizing many of the gun mounts on the walls and destroying them. Their actions had allowed many other squads to break through the perimeter without enduring the losses that we had taken.
He had done well, and had enhanced his reputation for solid, competent command. For all that, though, I could not help but pity him a little. He had not seen the things that I had seen. He would leave Chondax with only a glimpse of glory from afar.
‘Did he speak to you?’ Torghun asked me, showing more interest than I had expected.
He had taken his helm off – the lenses were cracked and useless – but otherwise he looked almost unscathed.
‘He did,’ I said.
I was in much worse shape. My battleplate was riddled with dents, breaks and gouges. My gorget was shattered from where the beast’s gauntlet had hit me and much of my suit’s sensory array was inoperative. The fleet’s armoury would be busy with us for months before we would be ready to deploy again.
‘What did he say?’ Torghun asked, pressing me for answers.
I remembered every word.
‘He commended us on our speed,’ I said. ‘He said that he had not expected to be beaten to the summit. He said that we were a credit to the Legion.’
I remembered the way he had walked up to me after the beast was dead, watching tolerantly as I had struggled to bow before him. His armour had been pristine – the creature had not so much as scratched it.
‘He told me that speed was not the only thing, though,’ I said. ‘He said that we were not berserkers like the wolves of Fenris, that we could not forget that we had responsibilities other than breaking things.’
Torghun laughed. The sound was infectious, and I chuckled at the memory.
‘So his advice was similar to yours, in the end,’ I said.
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Torghun said.
I looked out across the wide depression, over to where orbital landers had already come down from the fleet, ready to begin the long process of resupply and refit. Mortal auxiliaries were beginning to make planetfall, shuffling out in their awkward environment suits to liaise with the warriors of the Legion.
I saw a woman walking among them, a grey-haired official wearing a transparent dome-helmet over her suit. It seemed to me that she was in charge of the others, though she didn’t look Chogorian – she looked Terran. I wondered what she was doing there.
‘So what now for you?’ asked Torghun.
I shrugged, turning back to him.
‘I do not know,’ I said. ‘We await orders. And you?’
Torghun looked at me strangely then, as if trying to decide whether to tell me something important. I remembered how he had looked during our first conversation, when he had struggled to explain his brotherhood’s name and customs. It
was much the same then.
‘I can’t say,’ was all he told me.
It was an unusual reply, but I did not press him. I thought little of it, for mission orders were often restricted and he was entitled to keep his brotherhood’s business to himself.
In any case, I had secrets of my own. I did not tell Torghun what else I had seen the Khan do. I did not tell him that he had turned away from me quickly after our brief meeting, distracted by an approach from one of his keshig.
I could recall every word of that exchange too, every gesture.
‘A message, Khagan,’ his Terminator-armoured bodyguard had said.
‘From the Warmaster?’
The keshig had shaken his head.
‘Not from him. About him.’
‘What does it say?’
There had been an awkward pause.
‘I think, my lord, that you might wish to take this on the flagship.’
After that, I had seen an expression on the Khan’s face that I had never expected to see there. Amidst all the pride, all the assurance, all the martial majesty, I had seen a terrible shadow of doubt ripple across those haughty features. For a moment, only a moment, I had seen uncertainty, as if some long-buried nightmare had rushed back, inconceivably, into waking thought.
I will never forget that look, imprinted for the briefest of seconds on his warrior’s face. One does not forget the doubts of gods.
Then he had gone, striding away to whatever tidings they were that demanded his attention. I had been left on the platform, surrounded by those of my brotherhood who had survived the final assault, wondering what news could have prompted such a rapid departure.
At the time, the episode had troubled me. Facing Torghun, however, with the fortress of our enemies in ruins and the strength of the Legion gathering around me again, I found it hard to reconstruct that emotion.
We had triumphed, just as we had always triumphed. I had no reason to suppose that it would not always be so.
‘You were right,’ I said. ‘Earlier, you were right.’
Torghun looked amused.
