Betrayer

by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

  ‘No,’ Kargos admitted. ‘I was just trying to make you feel useful for once.’

  Esca bowed. ‘I appreciate your efforts, Apothecary.’ He was scarred, even by Legiones Astartes standards. His face was a smeared mess of pebbled scar tissue – all part of the legacy of the Death Guard chainsword that had torn his features away on Isstvan III.

  Isstvan III. Khârn remembered precious little of it. They told him he almost died that day.

  ‘Angron is taking his time,’ Kargos muttered. ‘There’s a war waiting for us.’

  As if on cue, Esca coughed once. He tried to hide it, to bite it back, but all nearby caught the scent of blood flecking his gauntlet as he coughed into his hand. Darker, thicker blood ran in a slow trickle from his ear.

  The World Eaters fell beneath a pall of sudden silence. All laughter ceased, all baiting quieted. They turned as one, falling into loose ranks as the western door rolled open on its grinding tracks.

  The figure beyond moved in a hulking sway, its bronze armour stained by the stern stare of the hangar’s illumination strips. Poets, remembrancers and war archivists often made a habit of drawing crude parallels between a battlefield’s heroes and the false gods those heroes resembled. No such comparison ever worked for Angron the Conqueror, Lord of the XII Legion. His lethality defied comparison, for everything about him spoke of contrast.

  His armour plating was layer upon layer of Mechanicum ingenuity crafted to resemble archaic gladiatorial worthlessness. His movements were feral, without any of the natural grace seen in the hunting cats stalking jungles of worlds still healthier than distant Terra. And if he could be called a god, he was a wounded one, scarred in flesh and mind. His over-muscled movements, coupled with the tidal grind of his armour joints, turned his stride into a lumbering threat. He could be swift, but only when the Nails hissed hot. Outside of battle, he was a ruined thing, a shadow of what could – and should – have been.

  Khârn and the World Eaters stood straighter. This was their father, and he’d remade his sons in his image.

  He breathed through the slit of his mouth, through the rows of replacement iron teeth whose tips almost touched. Mouth-breathing came naturally now; he was too used to his sinuses being clogged by fast-scabbing trickles from his bleeding brain.

  ‘Sire,’ Khârn greeted him, using the one honorific Angron tolerated with even a modicum of grace. He still rebuked those who fell back on traditional forms of address, but most of the time, he tolerated sire.

  ‘I was on the bridge.’ The primarch’s voice was a guttural, sticky snarl. His teeth clacked together as his facial muscles twitched to the Nails’ tune. ‘I saw the Word Bearers new battleships. Each one is a rival to Dorn’s precious Phalanx.’

  As Angron turned to regard the Word Bearers in their orderly ranks, a nasty smile split his lips. He sensed their ardency, their efforts at propriety, and it amused him.

  ‘You’re smiling,’ Khârn said, more a weary accusation than a question.

  ‘It entertains me no end to see them masking the sickness inside their souls with such zeal.’

  Khârn’s men gave dutiful chuckles at their primarch’s words. All but Esca, who’d retreated back from the ranks, back from Angron, and meditated in an attempt to stem his bleeding nose and ears.

  ‘Lorgar has been planning this war for decades,’ Angron said to his sons. ‘The mere sight of those ships is evidence of that. Remember it, all of you. Remember it whenever you feel tempted to trust one of those serpents in red.’

  The primarch’s pupils were pinprick specks in the depths of his sickly eyes. A stalactite of saliva trickled its way down his scarred chin. Khârn merely inclined his head in acknowledgement of his lord’s words. Arguing with Angron was never wise, even when it was necessary. Disagreeing with him now, when the Nails were so clearly singing in his skull, would be suicide. A great many World Eaters knew that from experience.

  ‘Creature,’ Angron growled. ‘Creature, get over here.’

  Somehow, his voice carried over the hangar’s settling din, for Argel Tal crossed the deck to stand before the master of the XII Legion. The Word Bearer didn’t bow. Argel Tal had learned the hard way that Angron loathed all signs of obsequious respect. Nothing irritated him more than polite submission. Only two things should prostrate themselves: frightened animals and dying men. Anything else was surrender, and no filthier word existed in any human tongue.

  ‘Primarch Angron,’ the Word Bearer greeted him with a neutral salute, fist over his primary heart. Khârn swallowed. He already knew where this was going.

  ‘Creature,’ the primarch said again. ‘You have your orders?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Very well. Then be ready to execute them.’

  Argel Tal saluted a second time, and started to turn away.

  ‘Creature,’ the primarch said a third time, smiling now. He enjoyed the way the insult tasted.

  ‘Yes, sire?’

  ‘I saw your lord’s pretty warships lighting up the skies, just now. The Trisagion and the Blessed Lady, reaving their way through Armatura’s defences. We owe this assault to them, eh?’

  Argel Tal betrayed no response, merely waiting impassively, his silver faceplate staring with its crystal blue eye lenses. Khârn willed him to silence, to manage his composure. His brother may have been a Bearer of the Word, but Argel Tal had a XII Legion temper.

  Angron’s teeth clacked together again, in sympathy with another facial tic. ‘The Blessed Lady,’ he said. ‘That name. She was your whore-priestess, was she not?’

  ‘She was our Confessor.’ The Word Bearer’s armour joints gave a low thrum as he tilted his head and bunched his muscles. Angron didn’t miss the telltale signs of rising aggression. He broke into a grin.

  ‘Dead though, eh? Entombed on Lorgar’s flagship. Is that the same shrine, or have you poor zealots been praying to more than one dead girl?’

  A hesitation, this time. Argel Tal took a slow breath. ‘It is her.’

  ‘Is it true that fanatics pulled her bones from the coffin? They stole them as holy relics, like the heathens of old?’

  Khârn watched Argel Tal’s fingers flinch and curl. ‘It is true,’ the Word Bearer replied.

  ‘Angron…’ Khârn warned his father. Angron ignored him, as Khârn had known the primarch would. He was enjoying himself too much to heed any advice.

  Khârn shook his head. Here it comes.

  Angron’s chuckle had all the charm and warmth of an avalanche. ‘This is the same whore-priestess you failed to protect in life. Now you can’t even guard her bones from human thieves. Lorgar must love you, creature. Why else would he stomach your failures?’

  The Word Bearer spoke through clenched teeth. ‘If my lord Lorgar finds fault with my service, he is free to offer punishment.’ He was turning away now, regardless of the disrespect he offered. Angron baiting him was an old game, though this time it risked going further than ever before. ‘And you, Broken One, are not fit to speak of the Blessed Lady.’

  Angron’s laugh was a wet landslide. ‘Did you ever recover her bones, creature? Or are they still in the hands of your unwashed cultist slaves?’

  Argel Tal, like all ranking Legiones Astartes commanders, had a personal armoury that would put any collector to shame, but now he carried two weapons sheathed across his back – his finest and favourite trophies. Both were crafted on Terra, in forges forbidden to all outside the Emperor’s own inner sanctum. Both were gene-locked, and could never be activated without the original owners’ genetic imprints on the reactive palm grips along both blades’ hafts. Argel Tal had broken that technological law, though he’d never shared how.

  The first weapon was a guardian spear, with an ornate boltgun forming the tip, bonded to an underslung power blade. Its name, etched in acid-eaten lettering along the priceless blade, was Shahin-i Tarazu, and it was once the blade o
f Sythran Kelomenes Astaga Meren Virol Uhtred Mastaxa Cyrus Shenzu-Tai Diromar of the Legiones Custodes. It was the weapon that killed Xaphen of the Word Bearers, one year ago.

  The second was a cousin to the spear – a two-handed sword forged in the same fires as Shahin-i Tarazu, and shaped by the same hands. Its crosspiece was an eagle of gold – the Emperor’s Palatine Aquila – spreading its wings, and its blade also bore the weapon’s name: Iktinaetar. It was the blade of Aquillon of the Legiones Custodes – a warrior of many, many names earned in glorious service. It was the weapon that had murdered Cyrene, Confessor of the Word, an unarmed woman who’d lost the use of her eyes.

  Brave, brave Custodians, thought Khârn. He had to wonder if they’d sung any victory songs after that battle.

  Both weapons required two hands to wield with full skill. In battle, Argel Tal switched between them, moment by moment, foe by foe, using whichever served best.

  In the hangar now, standing before Angron, he drew Iktinaetar. He pulled the blade in one smooth motion, and launched himself at the primarch. The stolen sword whined, the metal of its blade pure enough to sing as it cut the air.

  Angron caught the Word Bearer in one fist, his fingers wrapping around the warrior’s torso. It was over in a heartbeat. Argel Tal was hurled back before the blade could even come close to landing.

  The primarch laughed, that same sound of sludge and gravel. ‘Amusing as always. Back to your men, creature.’

  But Argel Tal was no longer Argel Tal. He twisted in the air, disgustingly graceful, and struck the deck in a crouch. Huge and beautifully ugly black bat’s wings rose from his shoulders. His silver faceplate was distorted in a snarling, wolfish maw of bent metal.

  ‘Back to your men,’ Angron told the thing again. He was already walking away.

  This time, it obeyed. Argel Tal rose to his feet, the great wings folding back with the sound of wrenching metal, the helm smoothing over into emotionless Mark IV sterility.

  Khârn sighed, purely theatrical, wanting the primarch to hear it. Angron’s slice of a smirk tore a notch higher, and he did nothing but chuckle as he made his way to the nearest Dreadclaw.

  ‘See you on the surface,’ he said, and sealed himself away from his sons.

  Khârn turned back to his men. ‘You heard him. Squad by squad, into the pods. Armatura awaits.’

  The World Eaters obeyed.

  He is no primarch,+ came Argel Tal’s voice in Khârn’s mind. The centurion’s first instinct was to shudder. The Nails bit harder, hotter, in the wake of the psychic whisper; they hurt more every time. Khârn looked back to his brother, where Argel Tal was directing his own men into their own gunships and drop pods.

  He is my primarch, Khârn replied, with no idea if Argel Tal could hear him. Sometimes the silent speech worked, sometimes it didn’t.

  A primarch should be inspiring. Our genetics should react at the mere sight of them. Think of the moments you laid eyes on Horus, Dorn, or Magnus. I’ve seen Sanguinius and Russ with my own eyes, as well. Close enough to touch their armour. Think of when you stand before Lorgar: the awe and reverence that beats through your blood. The feeling of our genetic coding reacting to the pinnacle of the human process. I’ve never felt that instinctive respect for Angron, Khârn. Not once. He is a broken thing. Devastating, unrivalled in war, but broken.+

  Khârn didn’t answer because there was nothing to say. He boarded his drop pod, ascending the ramp and waiting for a robed Legion slave to secure his restraint harness.

  You feel it,+ Argel Tal said. +You feel it, too.+

  In psychic silence, Khârn confessed something he’d never said outside his Legion.

  Yes, we feel the same. The World Eaters, each and every one of us, knows what you know.

  Argel Tal’s voice was laced with cold, seething anger. +Why do you tolerate it?+

  What can we do? Murder our own father? Did you destroy Lorgar when he led you into worshipping the Emperor? Or did you tolerate him in patience, hoping that eventually he’d find his way to equalling his brothers?

  A pause. A long, long pause. Khârn took it as Argel Tal’s capitulation and pushed on. It’s our shame to bear before the other Legions, brother. Angron was broken long before he ever reached us. Why do you think we let him beat the Nails into our heads? We hoped that by breaking ourselves on the same anvil, we’d finally feel unity with our father.

  There was nothing of mockery in the Word Bearer’s reply. Only sympathy. Khârn’s skin crawled. He’d have preferred mockery.

  It didn’t work?+

  The drop pod’s sides closed in, armour plating locking to block all view of the hangar beyond. Khârn’s last sight was of Argel Tal ascending the gang-ramp into a red XVII Legion gunship.

  ‘No,’ he muttered, as much to himself as to the distant Word Bearer. ‘It didn’t.’

  THREE

  Lost to the Nails

  Void War

  Sacred Red, Faithless White

  The one thing war stories always forgot was the dust. Khârn learned that early, and the lesson stayed with him through the years. Even two men kicking up sand in the gladiator pits was a distraction. Two armies of a few thousand souls on an open plain would turn the air thick enough to choke on. Scale it up again, and a few hundred thousand warriors locked in conflict would darken the sun for a day after the battle was done.

  But the realities of pitched warfare rarely made it into the sagas. In all the stories he’d heard, especially those woeful diatribes from the remembrancers, battle was reduced to a handful of heroes going blade-to-blade in the sunlight, while their nameless lessers looked on in stupefied awe.

  It took a great deal to make Khârn cringe, but war poetry never failed.

  Two Legions fighting through a city was beyond anything else. Tank engines exhaled fumes in an oil-smelling smog. Gunships roared down on heat blurs and air washes, while those shot down fell from the sky to crash and roll across the ground as burning husks. Titans striding through the streets bled fire and smoke in equal measure – wounds that gouted pollution tenfold when one of the colossal war machines finally died.

  The tens of thousands of soldiers grinding rockcrete and earth beneath their tread, and the last sighs of habitation towers bursting their dusty innards into the air as they came apart – they all added to the pall. Each spire that fell, every monument that toppled, every bunker that broke apart breathed a cloud of strangling ash in every direction.

  Fighting in a ruined city was one thing, but fighting during a city’s ruination was quite another. Visibility was a myth. It simply didn’t exist.

  In ages past, when bronze swords had formed the pinnacle of humanity’s capacity to wage war against itself, mounted scouts tore through a battlefield’s dust clouds to relay information and orders between officers whose regiments were blinded in the thick of it. That was another truth that rarely survived to make into the archives.

  War had come a long, long way from those ancient days. Mankind’s capacity to fight blind had not. Khârn’s retinal display responded to his irritation, auto-cycling through vision filters. Thermal sight was a worthless smear of migraine colours when half the city was aflame. Tracking by echolocation auspex was unreliable with any atmospheric interference, and the dense clouds of particulate coupled with burning buildings all around most definitely counted as suboptimal conditions.

  He didn’t stop running. He had no idea where he was any more, but he didn’t stop running. When in doubt, move forward. The old adage brought back his grin.

  Khârn remembered the landing. The teeth-rattling descent in the Dreadclaw’s dark confines, and the burst of sunlight that followed when the pod’s doors blasted open. He remembered that first charge out into the city, pulling his weapons free, feeling the wasp-stings of lasgun fire failing to pierce his armour plating. They’d come down in a barracks district, amongst the entrenched battalions of
Armaturan Academy Guard. Young warriors undergoing the process to become Ultramarines, alongside the hosts of uniformed, disciplined soldiers that were proud to serve the XIII Legion.

  Damn Guilliman and his empire within an empire. Armatura, the war-world, was merely one globe in the Five Hundred Worlds. How did one man raise such vast armies? How did one Legion command such might?

  He knew the answer, unwelcome as it was. Here was the gift of an unbroken primarch. Here was an unflawed genius at play, unburdened by a pain engine. While Lorgar wasted time with the mysteries of the aether and Angron tasted blood from his malfunctioning mind, Guilliman of the Ultramarines had reshaped an entire subsector into the Imperial ideal. Not even Horus had managed that.

  A bolter shell had severed his irritated musing, crashing against his chestplate and throwing his stride into a ragged stagger. Khârn had roared without realising – an instinctive vocalisation of the pain drilling into the back of his head – and charged into the first platoon of Academy Guard holding the barricade at the road’s end. Their Evocatus leader fought with an energised gladius, proving himself a swordsman of consummate skill. He lasted nine seconds before he collapsed, painting the avenue’s stones red with his innards.

  The city was still standing at that point. The dust hadn’t had a chance to occlude everything under the sun.

  That changed soon enough. Mere hours later and the cityscape was choking on its own breath. Now he’d lost Kargos and Esca and the others, and he was alone in a dying city, somewhere behind enemy lines. He remembered the Academy Guard breaking; remembered chasing them with spit thick on his tongue, crunching his axe into their fleeing backs, and the Nails ticking hotter, washing his vision red.

  He remembered nothing more, until he’d come back to his senses a few minutes ago.

  Shadows drifted from the smoke, becoming shapes, becoming warriors in armour the same blue as Terra’s sky at sunrise. Khârn didn’t slow down. He went through them in a roar of laughter and rending blades, saliva stringing between his teeth. His boots pounded across the rockcrete road.