by Nick Kyme
‘I don’t know how they died!’ Angron’s shout was so loud that the words seemed to fuzz into white noise in Kharn’s ears. The hand shook him like a sack. ‘We swore! Swore!’ Kharn was being yanked backwards and forwards, and Angron’s other hand beat the floor in rime. Amid all the clamour a sharp new scent imprinted itself on his senses, and Kharn realised it was the primarch’s blood, freshly shed. Angron had battered his hands bloody against the stone.
‘We swore an oath,’ Angron went on, his voice dropping to a groan like wrenching steel. ‘On the road to Desh’ea I had each of them cut a new scar for my rope, and I cut theirs. And we swore an oath that by the end of all of our lives we’d cut the high-riders a scar that would bleed for a hundred years!’ Despite himself, Kharn’s hands came up as Angron’s grip tightened around his neck and he fought the urge to try and grapple free. ‘A wound their great-grandwhelps would still cry from! A wound to haunt any of them who dared look on the hot dust again!’ Angron’s grip shifted, and air flooded back into Kharn’s lungs. He hung half-kneeling with one of the primarch’s hands pressed into each side of his head. ‘All this,’ Angron said softly, ‘and even my sworn oath wasn’t enough.’ He parted his hands and let Kharn crumple to the floor. ‘Because I don’t even know how they died.’
When Kharn opened his eyes Angron was sitting cross-legged a little way from his feet, elbows on knees, head thrust out in front of his shoulders, watching him. He could no longer smell the primarch’s blood as fresh as he had – had he lost consciousness for a time? Or had he just lain disorientated in the gloom? Or did Angron’s blood clot and seal even faster than his own? He thought it probably did. He took a breath, torso flickering with pain, and pushed himself up on his elbows.
‘And so how do you meet death, paperskin?’ The coolness in Angron’s voice was startling after the raving daemon that had battered and flung him like a puppet. ‘Do you make your salutes when you’re on the dust? Declaim your lineage like the high-riders? Declaim your kills like us? Tell me what you do while you’re waiting for the iron in your hand to warm up to blood-heat.’
‘We—’ Kharn began, but the unbecoming sprawl was cramping his chest. He pushed himself the rest of the way up and knelt, sitting back on his heels, keeping his breathing steady and composing himself through the pain. Even slumped over as he was, Angron was taller than Kharn by half a head.
‘The oath of moment,’ he said. ‘Our last act before we embark for combat. Each of us prepares our vow to our brothers in the Legion.
‘What we will do for our, our Emperor,’ Angron snarled at the word, ‘our Legion and ourselves. We witness the oaths. Some Legions write them and then decorate themselves with the written oaths.’
‘Did you take one of these oaths before you came in to see me?’ Angron asked.
‘No, primarch,’ replied Kharn, slightly wrong-footed by the question. ‘I did not come in here to fight you. I say again, not one in the Legion will raise a hand to you. Oaths of moment are for battle.’
‘No challenge,’ rumbled the looming shape. ‘You do not ask their names when you walk the dust, and you don’t give yours. No salutes and no showing of ropes. This is how they fight who say they are my blood-cousins?’
‘This is how we fight, sire. We exist to make the Emperor’s enemies extinct. We’ve no need of anything that does not serve that end. And we rarely fight enemies who have names worth knowing, let alone saluting. What the rope is, forgive me, primarch, I do not know.’
‘How do you show your warriorship, then?’ The puzzlement in the primarch’s voice seemed genuine, but when Kharn hesitated over his answer, Angron lunged forwards and punched him over onto his back.
‘Answer me! You little grave-grubber, you sit there and smirk at me again like some high-rid… uhhh…’ The primarch had sprung to his feet and now he picked Kharn up by the throat, yanked him into the air and dropped him flat on his back again. By the time Kharn had shakily pushed himself back up, Angron had walked away to stand under one of the lights. He turned to make sure Kharn was watching, then turned and spread his arms.
The primarch’s torso was bare, packed with inhuman musculature on the Emperor’s design, broad, heavy and angular to accommodate the thickened bones and the strange organs and tissues that Astartes legend said the Emperor had grown from his own flesh and blood, modified twenty different ways for his children. Kharn found himself wondering for a moment if Angron had grown up with the slightest idea of what he truly was, before he realised what the primarch was showing him.
A ridge of scar tissue began at the base of Angron’s spine. It travelled up his backbone, then veered to the left and around his body, riding over his hip and curving around to his front. Angron began to turn in place underneath the light and Kharn saw how the scar seemed to expand and thin again, ploughing and gouging the skin, in some places vanishing entirely where the primarch’s healing powers had overcome it. The scar looped around and around Angron’s body, spiralling up over his belly, around his ribs, towards his chest. A little past the right of his sternum, it abruptly stopped.
‘The Triumph Rope,’ Angron said. His hand moved to indicate the upper lengths of the scar, where it was smoother, more continuous, less ugly. There were no healed patches in its upper reaches. Kharn jumped as Angron thumped a fist against his chest with a report like a gun.
‘Red twists! Nothing but red on my rope, Kharn! Of all of us, I was the only one. No black twists.’ Angron was shaking with rage again, and Kharn bowed his head. His thoughts were bleak: I’ve started this now, and I wish to finish it, but primarch, I don’t know how many more of your rages I can withstand. Then Angron’s hands had gripped his shoulders, cruelly grating the bones in the broken one, and the muscles in Kharn’s neck and jaw locked rigid as he worked to stop himself crying out.
‘I can’t go back!’ came Angron’s voice through the pain, and the note in his voice was not fury now but an anguish far greater than the pain of Kharn’s injuries. ‘I can’t go back to Desh’ea. I can’t pick up the soil to make a black twist.’ Angron flung Kharn away and dropped to his knees. ‘I can’t… uhh… I need to wear my failure and I can’t. Your Emperor! Your Emperor! I couldn’t fight with them and now I can’t commemorate them!’
‘Sire, I, we…’ Kharn could feel hide stings and blooms of heat inside his abdomen as his healing systems worked on wounds inside him. ‘Your Legion wants to learn your ways. You are our primarch. But we haven’t learned them yet. I don’t know…’
‘No. Grave-grub Kharn doesn’t know. No Triumph Rope on Kharn.’ Kharn kept his eyes on the floor but the sneer was all too audible in Angron’s voice. ‘For every battle you live through, a cut to lengthen the rope. For a triumph, let it scar clean. A red twist. For a defeat you survive, work some dust from where you fought into the cut to scar it dark. A black twist. Nothing but red on me, Kharn,’ said Angron, spreading his arms again, ‘but I don’t deserve it.’
‘I understand you, sire,’ Kharn answered, and he found that he did. ‘Your brothers, your brothers and sisters,’ he corrected himself, ‘they were defeated.’
‘They died, Kharn,’ said Angron. ‘They all died. We swore to each other that we’d stand together against the high-riders’ armies. The cliffs of Desh’ea would see the end of it. No more twists in the rope. For any of us.’ His voice had softened to a whisper, heavy with grief. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be drawing breath. But I am. And I can’t even pick up the dust from Desh’ea to make a black twist to remember them by. Why did your Emperor do this to me, Kharn?’
There was silence after the question. Angron, still standing, had let his head fall forwards and was digging his knuckles into his forehead and face. The lights made strange shadows across his skull, lumpy with metal and scars.
Kharn got to his feet. He swayed, but his balance held.
‘It isn’t my place to know, sire, what the Emperor said to you. But we—’ Angron wheeled, and Kharn flinched. The primarch’s eyes wer
e alight, and his teeth were bare, but it wasn’t a snarl now, it was a broad, vicious grin.
‘Didn’t say much to me, no he did not. Think I let him? Think I did?’ Angron was in motion again, prowling to and fro under the light, his head snaking from side to side. ‘I knew what was happening. I’d stood there and seen the high-riders’ killers coming up for my brothers and sisters at Desh’ea, I knew, I knew. Ahhh!’ His hands shot out and blurred as they clawed the air in front of him. ‘Had his own brothers, didn’t he, his kin-guard. All gold-plated, fancying themselves high-riders even though their feet were in the dirt like mine. Pointing their little blades at me!’ Angron spun, leapt, hurtled at Kharn and slammed him backwards with an open palm. ‘They drew weapons on me! Me! They… they…’ Angron threw his head back, palms pressed to the sides of his skull as though sheer physical pressure could keep his boiling thoughts on track. For a moment he was frozen like that, and then he wrenched his body forwards and drove his fist into the stone by Kharn’s head. Stinging grains of rock flew out from the impact.
‘Killed one, though,’ spat Angron, rearing up and starting to prowl again. ‘Couldn’t put my hands on that Emperor of yours. Ahh, his voice in my ears, worse than the Butcher’s Nails…’ Angron’s fingers swiped and rubbed across the metal in his skull. His gaze was transfixing Kharn again. ‘Took one apart though. One of those gold-wrapped bastards. No stomach for it, your Emperor, paper-skinned like you. Pushed me back, into that… place… the place he took me from Desh’ea…’ The shadows over Angron’s face seemed to deepen at the recollection and his body hunched and folded inwards.
‘Teleport,’ said Kharn, understanding. ‘He teleported you. First to his own ship, and then to here.’
‘Something you understand, maybe.’ Angron was still moving, further away now, harder for Kharn to pick out except as a smoke-warm shape in infrared. He had his head back and his arms out, as though he were addressing an audience in a high gallery. ‘My sisters and brothers and I, owned by the high-riders, floating over us with their crow-cloaks. Their maggot-eyes buzzing around us while we drew each others’ blood instead of theirs.’ He growled, punching and clawing the air above his head. ‘And you, Kharn, owned by the Emperor who draws your blood and puts his gold-shiny puppets into the fights he won’t…’
Kharn was shaking his head, and Angron had seen him.
‘Well now,’ his voice rumbled out of the shadow, and all the menace was back in it. The sound reminded Kharn how weak he was, how wounded, how unarmed. ‘Kharn calls me liar. Kharn thinks he will question his primarch for the sake of his Emperor.’ Once again Angron came out of the darkness in a leap, landing in front of Kharn with one hand cocked back for a pulverising punch.
‘Admit it, Kharn,’ he snarled. ‘Why won’t you say it?’ The cocked fist shook but did not swing. Angron pushed his face forwards as though he were about to bite Kharn’s flesh. ‘Say it! Say it!’
‘I saw him once,’ was what Kharn said instead. ‘I saw him on Nove Shendak. World Eight-Two-Seventeen. A world of worms. Giant creatures, intelligent. Hateful. Their weapons were filaments, metal feathers that they embedded in themselves to conduct energies out of their bodies. I remember we saw the surface roil with the filaments before the worms broke out of it almost at our feet. Thick as a man, longer than you, sire, are tall. Three mouths in their faces, a dozen teeth in their mouths. They spoke through the mud in sonic screams and witch-whispers. We had found three systems under their thrall, burned them out of their colony nests and chased them home. But on their cradle-world we found humans. Humans lost to humanity for who knows how long, crawling on the land while the worms slithered in the marsh seas. Hunting the humans, farming them. Killing them.’
Angron’s eyes were still narrowed and his fist still raised, but he no longer shook. Kharn’s eyes had half-closed. He remembered how the War Hounds’ blue and white armour glimmered in the worm-world’s twilight, remembered the endless, nerve-sapping sucking sounds as the lunar tides dragged the mud oceans to and fro across the jagged stone continents.
‘The Iron Warriors were with us too, and Perturabo landed with the assault pioneers after our lances scoured our drop-zone bare and dry. He worked out how to dredge and shape the ground. The earth there, well, there barely was earth. Just muddy slops, full of trace toxins, the bedrock deep enough that a man’d drown if he planted his feet on it.’
‘How did you stop them?’ demanded Angron. ‘If you couldn’t stand on the ground?’
‘Sentries with high-powered lasguns, sire, devices to read the movements of the mud to hear them moving through it towards us, explosives we seeded around the earthworks and allowed to sink to where the worms burrowed. Perturabo’s earthworks were a miracle. He built trenches and dykes, penned in the mud seas and drained them, drove the worms back, reclaimed land these wretched humans could build on. And when the worms came out to fight us, they met the Emperor and his War Hounds.’
‘You’re speaking of yourself,’ said Angron.
‘Yourselves.’ Kharn nodded. ‘The War Hounds. XII Legion Astartes. Made in your image, as your warriors, primarch. He saw us fight in the Cephic hive-sprawls and named us for the white hounds the Yeshk warriors in the north used. He did us an honour with the name, primarch. We are proud of it, and we hope you will be too.’
Angron gave a growl, but he did not speak. The hand that had been a fist had opened again.
‘The southern anchor of Perturabo’s earthworks was a rock, the closest thing that place had to a mountain, the only one the sludge tides hadn’t been able to wear down. When the worms saw the Mechanicum begin to change the world’s face they mustered to break us under the peak. They buried themselves in the sludge beyond our range and came forwards under it to meet us.’ Kharn’s voice was speeding up as his memory filled with the sharp reek of the poisoned ground and the warning cries from the Imperial Army artillerists as the mud ocean heaved. Angron had backed away, his head pushed forwards and his eyes were full of concentration.
‘They first came in a wave,’ Kharn said. ‘They had skulked around the fringes of the earthworks, carried off some of the crews working the pumps and dredgers. We had not fought a decisive action against them for months. But now Gheer and Perturabo had read the patterns of their attacks and placed us for the counter-assault. We formed up among Perturabo’s aqueduct walls, only half-built they were and still blocked half the sky. We took our oaths of moment and primed our bolters.’
‘Bolters?’
‘A firearm. A powerful one. The weapon of the Astartes.’
‘Ehh. Get on with it. The worms came for the earthworks.’ Angron was staring over Kharn’s head, yanking his hands back and forth, shuffling his feet. It was a moment before Kharn realised the Primarch was playing the defence out in his mind, ordering the lines, mapping out the ground. ‘So they came up like chaer-dogs at a spike-line? Stupid to rush a shield wall. Tell me what you did.’
Kharn closed his eyes, focusing past his injured body to run the conditioned routines that ordered his memories.
‘The first line of them broke the mud with their jaws and filaments,’ he said, ‘and they came at us behind a wall of their power-arcs. The mud steamed in front of them and where the arcs converged they shattered rock. They sent a rolling bombardment ahead of them. We worked to break it with thudd guns, dropping shells behind their blast-front, and we broke up the rock in front of them with grenades. We thought we had their measure when the counter-bombardment made their front lines shiver, but they were simply filling up our attention, measuring where our own line was wavering. When their blasts dropped away they came in force to the weak points. Drove wedges into our front. To flank and envelop we’d have had to go out onto the mud where we could barely walk, and where the mud was shallow enough for us to try it, they had second and third lines ready to drag the flankers under or cook them in their armour. To break the assaults we had to get them onto rock, where we could manoeuvre better than they. Perturabo had built traps
into his earthworks. False outer walls, double emplacements, killing zones along the drainage canals.’
Angron nodded approvingly, looking up and down the dark chamber as though he could see the great rough walls, lit by orange bolter-flare and the blue-white power-arcs of the worms.
‘But still we had to bring them inside our lines to break them. Hold them back and then fall to second positions, one formation at a time, through the Army lines to where we were waiting to drop the axe. There were a lot of worms, primarch.’ Kharn grinned. His wounds throbbed as the vividness of the memory prompted his metabolism to begin glanding combat stimms. ‘Our axes weren’t dry for a month.’ In answer Angron growled again, making a quick double motion of his arm as though swinging a blade forwards and backwards at something below his own height. Barely thinking about it, Kharn’s warrior brain filed away the Primarch’s footing and balance, his arm and shoulder motions, noted where a riposte might land home. Then, still in his combat stance, Angron pinned Kharn with his gaze again.
‘The Emperor. You talk about fighting down there in the mud but you don’t talk about the Emperor. High-rode, did he? Hung above you, did he?’ Angron’s voice was rising, turning ugly and ragged. ‘Laughed at you, did he? Called your blood-spills, did he? Admit it, Kharn!’ In a blur he crossed the distance and knocked Kharn to one knee with a looping, glancing arm-sweep.
‘The Emperor,’ Kharn said, and couldn’t stop himself from smiling at the memory. ‘The Emperor was a golden storm descending onto Nove Shendak’s filth. When the worms were in amongst us he came down from the peak and it was as if he had brought a fragment of the sun down for us in amends for the sun we couldn’t see through those filthy fogs. He shone out over the battle lines like a beacon. His custodians were like living banners, the troopers rallied to them, but he…’ Kharn closed his eyes, looking for the words.
