Khârn: Eater of Worlds

by Anthony Reynolds

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, shrugging. ‘There’s no rational medical answer for him suddenly waking up as he did.’

  Maven grunted, and continued to work in silence.

  ‘I wonder how long it will be before I can fight,’ Skoral said after a few minutes had passed.

  ‘As soon as you feel like you have enough control,’ said Maven. ‘I wouldn’t want to fight you, though, not now. Well, not before, either, but you’d take my head off with a swing of this arm now. Truly, it’s exquisite work.’

  ‘You sound jealous. You wish it had been you that had their arm ripped off?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have ended up with anything as fine as this if I had,’ said Maven. He finished his work and stood back. ‘Right, you’re all done.’

  He turned away as Skoral dressed. Once she had, she rolled her shoulders and took up a fighting stance. She punched the air. Two jabs and a cross. The servos of her arm whined softly.

  ‘Feels good,’ she said.

  Maven bowed extravagantly. ‘I have my moments,’ he said.

  ‘They’re few and far between, but you do,’ agreed Skoral.

  ‘I’ll take that,’ said Maven, a crooked smile curling at his lips.

  ‘Will it be war, do you think?’ Skoral said in a soft voice. ‘With the Emperor’s Children?’

  ‘No,’ said Maven, without pausing even for a moment. ‘Khârn is there. He was able to forestall the worst of Angron’s rage. He’ll make sure things do not get out of hand.’

  Chapter 14

  ‘We’re sitting targets out here,’ said Argus Brond, speaking through a closed vox-channel to the other captains. ‘One guided attack run, and we’ll be a smoking crater on this hell-forsaken moon.’

  Three hundred World Eaters stood together, awaiting the arrival of the Emperor’s Children. Even with their ranks decimated, it was but a fraction of the XII’s strength. This was an honour guard, not a battle force.

  ‘Let them come,’ growled Ruokh. He stood at Dreagher’s side, immense in his new Cataphractii prison. Even before his helm had been drill-locked into position, his face had been twitching. It wouldn’t take much for him to lose himself to the Nails.

  At Dreagher’s other side stood Baruda. He said nothing, but he didn’t need to. He’d made his displeasure plain when he had learned that Dreagher was bringing Ruokh here with them.

  Despite the fact that a single trigger word would render Ruokh incapable of moving a muscle, Baruda had spoken vehemently against his inclusion in this gathering. Dreagher had listened to his argument, but not taken his advice.

  ‘If things turn bad, I want him there,’ he had said.

  ‘Things will turn bad if he is there,’ Baruda had shot back. ‘Mark my words.’

  ‘They’ve got nothing to gain by doing something stupid,’ came the crackling response from Zhârkhan, captain of the 48th.

  The hulking captain and his company had been readying to make warp transit, determined to sell their lives in battle against the Wolves that had been nipping at their heels since Terra, but they had turned back to rejoin the fleet once they had received word of Khârn’s return.

  ‘They strike and our entire Legion will be galvanised against them,’ said Zhârkhan. ‘They may outnumber us, but we would take a bloody toll on them, and for what? No. They will not strike unless they are goaded into it.’

  ‘I do not trust them,’ growled the Skull Taker, Kho’ren.

  ‘And they don’t trust us,’ said Dreagher. ‘Both of our Legions are right to be wary.’

  ‘They will come to talk,’ said Khârn. ‘They will not strike us as we wait. It is not their style.’

  An accord of sorts had been struck between the two Legions. As he had so often done before, Khârn had acted as the Legion’s diplomat, its voice of reason, soothing the tensions of both sides and easing the escalation before they had turned to outright hostility.

  The III Legion had agreed to Khârn’s request that the two Legions meet, face to face; a formal meeting of allies. A neutral location had been chosen; the moon on which the World Eaters now stood. The two fleets were arrayed equidistant from the moon, facing off against each other.

  Khârn had spoken with the World Eaters captains that were not here – as well as Goghur and the others – and while Dreagher knew not what they had discussed, whatever he’d said had worked thus far. The fleet was holding position. How long it would last, he couldn’t guess, but for now at least, Goghur’s lust for violence was being held in check.

  The honour guard had been chosen from half a dozen echelons. All were veterans, but then there were none within the Legion now who were not. Their captains – or at least, the highest-ranking centurions – stood to the fore.

  On Dreagher’s left stood Centurion Drask, the Master of Neophytes. Even as acting captain of the 25th, he still wore his stripped-down reconnaissance armour, painted a dusky grey, and his fraying cameleoline cloak over one shoulder, pinned in place with a War Hounds icon of the old Legion. Old habits died hard.

  Drask had trained Dreagher when he’d first been inducted in the Legion. He’d trained many of the Legion – even Khârn himself. A tough old bastard, as mean as he was cunning, there were few within the Legion that Dreagher would rather have next to him in battle. His presence was deeply reassuring.

  Khârn had chosen well, Dreagher thought. None of the captains here were berserkers or warmongers like Goghur. The legionaries picked to accompany them were those more in control of the Nails. Ruokh was the exception, but then he could be controlled with the inhibitor switch wired into his armour. Any of those gathered were capable of blind fits of uncontrollable rage when the red haze descended, of course – there was not one in the Legion who was not – but these were the most controlled of a Legion of uncontrollable monsters. They were those who could be most relied upon not to start a costly, pointless war.

  The honour guard were arranged in loose – very loose – ranks, standing before the shuttles and gunships that had brought them in: a motley arrangement of battle-worn Stormbirds, Thunderhawks and heavily armoured transporters.

  Some of the World Eaters stood with their arms folded, weapons maglocked to their armour. Others cut the air with chainblades, or crouched upon the icy, chalk-like ground. More than a few were pacing, clearly feeling the bite of the Nails as they were made to wait.

  They carried no banners. No pennants or icons proclaimed their deeds or the wars that they had won. There were no trumpeters or loudhailers to announce them. There were just the World Eaters themselves, hard, battle-scarred veterans bedecked in the skulls of those they had killed. World Eaters did not do parade formations.

  Some Legions relished the pomp and ceremony of such displays: the Ultramarines, the Word Bearers and Dorn’s stubborn, headstrong get were notable in this regard.

  None had such a reputation for ceremony and drama as the III Legion. They were late, and it was very obvious that they were making a point by having the World Eaters wait for them.

  Over Dreagher’s left shoulder, directly behind Baruda, Galerius stood tall and proud. While the World Eaters armour was uniformly battle-stained and cratered, the Palatine Blade’s armour gleamed, the purple ceramite and gold edging shined to perfection. The battle damage he had sustained fighting the Bloodborn had been meticulously repaired, and he stood sharply to attention, head high. Neither the white plume atop his helm nor his pale tabard so much as flitted in the wind, for there was none on this desolate moonscape.

  Most of the gathered legionaries wore their battle helms. The oxygen levels on the moon were a little lower than Terran standard, but that wouldn’t bother any of them. No, they wore their helms on account of the fact that going into a potential warzone without one was simply idiotic. A bolt to the brain would kill a legionary as surely as it would an unaugmented human. Why give the enemy that opportunity?

 
In front of the increasingly aggravated legionaries, standing alone before the captains, was Khârn. Statue-still, he waited for the arrival of the Emperor’s Children emissary, his snarling, Sarum-patterned helm turned out across the undulating dust-plains. He held Gorechild in a relaxed grip; his gauntleted hand clasped the massive chainaxe at its point of balance, just below the blade-housing.

  Alone among the World Eaters, Khârn appeared patient, unbothered by the disrespect being shown them by the Emperor’s Children.

  The dark, grey-blue orb of the unnamed planet the III Legion had claimed hung in the void above them. Immense swirling storms rotated slowly upon the world’s surface, like giant, staring eyes.

  ‘Where are they?’ said Solax. ‘Make your pet tell us, Dreagher.’

  Galerius stood alongside Dreagher, staring resolutely straight ahead, but he made no reaction. The World Eaters were speaking Nagrakali, the speech of the XII Legion.

  ‘He knows no more than us,’ said Dreagher.

  ‘Perhaps you are not asking him forcefully enough,’ came the snarled reply. ‘You should have killed him before now, anyway. Fed his soul to the Blood Father. What purpose does he serve?’

  ‘Back off, Solax,’ said Dreagher. ‘We are not all savages.’ Not yet, he thought. ‘He has been separated from his Legion since Terra. What could he possibly know that we do not?’

  ‘Make him speak,’ urged Solax. ‘Ask him if the Third Legion intend deception.’

  ‘Why not ask him yourself?’ said Galerius. He spoke in perfectly enunciated Nagrakali, but did not so much as deign to turn his head to look upon Solax. ‘Or do you so fear one lone swordsman that you must let others speak for you?’

  Solax spat a Nagrakali curse and reached for the massive spiked maul slung across his back. Before he had the weapon even half-drawn, Galerius’s immense, golden-pinioned sword – the blade Argentus – was at his throat. The acting Third Captain looked down at the blade, hovering scant centimetres from his neck.

  ‘You’re fast,’ he said, speaking heavily accented, guttural Gothic. ‘Wouldn’t do you any good, though. You’d get one strike, that’s all. Then I’d have you.’

  ‘One strike is all that I would need,’ said Galerius, his voice a refined contrast to the World Eater’s crude speech.

  Solax grunted, perhaps in amusement, and stepped back. Galerius sheathed the blade Argentus in one, smooth movement.

  ‘As the captain of the Ninth said, I have not seen or spoken with any member of the exalted Third Legion since Terra,’ said Galerius. ‘I have no more knowledge of their intentions here than you.’

  ‘Where in the hells are they?’ snarled Kho’ren. ‘The Nails are starting to bite.’

  Kho’ren was not the only one. Dreagher could feel the rising agitation and spiking aggression in the legionaries around him, and his genhanced physiology was already responding in kind. A threat to one legionary was a threat to them all, and they were conditioned to respond to the biological threat-responses of their brothers. The Nails just made that worse.

  The Nails pushed the Legion on a dangerous, exponential curve. When a single warrior began to exhibit combat signals – enhanced heart rate, adrenal spikes, automated combat-stimm pheromones – it began to spread to those around him, like a plague. Their anger came off the legionaries in palpable waves, further driving them towards the precipice from where there was no turning back. Within minutes, an entire battalion could succumb, becoming mindless, uncontrollable killing machines. Dreagher had seen it happen on more than a handful of occasions.

  He felt the Nails digging into his mind. They urged, cajoled and threatened to make him lose himself in their enticing madness. They scraped behind his eyes, like fingernails on glass.

  Ruokh had been wrong when he said that Dreagher hated the Nails. The opposite was true. The Nails were the only source of peace he had any more – in them, all the pain, all the guilt, and all the disappointment was blotted out. Deep within him he longed to succumb, as he knew he would, eventually. And that fact made him hate himself and what he’d become even more. As much as he yearned for the peace the Nails offered, it was anathema to him to allow himself to succumb without a fight. As painful as it was, and as much as he desired to do otherwise, he would resist them to the bitterest of ends.

  They stabbed at him now for his rebellious thoughts. His vision began to redden.

  ‘Not now,’ Dreagher breathed, gritting his teeth, his hands clenching into tight, painful fists. ‘Not now.’

  ‘Incoming gunships,’ said Baruda.

  Dreagher shook his head, clearing it.

  ‘I see them,’ he said.

  They were coming in fast, utilising the radiation glare of the system’s twin suns to partially mask their approach. Dreagher’s helmet cut out most of that blinding light, allowing him to see them as dark silhouettes against the glare.

  ‘Storm Eagles,’ said Dreagher. ‘And Fire Raptors.’

  The gunships came roaring in, flying in formation, angling directly towards the World Eaters on the ground. They were coming in low, kicking up madly swirling clouds of white chalk and frost in the wake of their powerful draught. Dreagher resisted the urge to break for cover and draw his weapon.

  ‘Hold,’ he growled through the vox. He would not let the Emperor’s Children have the satisfaction of seeing the World Eaters scatter like leaves before them.

  Red targeting icons flashed insistently before his eyes. Range-finders showed the rapidly decreasing distance to the approaching gunships. The metres fell away in a flood. Two thousand metres became fifteen hundred, became one thousand, five hundred, two hundred, one hundred. All it would take would be for one legionary to fire, and they would all be annihilated. He blink-clicked the targeting icons away, resisting the urge.

  The purple and gold gunships screamed overhead. They were so low that Dreagher could have leapt up and slapped a melta charge to their undercarriage. The sound of their passing hit a fraction of a second later, along with the hard smack of displaced air, heat and dust.

  The gunships split into two formations, each one banking sharply, bringing them around in a wide sweeping loop before they again approached directly towards the World Eaters. The banking turn had robbed them of much of their velocity, and they came in slower now, retros blasting hard, before touching down fifty metres before the gathered XII legionaries.

  Dreagher wiped grit from the exterior of his helm’s lenses. While the dust cloud had done little to blemish the already tarnished appearance of the World Eaters, it had taken the brilliant sheen off Galerius’s polished battleplate.

  Though his face was obscured by his ornate marble-white and gold helm, Dreagher could imagine the Palatine Blade’s irritated expression as he attempted to wipe the worst of the dust from his battleplate.

  ‘Your Legion,’ said Dreagher, a barking laugh ripping from his vox-grille.

  Galerius said nothing. Dreagher slapped the Palatine Blade hard on the shoulder.

  ‘It’s just dust,’ he said.

  ‘They didn’t need to do that,’ said Galerius, running a hand through his ivory plume and shaking his gauntlet free of the worst of the grit and dust. ‘It was… disrespectful.’

  ‘Your Legion chooses the children of high-riders and the noble born to join its ranks,’ snarled Baruda. ‘You pick the finest specimens from the wealthy, the decadent and kingly. It’s in your blood. We of the Twelfth are killers, cannibals and head-takers all, murderers claimed on bloody nights from the most brutal warrior cultures.’

  Baruda pointedly ran his fingers along one of his vambraces, leaving trails in the dust there. ‘You have always seen yourselves as our betters,’ he said, ‘and take every opportunity to remind us of it.’

  ‘You speak in ignorant generalisations, seeing things only as you wish to see them,’ said Galerius. The vocal modulators of his helm were of more refined q
uality than those of the World Eaters. His voice emerged from his ivory and gold helm as a deep purr, the bass resonant, like the low rumble of a feline predator, rather than the ugly growl of the World Eaters.

  ‘I was the thirteenth son of a stimm-dependant, low-hab prostitute,’ said Galerius. ‘I made my first kill at the age of nine. I was not noble born. Many within the Third Legion were not. We are more similar than you’d like to believe.’

  Dreagher looked at Galerius, considering his words.

  ‘They come,’ said Brond.

  Dreagher grunted and looked away from the Palatine Blade.

  The frontal assault ramps of all but the lead Storm Eagle were lowered in perfect symmetry, each of them thudding down onto the moon’s surface at exactly the same moment.

  There was a deafening blast of discordant, screeching noise that made Dreagher’s vision become static, momentarily overriding his helmet’s sensors. When it cleared, he saw that the legionaries of the Emperor’s Children were emerging, marching in serried ranks.

  They marched in perfect unison, bolters and exotic, nonstandard weapons held across their chests. Ornate banners were unfurled, displaying the victories and conquests of the III Legion. Swordsmen marched with golden blades unsheathed, and mighty Contemptors stomped forward, their armoured carapaces acting as tapestries for ostentatious art and fine gild-work.

  The III Legion was accompanied by a vast entourage of non-Legiones Astartes, a cavalcade of such grotesque and debauched decadence that Dreagher wanted to unload his bolter into them.

  Long-limbed, androgynous humans bedecked in skin-tight black bodysuits cavorted and danced lasciviously around the Emperor’s Children. Their faces were mutilated. Hooks and blades were embedded in many of those faces, carefully positioned to hold back flaps of flechetted skin, while others had eyes and mouths stitched shut, or eyelids or lips shorn off. Some wore masks of dead flesh, others garish make-up, and others licked at blood-red lips with forked tongues pierced by blades and jingling bells.