Grotesque cherubs, all pallid dead flesh and tiny wings, fluttered above the ranks on humming grav-suspensors, rippling conquest lists and tapestries grasped in their tiny, pudgy hands.
Most repulsive of all, however, was yet to come.
The Emperor’s Children marched forward, maintaining perfect ranks, forming a corridor leading towards the World Eaters from the lead Storm Eagle, a shuttle of gleaming gold. Once in place, they stood stock-still. The assault ramp of the golden ship began to lower.
A cloud of pink-hued vapour emerged, a pastel fog that rolled out but did not dissipate – it hung low, cloying and creeping, similar in substance to the ‘crawling death’, phosphex.
Glowing eyes appeared in the midst of that fog, and Dreagher’s body was instantly flooded with combat stimms and adrenaline. The grind of the Nails turned into a blinding hammering. This was no natural being that approached.
The first figure to resolve itself in the fog, descending from the Storm Eagle in dramatically slow steps, was an ostentatiously garbed Emperor’s Children warrior. His armour was gleaming gold, and fashioned in the likeness of heroically chiselled musculature. The faceplate of his helm was beautifully sculpted, with a single carved tear falling from the left eye. He was accompanied by a trio of golden-armoured champions bearing immense blades; his honour guard.
Terminators emerged next. Massively armoured, they wore golden helms and sweeping, feathered shoulder-guards, and carried long-bladed halberds. Still, Dreagher and his warriors barely cast a glance in their direction, their attention drawn by the creature that had emerged with the envoy of the Emperor’s Children, sent to parley with them.
Dreagher’s lips curled back in snarl.
‘Daemon-spawn,’ he cursed.
‘The Hedonarch,’ breathed Galerius.
Where Dreagher’s voice was filled with loathing and disgust, the Palatine Blade’s was one of awe.
The creature rose to its full height as it emerged from the darkened interior. It towered over the Emperor’s Children. Shadows that might have been wings – Dreagher could not draw a clear focus on them, even as he cycled through different vision modes – stretched and flexed from its back.
From the waist down, the daemon had the body of a snake, though its skin was fleshy and smooth rather than scaled, riven with throbbing veins. It moved with repulsive, peristaltic muscle contractions. Pink musk puffed from vent-like orifices running down either side of its sexless torso, the source of the cloying fog that had filled the shuttle’s interior. Two pairs of arms sprouted from its sinuous, coiling body, each ending in slender crab-claws. Its face was a thing of mortals’ nightmares.
‘This is the company that your Legion now keeps?’ said Dreagher in a low voice.
Targeting icons flickered, disappeared, and reappeared before his eyes as they struggled to get a solid lock on the creature. It was as if it were not truly here, or that it was not fully corporeal.
Galerius looked at Dreagher. His faceplate was emotionless, but Dreagher could imagine the Palatine Blade lifting one sharp eyebrow.
‘I saw your primarch on Terra, Dreagher,’ said Galerius. ‘I saw what he had become. The hypocrisy of your words is not lost on me.’
Dreagher bit back a retort. He could not disagree.
‘We have fallen far, all of us,’ he said.
Dreagher returned his gaze to the daemon. Its teeth clicked as its too-wide jaw worked. Above its dominating maw, a cluster of eyes stared at the World Eaters, unblinking.
One of those eyes was oversized and bulging. The other eyes were shrunken, gleaming jewels, embers burning in darkness.
The Emperor’s Children envoy and the daemon Galerius called the Hedonarch came towards the World Eaters as equals, side by side. Terminators marched in their wake. As they walked along the corridor formed by their honour guard, the Emperor’s Children closed ranks behind them, synchronised lines interweaving, forming a solid, perfect phalanx.
‘Look upon the face of degradation,’ drooled Ruokh. ‘Deviant filth, spitting on their gene-heritage.’
‘Speaks the voice of degradation itself,’ said Baruda.
‘We should just kill them all,’ continued Ruokh, his voice becoming more animalistic, less coherent. ‘None of them deserves to live. Take their skulls. Drink their blood. Suck the marrow from–’
With a word, Dreagher silenced Ruokh’s comms. His warriors did not need to hear his deranged ravings. He didn’t need to hear them.
‘Why did you bring him?’ growled Baruda, over a closed channel.
‘Enough,’ Dreagher said. ‘You’ve made your opinions known.’
‘I cannot understand why you–’
‘Enough, Baruda,’ snapped Dreagher, a harder edge in his voice.
‘With me,’ said Khârn.
Angron’s equerry stepped forward, striding out to meet the III Legion detachment, and the World Eaters went with him en masse.
Ruokh stamped heavily forward, the curved chainblades set beneath his massive armoured mitts whirring.
‘Steady, Ruokh,’ Khârn said. ‘This is not the time to kill.’
Not yet.
Baruda marched at Dreagher’s side, the bones adorning his armour rattling. Galerius strode with them, his head held high. His movements were stiff; he was clearly ill at ease to be surrounded by the World Eaters and facing his brothers.
It would have taken little for the World Eaters’ advance to turn into a loping run, then into a charge. This was how the Legion went to war. Without Khârn at their forefront, it may yet have turned into a bloodbath, but the Eighth Assault Captain kept his pace steady. The others matched it.
The envoy of the Emperor’s Children was undaunted by the mass of World Eaters approaching him. His Terminators marched at his back, a solid wall of gleaming purple and black adamantium and ceramite. Behind them came the rest of the entourage, marching in perfect, uniform order.
They were ostentatious to the point of garishness, and aberration was ripe within their ranks. While not as austere as their brothers of the Death Guard, the World Eaters were a deeply pragmatic Legion who disdained ornamentation and indulgence in all its forms. The Emperor’s Children were the antithesis of that, and Dreagher viewed the debauched flamboyance of the III Legion with revulsion.
While they marched in perfect parade-ground order, individual ornamentation and prideful decoration was common. Some had gaudily coloured silks or human skins hung over their battleplate, while others sported grotesque, iridescent helm-crests or impractically large topknots, overly ornate golden shoulder plates, or wore extravagant furred cloaks. Others had areas of exposed flesh – faces, abdomens, arms, a leg – covered in unsettling, serpentine tattoos or pierced with innumerable spikes and rings. Dreagher saw one battle sergeant with a strangely asymmetrical horn growing from one temple. It made Dreagher want to retch.
The envoy of the III Legion wore a long, ceremonial golden cloak, which trailed behind him like liquid metal, dragging in the frozen powder of the moon’s surface. An impractically high white crest sprouted from his elongated helm. Dreagher could see the World Eaters reflected in the emissary’s gleaming, golden lenses as they drew close.
‘Be calm,’ Dreagher said through the vox, as much to settle his own racing hearts – his secondary heart had kicked in a moment earlier in anticipation – as to placate the rising tension in his legionaries. Ruokh was not the only one feeling a sudden urge to fight. ‘These are not our enemies.’
Compared to the Emperor’s Children, the World Eaters looked exactly like what they were: a Legion that had been waging war since its inception.
When less than twenty paces separated the two Legions, Khârn lifted a hand, halting the World Eaters advance. Even Ruokh came to a grinding halt, settling into a half-crouch, his chainfists ready to do their work at a moment’s notice. Dreagher was thankful for that.<
br />
The World Eaters crowded into a loose semicircle, with Khârn at its centre – a warband gathered around its leader.
The Emperor’s Children halted as one, and the envoy at their centre cast his gaze across the World Eaters. Even with his expression hidden behind his sculptured faceplate, his arrogance and disdain at having to deal with what he would have seen as savages was obvious.
‘I am Tiberius Angellus Anteus,’ said the officer of the Emperor’s Children. His voice was a gentle purr, amplified to be heard by every warrior gathered upon the plain. ‘I am the Lord Emissary of the Third Legion. I have been sent to speak terms with you.’
‘I am Khârn.’
Angron’s former equerry strode forward, alone, moving to the centre of the open space between the two Legions. There he halted. After a moment, the III Legion envoy stepped out to meet him.
The three golden-armoured swordsmen at his back moved with him, but he stopped them with a sharp word, and they fell back into line, leaving him to meet Khârn alone. He came to a halt just feet from the World Eaters commander.
The lord emissary was taller than Khârn, and his highly ornate, opulent armour was a stark contrast to the Eighth Assault Captain’s brutish, utilitarian appearance. The appearance was as that of a meeting between a decadent, impossibly wealthy emperor and a savage warrior chieftain.
Even their weapons set them apart. The lord emissary wore a pair of slender duelling blades at his side, their hilts encrusted with gems and precious metal. Their scabbards were minor works of art, carved from ivory and inlaid with gold and onyx. A pair of slender-barrelled pistols of xenos build were holstered alongside the blades, similarly decorated.
In contrast, Khârn had a plain, old-style plasma pistol mag-clamped at his hip, and held his massive chainaxe loosely in one hand. It may have been the weapon of a primarch, but there was nothing decorative about it.
‘The mighty Gorechild, yes?’ said the envoy, gesturing languidly towards the axe. ‘I expected something more. Is it customary among your Legion to meet an ally with weapon in hand?’
Khârn reached up with one hand and thumbed the release catches on his helmet, then pulled it free with a hiss of depressurisation.
‘Better the weapon you can see than the knife hidden behind one’s back,’ said Khârn, his voice now lacking the mechanised growl of his helm.
The envoy sniffed. ‘You’ve brought your rabble with you, I see,’ he said, casting a glance across the World Eaters.
A low, warning growl rumbled in Dreagher’s chest.
‘This rabble has been at the forefront of humanity’s wars since its inception,’ said Khârn. ‘This rabble was bleeding and dying on the walls of the Imperial Palace while your Legion slaked its lusts upon the Terran populace. There are those who feel that your Legion ought to bleed, as we did.’
‘The Twelfth have ever put themselves into the heart of the meat grinder,’ said the III Legion envoy. ‘You cannot do so and then cry “foul” that you suffered heavy casualties. The Third Legion did its part in the siege. We did as the Warmaster ordered us. Horus recognised that we were capable of a task somewhat more subtle than simply charging into the loyalists’ guns. We were not to blame for the decimation of your ranks. Nor for the fact that the war was lost.’
‘Maybe,’ said Khârn. ‘Maybe not.’
‘Let us not dwell on past blemishes,’ said the envoy. ‘That was a different time. The universe is a different place now. We are not the same Legion as we were,’ said Anteus.
Khârn looked pointedly at the undulating daemon standing back with the lord emissary’s bodyguard. ‘So I see.’
Anteus laughed. It was a rich sound, honeyed and oozing contempt. ‘Don’t be judgemental, Khârn. Your Legion has changed as much as mine, and that is not simply due to the mutilations you’ve subjected yourselves to in emulation of your broken lord.’
‘Take off your helmet, emissary,’ said Khârn. ‘I like to see the faces of those who would insult Angron.’
‘I mean no insult,’ said Anteus. ‘But very well.’
He turned and removed his tall helm with an imperious flourish. A slender limbed mortal – Dreagher could not determine whether it was male or female, or some blend of the two – ran lightly forward to take it in its arms. The lord emissary brushed the mortal’s cheek with the back of his hand before turning to face Khârn.
To Dreagher’s eyes, his appearance was repulsive. His flesh was tinged violet, and his eyes were wide and unblinking. His eyelids had been surgically removed, and his pupils, as black as the void, were dilated to such an extent that they filled his orbs. They were the cold, dead eyes of a shark. Periodically, his painted red lips parted, and a too-long, fleshy tongue licked his eyes, moistening them.
‘Better?’ said the III Legion envoy. Clearly he enjoyed the effect his appearance had on those who beheld him.
Had the Nails not been punishing him, Dreagher might have laughed. Once, he’d regarded the Legiones Astartes as a higher form of humanity. Superior. The next step in the evolution of the human species. He’d long since resigned himself to the fact that they were nothing of the sort. They were genetically engineered weapons, to be used and discarded as needed. Still, to see how devolved and corrupted the World Eaters and the Emperor’s Children were now, how far removed they were from their original concept, was darkly amusing.
The Nails were punishing him, however. He did not laugh. His breathing shallowed, and his hands clenched involuntarily into fists. He wanted to cave the lord emissary’s vile, mocking face in.
He wanted to revel in the gush of hot blood spurting from ruptured arteries, to glory in pitting his strength against another worthy being and besting it. He wanted to butcher this grotesque mockery of a Space Marine, to hack his head from his shoulders and hold it aloft for all to see, screaming his defiance to the heavens, pledging his skull to…
No. Stop.
With a concerted effort, Dreagher slowed his hammering heartbeats, taking a deep, long breath. He was twitching, he realised. He stopped that involuntary movement.
Focus. Focus.
He dragged himself back from the brink. He forced his hands to unclench.
‘Tell me,’ said the III Legion envoy. ‘Why does one of the Phoenician’s noble sons stand among you?’
Khârn cast a glance sidewards.
‘Dreagher,’ he said. ‘Bring the Palatine Blade.’
Dreagher saluted, slamming his fist into his chest in the manner of the War Hounds.
‘Come,’ he said to Galerius, and took a step forward.
Instantly, the three golden-armoured warriors that formed the lord emissary’s bodyguard had their swords half-drawn. At the back, the Terminators’ weapons rose as one, locking on to Dreagher. Anteus waved them down.
‘Please,’ he said, admonishing them. ‘These are our kinsmen.’
Weapons were lowered and blades sheathed.
‘Forgive my warriors,’ said Anteus. ‘They are, perhaps, a little overprotective. Now,’ he said, looking at Dreagher and Galerius, ‘this is an unexpected development.’
The daemon slithered forward to join the lord emissary, and this time it was the World Eaters who bristled, tightening their grip on their weapons and shifting their weight uneasily. It started towards Khârn, eyeing him with its baleful gaze, its teeth clicking as its jaw flapped. The pastel musk gusted from its vents, clouding the air, and its claws clacked.
The cloying stink filled Dreagher’s nostrils as he came to Khârn’s side, and his head swam. That should have been impossible – his armour was a void-capable, closed atmosphere – and yet the mist seeped through the closed grille of his helm.
Dreagher growled and laid a hand on his weapon, intending to draw it and cut the vile thing down. Only a touch on his shoulder forestalled him. He looked down at the gauntleted hand, ready to lash out. He didn�
��t recognise it at first. Only Khârn’s voice halted him.
‘No, brother,’ he said.
The lord emissary chuckled. ‘The Hedonarch’s presence can be… unnerving for those who are not used to it.’
The daemon brushed a hand along the lord emissary’s armour, the touch intimate and casual. It glanced at Dreagher and he felt like retching, acidic bile rising in his throat. Nausea was not a familiar sensation for those of the Legiones Astartes, and it made him angry. A low growl escaped his lips, rumbling from deep within.
In the daemon’s myriad eyes, he saw a flash of multi-hued, kaleidoscopic colour, like a passing reflection. The brilliance of those hues seemed at odds with its nature, as if they belonged to something else altogether.
At his side, Galerius dropped to one knee and lowered his head. The daemon slithered forward and caressed the side of the Palatine Blade’s helm with the back of one claw. The gesture was at once gentle, nurturing and obscene.
The prodigal returns, whispered a voice that was a hundred voices.
Then the daemon whipped around, making its musk whirl and spin in tiny eddies. With a repulsive spasm of movement, it slithered behind the lord emissary, casting Khârn a baleful glance as it circled by him. Khârn paid it no mind.
‘Rise, Palatine Blade,’ said the lord emissary.
‘Take his return to the Third Legion as a gesture of good faith, if you will,’ said Khârn.
‘And have the Twelfth Legion treated you with the respect you are due, my brother?’ said the lord emissary, addressing Galerius.
‘They have, my lord,’ said Galerius, somewhat stiffly. ‘I had feared the Third Legion was no more. I am overjoyed to see that fear allayed.’
The lord emissary spread his arms wide, a beatific smile twisting his grotesque face. ‘From the ashes, the Legion rises,’ he said.
‘Pray tell me the Lord Commander Cyrius still lives,’ said Galerius. ‘I was oath-sworn to protect him.’
Khârn: Eater of Worlds Page 15
