Khârn: Eater of Worlds

by Anthony Reynolds

  Galerius was spinning before the severed arm fell, turning aside from the thrust of a jagged blade. Still turning, he slashed through another World Eater’s head, cutting straight through helmet and skull.

  A chainaxe roared for his neck. He batted it aside and another of the XII Legion died with a reverse thrust through the chest. Turning fast, Galerius slashed through a bolt pistol that chased his rapid movements, took off a World Eater’s head with the return blow, then planted the blade of his spitting sword through the vox-grille of another. The tip punched through the back of the legionary’s skull.

  Displaying preternatural speed and spatial awareness, he neatly sidestepped a sword thrust from behind, then reversed his strike, smashing the pommel of his golden blade into his assailant’s head.

  A bolt screamed past him, missing his head by centimetres. A lucky miss. He cursed himself for his lack of awareness. He could have been ended there.

  He turned, whipping his immense golden sword around in a blurred arc, spinning it in his hands. He cut the legs from beneath one roaring assailant, then took another under the chin. The ceramite of the legionary’s helm gave little resistance. The vengeful blade sliced upwards, cutting through the World Eater’s jaw, skull and brain before exiting with a hum of energy.

  A boot slammed into his chest, sending him reeling. He stumbled, dropping to one knee. A heavy, spiked cudgel slammed down at him. Only a desperate sway to the side stopped him from being brained. Even then, he could not avoid the blow fully. It crunched down on his shoulder, embedding itself in his ceramite plating.

  He rose to his feet, backing off to give himself more space. The World Eater – a captain, he saw – came after him. His weapon came down on him with titanic force, and he met it with Argentus. Energy crackled spitefully as the two power fields came into contact. The tip of Galerius’s blade was forced to the ground. The World Eater stepped forward, stamping one boot down upon the blade, ripping it from Galerius’s hand.

  The World Eater roared in victory, his vox-amplifiers making him sound more machine than man.

  A firing synapse providing the trigger, Galerius forced his helm to open. The faceplate snapped back in a series of unlocking sections, leaving his snow-white face exposed. Blood flecked his lips.

  His mouth opened, far wider than was natural, and he sucked in a deep breath. The subtle pink scar-lines radiating from his mouth parted, exposing the glistening, red flesh beneath. His mouth continued to widen, the lower half of his face peeling back like the petals of a blossoming flower.

  With a wet crack of bone, his lower jaw split down the middle. The two sections hinged outwards, distending his throat and mouth so that he looked like nothing of human origin at all, more closely resembling some deep-sea monster as it lunged to engulf its prey, or some horrific Neverborn denizen of the warp.

  The jarring transformation happened in milliseconds. The XII Legion centurion stepped forward to execute him, ready to bring his spiked, power-wreathed cudgel down upon his skull, but he was too slow.

  With a sharp exhalation, Galerius let loose his anger and frustration in a devastating ultrasonic scream that made the air ripple and shimmer like a mirage. It struck the World Eater like a hammer-blow, and the effect was devastating.

  The World Eater’s internal organs ruptured. His eyes exploded in their sockets, and his bones vibrated at such a frequency as to cause myriad hairline cracks to permeate their super-dense structure. The World Eater’s twin hearts faltered.

  His armour cracked, splintering like ice beneath a hammer, and he was thrown back into his comrades. He was not dead when he hit them – his death would be a painful, lingering one – but he was a fighter unable to fight, utterly crippled by the devastating aural assault. A dozen other World Eaters nearby would never hear again, their eardrums shattered, the cry having overcome even the dampeners that normally protected them from deafening ordnance.

  Then it was over, and Galerius’s over-extended mouth snapped shut, bone and flesh reknitting, and his helm clicked back into place.

  His scream had cleared the space around Galerius, and in the time before the World Eaters crashed in to fill that void, he retrieved Argentus from the ground.

  Through the press, he sought the familiar figure of Dreagher – but he was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘This is not the end, Dreagher,’ he swore. ‘We shall meet again.’

  He still stood over the fallen lord emissary. The broken bodies of Anteus’s three Palatine Blades – warriors Galerius knew by name – lay before him. The enemy were piled around them; they’d sold their lives dearly.

  ‘Come then, you dogs,’ he said, his voice clear and loud. ‘Come forward and die.’

  Klaxons blared across the Defiant’s bridge, and warning icons and floods of logistical data cascaded down the view-screen.

  ‘The Third Legion’s fleet!’ came a warning cry from the navigation array. ‘Their weapon arrays are coming online!’

  ‘We have been targeted, sir!’ called another voice.

  ‘They are advancing into attack range!’ said another.

  Flag-Captain Stirzaker didn’t need the verbal updates; he already knew it microseconds before the information reached the comms-screens and cogitators on the bridge.

  His skeletal digits tapped orders upon the slates set into the arms of his command throne, while he simultaneously spat noospheric order-packages across the bridge and sent mind-impulse directives into the ship’s datacore, getting the ship ready to fight.

  ‘Bring the guns up. Split power between frontal shields and engines,’ he ordered, his voice calm and authoritative.

  ‘Guns, aye sir!’

  ‘Shields at full!’

  ‘Engine power rising, sir!’

  ‘Come about to heading eight-eight-nine-three,’ he said. ‘Bring forward thrust to seventy-two thousand.’

  ‘Seventy-two thousand, aye!’

  A cascade of information scrolled down the inside of his gleaming silver eyes, giving him a constant rundown of the entire ship’s systems. He saw the flurry of binaric code redouble in speed and complexity as his orders were enacted. There was a remarkable beauty to it, that flow of data, though most in the universe were blind to it. Those of the Legion in particular would never understand such a sentiment.

  Satisfied for the moment that what needed to be done was in motion, Stirzaker steepled his skeletal fingers before him.

  ‘And so it begins,’ he said.

  Deep in the sub-decks of the Defiant, Skoral struck her opponent in the face with two swift jabs. His nose was already broken from a previous blow; these strikes spread it further across his face, squirting blood. She followed up with a brutal hook that caught him on the side of his jaw, and there was an audible snap of bone. He hit the sand hard.

  The onlookers roared, some in approval, others – those who had evidently chosen to back the losing side – in anger and disappointment.

  Breathing hard, Skoral pulled off the leather, fingerless glove worn over her mechanised hand, inspecting the extremity for damage. There was none. Satisfied, she gestured to the edge of the circle, ushering an orderly forward. He ran up to her, passing over her field injuries kit. She moved to her downed opponent, who was bellowing in pain, and spitting blood onto the sand.

  Kneeling at his side, she took his face in her hand, turning it as she inspected the damage. The man’s jaw was dislocated and broken in at least two places. It would need to be wired together until the bones were able to reknit.

  He tried to say something, but it came out as a garbled dribble of blood.

  ‘Don’t speak,’ she said.

  ‘You probably didn’t need to hit him quite so hard,’ said Maven, who had appeared at her shoulder. She glared up at him.

  ‘Didn’t mean to,’ she muttered, throwing an arm around her opponent and helping him to his feet.

/>   The floor underfoot shuddered, and silence descended. Groans and echoes reverberated through the armoured frame and bulkheads of the Defiant, and everyone on the sub-deck listened closely, eyes wide.

  ‘We’re turning,’ said Skoral, head cocked to the side. ‘The plasma core is firing up. Are we leaving?’

  It didn’t sound believable, even to herself.

  ‘No,’ said Maven, shaking his head. ‘This is something else.’

  Warning klaxons could be heard echoing in the distance, moments before those within the sub-deck began blaring.

  ‘That’s it then,’ sad Maven.

  ‘We are at war,’ said Skoral.

  Argus Brond rammed one of his blades through the spine of an Emperor’s Children legionary who was struggling to rise, for all that he was missing both legs.

  He sheathed the gladius, not bothering to wipe the blood off first. It would have been pointless. He was covered in it.

  He dropped to one knee, taking cover behind a stand of rocks. He had picked up a bolter some time earlier, but had discarded it when its ammunition had run dry. His bolt pistol was holstered at his side, but he had exhausted its clips early in the fight. He pried a plasma carbine from the dead grasp of the III Legion warrior he had just killed. Its core was half depleted, and it was venting cooling vapours in a hot cloud, but it was serviceable.

  He passed his gaze across the moon’s surface. It was a charnel ground.

  Corpses in the colours of the XII and the III Legions were strewn across the icy surface. Across the killing ground, the surviving elements of the Emperor’s Children were in the process of pulling back. The III Legion’s fighting retreat was ruthlessly effective, while the World Eaters chased them mindlessly, lost in the throes of the Butcher’s Nails.

  Argus Brond shook his head.

  When the pursuing World Eaters set upon the legionaries of the III Legion, they tore them apart – quite literally – but they were being led by their nose by the Phoenician’s get, who were falling back in staggered squads.

  It was clear that the World Eaters had had the better of the early exchange – the majority of the corpses in the centre of the field, where the two Legions had met, were garbed in the III Legion’s garish purple and pink hues.

  In close, there were no better shock troops than the World Eaters. The legionaries of other Legions may be more disciplined, more focused, more tenacious or more cunning, but when the blood started flowing, and battle was met blade to blade, there was simply no more deadly warrior than a World Eater.

  That too was where the Emperor’s Children’s mortal hangers-on had died, cut down as they sought to run. They also had been torn apart. Most were completely unrecognisable as having ever been human.

  Brond was not displeased to see them dead. Grotesque deviants, all of them.

  Now, however, as the battle lines were stretched and dispersing and the brutal, chaotic melee in the centre of the field broke apart, the World Eaters were being cut down in droves.

  It seemed so pointless. Their Legion was already but a fraction of its former strength, with no new legionaries replacing those that were killed. And for what?

  Already, most of the Emperor’s Children gunships were airborne. Fire Raptors were hurtling in low, cutting through the World Eaters packs in devastating strafing runs. One of the gunships was struck from below by a spearing missile as it banked for another attack run. Even as it went down, the pilot had the presence of mind to steer it into a mass of blood-crazed World Eaters, ploughing through them as it crashed into the moon and disappeared in a tumbling cloud of wreckage, explosions and dust.

  A handful of legionaries stood with Brond, using the stand of rocks as a firebase. Three were his own men. Two were of Dreagher’s cohort. The other, sporting jagged tattoos upon the sides of his shaved scalp, bore squad markings identifying him as one of Solax’s warriors.

  With the World Eaters, it was often this way. More disciplined Legions fought and died with their squad brothers, but individual fighters of the XII often found themselves scattered once the blood-haze departed.

  Isolated World Eaters were loping through the smoke, angling towards them. Brond and the World Eaters with him provided them covering fire as they approached.

  A legionary holding three Emperor’s Children’s heads by their hair saw Brond, and jogged through the smoke towards him. He wore a skull-faced helm; Baruda.

  Brond squeezed off a shot with his borrowed plasma carbine, and the head of a purple-armoured legionary crawling towards the drop-ships burst into blue flame, consumed by the liquefied heat of a contained sun.

  Baruda crashed in beside Brond, placing his back against the rocks. He too was spattered with blood, and his front was blackened and blistered from promethium burns.

  He nodded his thanks, and shook off his power maul, showering the ground with gore.

  ‘Dreagher,’ said Baruda. ‘Have you seen him?’

  ‘What in the seven hells was he thinking?’ growled Brond. ‘I could expect that kind of thing from the likes of Goghur, or Ruokh, but Dreagher? Did you know he was going to do that?’

  ‘No,’ said Baruda. ‘But it makes sense now. This is why he brought the Destroyer with us. Have you seen him?’

  ‘No,’ said Brond. ‘Not since our lines got blurred. He’s not responding to vox-reports?’

  Baruda shook his head. ‘Not for some time.’

  ‘The Nails?’ said Brond.

  ‘That, or he’s dead,’ said Baruda.

  ‘It is no less than he deserves,’ said Brond. ‘We need extraction. What’s done is done.’

  ‘This is just the beginning,’ said Baruda. He busied himself with the three severed heads he had carried, using their hair to tie them at his waist. ‘The Blood God will be pleased with the harvest.’

  ‘It is madness,’ said Brond. ‘We need to start the extraction.’

  ‘Half our number are lost to the Nails,’ said Baruda.

  ‘So we leave them,’ said Brond. ‘Not everyone needs to die here. The Emperor’s Children fleet is inbound. They’ll be in weapons range in twelve minutes.’

  ‘What of our own fleet?’

  ‘Sixteen minutes before they are within weapon range,’ said Brond.

  Baruda swore.

  ‘You see?’ Brond said. ‘If we are still here, this moon will be blasted into the ether before our fleet gets here.’

  ‘Where is Khârn?’ said Baruda. ‘We cannot leave without him.’

  Ice dust kicked up around them in wild vortices as a Stormbird came in fast, killing its speed and lifting its nose as it lowered to the moon’s surface. Its assault ramps were already falling before its clawed landing gear touched down, and World Eaters who had already been collected leapt out, beginning the process of dragging fallen legionaries’ bodies onto the assault boat, under the shouted directions of Brond.

  A handful of warriors moved onto the field, aiming missile launchers skyward, scanning for enemy attack craft seeking to target the vulnerable Stormbird – this was always the easiest time to take one of the powerful craft down.

  Baruda slammed a fresh clip into his bolt pistol, took up his power maul once more, and rose to his feet.

  ‘I will find Dreagher,’ he said.

  ‘Leave him!’ Brond snapped. ‘We are better off without him. He’s the one that caused this.’

  ‘He is my captain,’ said the skull-helmed warrior. ‘I must find him.’

  Brond shook his head. Without further words, Baruda pushed out from the rocks, pistol bucking in his hand, and was gone.

  Chapter 16

  Blood.

  It was all that he could see, drowning his vision in a sea of red. It was all he could hear, blotting out everything, his twin hearts thundering like war drums.

  Thump-thump-thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump-thump.

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nbsp; No… there was something else. A voice. He heard it vaguely, as if it was coming to him from a great distance.

  Reality reasserted itself. The roar of engines crashed over him. It struck him like a physical blow.

  Behind it, for a moment, he heard the visceral onslaught of battle: the roar of weapons, the cries of the dying, the bellow of those lost to the Nails; the clash of blades, the deep resonant boom of heavy weapon fire. But that quickly faded. It was not real. It was just a remnant, an echo of what had brought him here, what had come before.

  But where was here?

  The red veil bled away, leaving him in darkness. He was seated, locked in placed with a harness restraint. He was jolted sharply, striking the back of his head. He wasn’t wearing his helmet. He had no notion of how he had lost it.

  The voice came in at him again, louder this time. Insistent. It was close.

  ‘Dreagher.’

  A dark, red-hazed figure resolved itself before him, seated opposite.

  Khârn.

  His head was bare, his long, serious face pale and sepulchral in the gloom. His expression: unnaturally calm, almost disinterested. His eyes: burning with rage.

  Dreagher took in his surroundings. He had no recollection of how he came to be here, not yet, but that was nothing unusual. It often took him some time to piece together the time he had lost to the Nails.

  He was within the armoured belly of a gunship. The interior was claustrophobic, and it stank of oil, blood, cordite and aggression. Gore-drenched World Eaters packed its tight confines, shoulder to shoulder. Their armour buzzed angrily as they reloaded their weapons and wiped congealed body tissue from their blades.

  He was gripping his gladius tightly. Bloodied chunks of flesh clung to the blade. He didn’t know whose blood it was. With a conscious effort, he relaxed his grip. He eased his fingers off the sword’s hilt, breaking the glue of semi-congealed gore.

  He touched his face, feeling a dull pain there. A deep cut ran from his temple to his lip. It had cut to the bone. Blade wound. He presumed he’d killed whoever had given it to him, else he would be the one now dead.