Angron

by Matthew Farrer

  Angron wheeled, and Khârn flinched. The primarch’s eyes were 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 Khârn 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 Khârn’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 Khârn 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 Khârn, 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 Khârn 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 other’s blood instead of theirs.’ He growled, punching and clawing the air above his head. ‘And you, Khârn, owned by the Emperor who draws your blood and puts his gold-shiny puppets into the fights he won’t…’

  Khârn 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 Khârn how weak he was, how wounded, how unarmed. ‘Khârn calls me liar. Khârn 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 Khârn with one hand cocked back for a pulverising punch.

  ‘Admit it, Khârn,’ 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 Khârn’s flesh. ‘Say it! Say it!’

  ‘I saw him once,’ was what Khârn said instead. ‘I saw him on Nove Shendak. World Eighty-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, and 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. Khârn’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.’

  Khârn 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.’ Khârn’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,’ Khârn 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 Khârn’s head, yanking his hands back and forth, shuffling his feet. It was a moment before Khârn 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.’ Khârn 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 barel
y 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.’ Khârn 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, Khârn’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 Khârn 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, Khârn!’ In a blur he crossed the distance and knocked Khârn to one knee with a looping, glancing arm-sweep.

  ‘The Emperor,’ Khârn 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 a star 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…’ Khârn closed his eyes, looking for the words.

  ‘Imagine, sire, did they fight in your home with grenades? Explosive weapons, small enough to hold in the hand and throw?’

  ‘High-rider weapons,’ snarled Angron. ‘Not fit for a warrior on the hot dust.’

  ‘But imagine, primarch, some,’ he searched for the word Angron had used, ‘some paperskin who takes a grenade and simply grips it in his fist until it explodes. Imagine how it would destroy the hand, shatter the arm, ruin the body! Wherever the Emperor met one of their columns head on it shattered like that. He didn’t repel them, sire. Didn’t defeat them. He ruined them. Assault after assault, not even Perturabo when he came down to the lines for the final–’

  ‘You’ve said that name already,’ boomed Angron from behind him. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘Forgive me, sire. Another primarch. One of the first I ever saw. I was new to the War Hounds when the message went through the fleets, and I almost didn’t understand what it meant. Not until I saw the Iron Warriors and how they reacted. The very air seemed to change around them. They and we and the Ultramarines, we were travelling together. We envied them both. They had found their blood-sires and their generals. Now we have found ours.’

  ‘Another. Another one.’ Khârn risked a look around and up. Angron was standing still, hands pressed to his face again, teeth grinding as he concentrated. ‘Another one of me?’

  ‘Not like you, primarch. A brother to you. Made for conquest and kingship as you are. The Iron Warriors, they’re his Legion now.’

  ‘Brave fighters?’

  ‘Brave enough,’ Khârn answered, ‘with a wall to sit on or a trench to stand in.’

  ‘Walls.’ Angron growled the word. ‘Walls can be broken.’

  ‘So we tell them, sire. Perhaps you can–’

  ‘Walls,’ Angron cut him off. ‘When we first broke out of the caves and walked on stone, not dust, we were nearly trapped within walls. We had the weapons we’d drawn one another’s blood with and they were ready for a change of flavour. The high-riders laughed, the way they always laughed as they looked down on us on the dust, and they called out taunts the way they goaded us when we fought.’ Angron whipped his fists through the air as though he were batting at insects. ‘Sent their voices through the maggot-eyes they watched us with. Voices, voices. “Oh, do oblige, wonderful Angron!”’ Angron’s voice was suddenly, eerily imitating a higher, softly accented, singsong voice. ‘“We wagered you’d take a wound from a dozen enemies, surely a single wound, won’t you oblige and bleed for us?”’ His tone shifted and he imitated another. ‘“My son is watching with me, Angron, what’s wrong with you? Fight harder, give him something to cheer!” The eyes, the voices. The Butcher’s Nails in my head… hot… smoke… in my thoughts…’ A wolfish look stole over Angron’s face. ‘It was good to fight without the eyes and the voices. They tried to trap us but we wouldn’t stop for them. Every line they formed we rushed before they were in formation. They were everywhere, but we were fast.’

  Angron was suiting actions to words, loping back and forth, smashing and lunging and ripping at imaginary enemies.

  ‘Jochura with his laugh and his chains. Cromach, he fought with a brazier-glaive. Hah! I gave him the first black twist in his rope, and he and I burned the watchtowers at Hozzean together. Klester riding her shriekspear through the air, you should have seen her, Khârn, so fast, and, ohh…’ Angron was clutching at the metal tracery jutting from his scalp. ‘Fast we moved – fast, not hanging between walls, entrapment is death, fast, trust and discipline… Never rest, always forwards, hunger for the enemy, that’s what they taught us… Uhh, my brothers and sisters, oh, if we had known how it would end, we didn’t know!’ Angron fell to his knees and howled. ‘All that valour! The eaters of cities, they called us! All the mountain fastnesses, burning like beacons! All the Great Coast painted in blood! We devoured Hozzean with flames! Meahor! Ull-Chaim!’ Weeping and roaring, he leapt to his feet, oblivious to Khârn looking on. ‘We broke them at the river before Ull-Chaim! Hung half a thousand high-riders and kin-guard from the vine bridges! The princelings’ heads floating on the river, down to the lowlands as our heralds! The silver lace from their skulls, ahh, ripped from their skulls, wrapped on my fists!’

  The furnace rage was back. Khârn thought to shuffle away, and dismissed the idea. He would not hide from Angron any more than he would fight him. And Angron would find him anywhere in this room anyway. And no sooner had he finished that thought than he had been wrenched from the ground by each arm and swung over the primarch’s head to be slammed into the floor. Stone cracked under him.

  ‘They paid! They paid! We made them pay!’ Angron kicked Khârn across the floor, bellowing. ‘Paid for my brothers and sisters! Who will pay?’

  Dizzy, fainting, Khârn felt himself picked up and slammed down again, kicked again, grabbed by the neck.

  ‘Pay, War Hound! Pay! Fight me!’ Something – fist? Foot? – crashed into his chest and Khârn sprawled on the floor, choking. ‘Get up and fight!’

  The end of it, then, Khârn thought. Well, I carried my embassy as well as a War Hound could. He tried to rise and couldn’t, so he lay full-length on his back and spoke weakly into the air.

  ‘You are my primarch and my general, Lord Angron. I swore that I would seek you out and follow you, and I will not fight you. And if I must die, then yours is the hand I will die by. I am Khârn and I am loyal to your will.’

  While he waited, he faded from consciousness then jerked back as his system shifted itself to rouse him and the pain of his injuries sharpened. He could not see or hear Angron, but he could feel the stone floor underneath him and the cool air in his lungs. When it came, Angron’s voice was frighteningly close, almost by his ear.

  ‘You are warriors, Khârn,’ the primarch said. ‘I know warriors when
I see them.’ Khârn tried to answer but pain rippled through his neck and chest with the effort.

  ‘This… Emperor,’ Angron said, palpably struggling to keep his voice level. ‘He is the one you swore to?’

  ‘We swore to each other,’ Khârn managed to get out, ‘in his name and on his banner.’ His breath took a long time to come. ‘That we would not… raise a hand against you.’

  Angron said nothing for a time. Khârn’s consciousness had begun to flicker again by the time he spoke.

  ‘Such devotion… from such warriors…’ His voice tailed off, faded and returned. His hands were pressed to his head again. ‘A man who can… a man… to whom… your oaths… for him you would…’

  Minutes passed. Angron’s voice came again.

  ‘This room. I can leave it?’ It took Khârn a moment to work out how to answer.

  ‘This is the flagship of the War Hounds. Our greatest vessel. It is the instrument of your will and yours to command, primarch, as are we.’

  For a long time there was no answer, just quiet and dark, and just as Khârn was starting to feel his consciousness go again he felt himself lifted, slowly and gently now, and carried through the dark.

  They had looked at one another when the booming knock came on the doors, unsure of what to do, but only for a moment. Then Dreagher worked the openers, and when the locks clanked and the portals groaned open he was there. The War Hounds gasped and moved back as the giant shadow on the steps grew, advanced, came into the light. With his right hand the primarch supported Khârn, battered and hanging barely conscious.

  Angron stood, wary, wound tight as a bowstring, his free hand opening and closing. His breath rumbled in his throat. For long minutes each War Hound in turn blanched under the primarch’s gaze, until Khârn managed to lift his head and speak.

  ‘Salute your primarch, War Hounds. Salute he who shed blood on the hot dust and made the high-riders pay for their arrogance. Salute your blood-sire and the general of the Twelfth Legion. Salute the one whose soldiers were named the Eaters of Cities. Salute him, Astartes!’