THE HORUS HERESY®

MIGHTY HEROES BATTLE FOR THE RIGHT TO RULE THE GALAXY. THE VAST ARMIES OF THE EMPEROR OF EARTH HAVE CONQUERED THE GALAXY IN A GREAT CRUSADE – THE MYRIAD ALIEN RACES HAVE BEEN SMASHED BY THE EMPEROR’S ELITE WARRIORS AND WIPED FROM THE FACE OF HISTORY. THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE OF SUPREMACY FOR HUMANITY BECKONS.

GLEAMING CITADELS OF MARBLE AND GOLD CELEBRATE THE MANY VICTORIES OF THE EMPEROR. TRIUMPHS ARE RAISED ON A MILLION WORLDS TO RECORD THE EPIC DEEDS OF HIS MOST POWERFUL AND

DEADLY WARRIORS. FIRST AND FOREMOST AMONGST THESE ARE THE PRIMARCHS, SUPERHEROIC BEINGS WHO HAVE LED THE EMPEROR’S ARMIES OF SPACE MARINES IN VICTORY AFTER VICTORY. THEY ARE UNSTOPPABLE AND MAGNIFICENT, THE PINNACLE OF THE EMPEROR’S GENETIC EXPERIMENTATION. THE SPACE MARINES ARE THE MIGHTIEST HUMAN WARRIORS THE GALAXY HAS EVER KNOWN, EACH CAPABLE OF BESTING A HUNDRED NORMAL MEN OR MORE IN COMBAT.

ORGANISED INTO VAST ARMIES OF TENS OF THOUSANDS CALLED LEGIONS, THE SPACE MARINES AND THEIR PRIMARCH LEADERS CONQUER THE GALAXY IN THE NAME OF THE EMPEROR.

CHIEF AMONGST THE PRIMARCHS IS HORUS, CALLED THE GLORIOUS, THE BRIGHTEST STAR, FAVOURITE OF THE EMPEROR, AND LIKE A SON UNTO HIM. HE IS THE WARMASTER, THE COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF THE EMPEROR’S MILITARY MIGHT, SUBJUGATOR OF A THOUSAND THOUSAND WORLDS AND CONQUEROR OF THE GALAXY. HE IS A WARRIOR WITHOUT PEER, A DIPLOMAT SUPREME.

AS THE FLAMES OF WAR SPREAD THROUGH THE IMPERIUM, MANKIND’S CHAMPIONS WILL ALL BE PUT TO THE ULTIMATE TEST.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Dreagher, breaking the long silence, and the relaxing of tension from the other War Hounds was audible even without Astartes senses. Khârn looked around the loose square of warriors and saw sneaking relief in their expressions. Someone had finally come out and said it.

‘You need not do it.’ Dreagher could not quite bring himself to step between Khârn and the doors, but his voice was steady. ‘You should not do it.’

But other signs gave the lie to the composure in Dreagher’s voice. Khârn watched his fellow captain’s respiration move at just below combat-preparation speed, watched the veins in his face and shorn scalp tick at an elevated rate, took in the motions of his eyes, the subtle shifts of his shoulders as his body went through the muscle-loosening routines that had been part of their deep conditioning. Dreagher’s skin carried the scent of scouring-gel but underneath it, coming off his skin, was the scent of adrenaline and the inhuman essences that the Astartes body made for itself when the danger instincts rang.

They were all keyed up; Khârn’s own metabolism was escalated too. He could hardly have helped it. The air cyclers had not yet been able to carry away the tang of blood that had washed through the anteroom the last time the double doors had opened.

As Khârn worked his palate and tongue, processing and tasting the air, he realised something else: the rest of the ship had fallen as silent as the anteroom they stood in. The anteroom’s semicircular outer wall opened through to the barrack-decks, and normally the broad colonnade was alive with sounds. Voices, the clank of boots and the softer tread of the menials and technomats, the distant sound of shots from the ranges, the almost subsonic buzz of the new power weapons, all gone now. The decks were as silent as the great chamber beyond the steel-grey double doors at Dreagher’s back. The strangeness of that silence tautened his nerves and muscles further still.

Khârn ignored his body, letting it do what it will. He kept his eyes cold.

‘Eighth Company makes me the ranking captain aboard, now,’ he told them. ‘My rank, my oath and my Emperor. Together they close the matter. In case anyone is insolent enough to think there’s even a matter to close.’

‘No,’ came a voice from beside him. Jareg, the Master Shellsmith from the artillery echelon. ‘The matter to close is that we must find a way to, to…’ Jareg motioned wordlessly towards the doors, face twisted in distress.

‘We… don’t know how this will end,’ said Horzt, commander of the Ninth Company’s Stormbird squadron. Khârn watched the man’s hands form fists, shaking to match the shake in his voice. ‘And so we have to plan for the worst. One of us here, now, may need to command the Legion yet, and–’

He broke off. In the space beyond the doors a voice, deeper than a tank-rumble, mightier than a cannon-blast, was roaring in anger. If there were words to it, they were blurred and muffled by the slabs of metal in the way, but still the War Hounds fell silent. They had shouted oaths and orders and obscenities over the clamour of gun, grenade and chainaxe, over the scream of Stormbird jets, over the keen and bellow of a dozen different xenos, but Khârn was the only one who dared to speak now over that distant, muted voice.

‘Enough,’ he said, and his voice was flat. ‘I’m not stupid enough to deny what we all think and know. You all owe Horzt a salute for being the only one to find enough Astartes guts in his belly to say it. The Emperor has brought us our lord and commander. The heartspring of our own bloodline. That is who is with us now. Our general. The one of whom we are echoes. Do you remember that? Do you?’ Khârn looked from one to the next, and the War Hounds stared back at him. Good. He would have struck any of them who hadn’t met his eyes. On the other side of the scarred grey plate of the doors, the distant voice roared again.

‘Now, this,’ he went on, ‘this thing we are doing here, this is right. It is not for any Lord Commander, it is not for any high-helmed, gilt-edged Custodian, it is not for anyone–’ his shout stiffened their backs, widened their eyes ‘–to come between the War Hounds and their primarch and live. Only for the Emperor himself will we stand aside, and the Emperor has shown his wisdom. He has taken this duty and he has laid it on our shoulders.’

He looked at Dreagher again. Like Khârn, the man was dressed in white, bands of blue glittering across the high-collared tunic, boots and gauntlets a dark ceremonial blue rather than functional shipboard grey. The Emperor’s lightning-bolt emblem gleamed at his collar and shoulder. His dress matched Khârn’s own: the formal garments with which the War Hounds symbolised they were about their most solemn business. It was obvious why. Dreagher wanted to go in Khârn’s place. Wanted to go in and die.

‘We have our primarch now,’ Khârn told them, and even now he felt a little shiver at the words. All these years since they had launched outwards from Terra, watching as one mighty creation after another emerged from unreclaimed space to take their places in the ranks. Khârn had heard how the Salamanders had waited in orbit around the burning moon, waited for the Emperor’s word that the one he had found there was indeed their sire. He remembered the first sight of chilly-eyed Perturabo walking at the Emperor’s shoulder the day they took ship for Nove Shendak, and the change in the Iron Warriors when they knew who was to command them. Every Legion still with that empty place at its head felt the same longing, sharper with every voyage, every campaign. Would this next star be the one where their blood-sire lived? Would this ship, this communiqué, bring the news that their father-commander had been found, out there in the dark? And then that electric day when the word had come to the mustering docks at Vueron, the news that their own primarch had been found, their lord, their alpha, their…

And it had come to this.

‘We have our primarch now,’ he repeated, ‘and he will lead his Legion in whatever manner he chooses. We are his just as we are the Emperor’s. What we wish or plan no longer matters. The commander of the War Hounds will meet the primarch of the War Hounds, and what happens will be as the primarch wills it. So be it. No more talk.’

Besides, he thought as Dreagher saluted and silently walked to the doors, I don’t suppose it will be long before he works his way down to you. He was surprised at the thought, but surprised also at the lack of emotion that came with it. For all that the War Hounds were a hot-blooded Legion, Khârn found his thoughts flat and colourless. He took a moment to wonder if this were how others felt, the enemies who had advanced to their doom under War Hound chainaxes, or the condemned men of the auxilia in the days before the Emperor had banned the Legion from decimating allies who disgraced them on the field.

Dreagher worked the key controls and the doors swung silently outwards. Beyond them, oddly prosaic, a plain set of broad steps went down into shadows. Another roar, wordless and deep-throated, came echoing up from the gloom.

Khârn shook the thoughts away, walked forwards, and let the darkness fold over him as Dreagher swung the doors closed at his back.

Khârn came down the broad, shallow steps into the great space that had been built into the ship as Angron’s triumphal hall. He had been in it many times but it was a different space now, even with most of it lost in the dark. It felt different. Khârn registered that sensation, of walking into a strange space unfamiliar to him, and wondered if any room that held a primarch could feel the same again. He walked three slow, measured paces onto the smooth stone chamber floor, and pushed his enhanced vision through its darkness adjustments – the primarch had shattered most of the lights, or torn them from their mountings. Here and there the survivors cast glow-pools that did little more than texture the darkness around them. Some of the glows showed dark spatters and puddles across the floor, but Khârn did not bother to look closely. Even if the smell of it were not drowning his senses, he had seen the aftermath of death too many times not to know it.

He felt the urge to look around him for his brothers. Gheer, the Legion Master, who had come in here first when the Emperor had told the War Hounds they must take this duty upon themselves and then taken ship to meet the Thirty-seventh Fleet at Aldebaran. Kunnar, the First Company Champion, who had donned his formal cape, taken up his axe-staff and walked down the steps after the noises coming through the doors had convinced them that Gheer was long dead. Anchez, who had captained the assault echelon, had walked down next. He had joked with Khârn and Hyazn as the doors had been opened for him, despite the blood they could already smell on the air. The man had never known what fear was. Hyazn had been next, and two of the banner-bearers from his personal command coterie had insisted on marching down the steps into the dark with him. They had meant to block the primarch’s fury for long enough that Hyazn could speak with him. It hadn’t worked. Vanche, the master-at-arms to old Gheer, had insisted on being next, even though the next to inherit the Legion’s command, and so the duty of taking up embassy to their lord, should have been Shinnargen of the Second Company. The point was moot now. Shinnargen had met his end in here an hour after Vanche.

I am, primarch, the servant of your will, thought Khârn, and I would never dare to pronounce you the servant of mine. But still, my newfound lord, if you would make your peace with your Legion while there are still any in your Legion to draw breath…

He exhaled, and took another step into the room. For a moment he thought he could hear movement, the padding of feet, a rush of air that felt like breath before everything splintered and whirled and he crashed into a pillared wall to land hard on his back, gasping in pain.

By the time the gasp had entered his lungs, reflex had taken over and he was up on one knee, turning to put his broken right arm and shoulder to the wall and holding and tensing his left arm ready to ward as he scanned for motion, eyes sifting the gloom, pushing into infrared to see the hulking shape hurtling forwards to fill his vision–

Will overrode reflex, and with an iron effort Khârn forced his hand towards his side. Then he was skittering on his back across the floor, breath hammered out of his lungs and cracked clavicle flaring. Unthinkingly he drew his knees to his chest, turned the skidding tumble into a backwards roll. Training, determination and Astartes neural wiring let him shunt the pain to the back of his mind as he came up into a combat crouch.

Then will took over again, and Khârn made himself stand upright and placed his hands by his sides. He looked back and found the spot where he had rested a moment ago, but the floor was empty, no shape or heat-trace.

Was this how it was for the others? He caught himself wondering, and stopped thinking about it when the lapse in concentration started him swaying on the spot. He focused, half-heard movement closing in behind him and opened his mouth to speak, and a moment later was jerked up from the floor, the back of his head and neck in the grip of a hand that felt bigger and harder than a Dreadnaught’s rubble-claw. Will, will over instinct: Khârn stopped himself from kicking backwards, trying to wrench free.

‘Another one? Another one like the rest?’ The voice in his ear was a rasp, a rumble, words like handfuls of hot gravel. ‘Warrior made, warrior garbed, uhh…’ For a moment the grip on the back of Khârn’s neck juddered and his body shook like a Stormbird hitting atmosphere, then the animal growl from behind him became a roar.

‘Fight!’

He was being carried forwards one-handed in long blurring strides across the width of the hall.

‘Fight me!’ With the words, a slam into the wall hard enough to leave Khârn’s wits red-tinged and reeling.

‘Fight me!’ Another slam and the red was shot through with black. His limbs felt sluggish and only half there. The voice was bellowing, drowning his hearing, pouring into his head and trampling his jangled thoughts.

‘Fight!’ Another steel-hard grip closed about his broken arm and for a brief moment Khârn whirled through the air. Another impact and his back was to the wall, his feet dangling, broken shoulder incandescent with pain as one of the great hands pinned him against the dark marble.

It took a moment for things to clear. Astartes biochemistry stabilised his pain and his cognition, glanded stress-hormones slammed into his system and Khârn looked at his primarch’s face with clear eyes.

The cabling from crude cranial implants tumbled away from a high brow, pale eyes sat deep behind cheekbones that angled down like axe-strokes to an aquiline nose and a broad, thin-lipped mouth.

It was the face of a general to follow unto death, the face of a teacher at whose feet the wise would fight to sit, the face of a king made for the adoration of worlds: the face of a primarch.

And rage made it the face of a beast. Rage pushed and distorted the features like a tumour breaking out from the skull beneath. It made the eyes into yellow, empty pits, debased the proud lines of brow and jaw, peeled the lips back from the teeth.

And yet it was a face so maddeningly familiar, the face of the sire whose template had made the War Hounds themselves. Khârn could see his brethren in the bronze skin, the set of the eyes, the lines of jaw and skull. Pinned there and staring, the thought that flicked into his mind was of the Legion’s battles against the capering xenos whose masks wove faces out of light, taunting them with distorted mockeries of themselves.

The primarch’s grip tensed, and Khârn wondered if he had heard the thought – didn’t they say some of their sires had that trick? Slowly Angron’s other hand rose up before Khârn’s face. Even in this light he could see the crackling shell of quick-clotting blood coating the fingers. The hand made a trembling fist before his face that seemed to hang there for an age before it slowly opened to make a stiff-fingered claw. Khârn could tell how the claw would strike: a finger in each eye, powerful enough to punch through the back of the socket and into his brain, the thumb under his jaw to crush his throat, the whole hand then ready to clench and rip away the front of his skull or pull his head from his neck. Astartes bone was powerfully made – did the primarch have the power for that in just one of his hands? Khârn thought he did.

But the hand did not strike. Instead Angron leaned forwards, the snarling gargoyle-mask of his face closing, closing, until his mouth was by Khârn’s ear.

‘Why?’ And his whisper was like the grate of tank-treads on stone. ‘I can see what you’re made for. You’re made to spill blood, just as I am. You’re not born normal men, any more than I was.’ A long, savage growl. ‘So why? Why no triumph rope? Why no weapon in your hand? Why do you all walk down here so meek? Don’t you know whose blood I really – eh?’

They were close enough that he had felt Khârn’s smile against his cheek, and now he pulled back to see it. Angron’s eyes squeezed shut for a moment, then flashed open again as he twitched Khârn away from the wall and slammed him back again. It seemed to Khârn that he could feel the fingers of the hand that held him thrumming with checked violence.

‘What’s this? Showing your teeth?’ Another slam against the wall. ‘Why are you smiling?’ By the end of the question the voice was once again at that shattering roar, and even Khârn’s hearing, more resilient than human, rang for whole seconds before it cleared. And in those few seconds, he realised that the question had not been rhetorical. Angron was waiting for an answer.

‘I am…’ His voice, when he found it, was hoarse and brittle. ‘I am proud of my Legion brothers.’ He swallowed to try and soothe his dry throat so that he could speak again, but before he could take another breath he was pulled from the wall and dropped. Angron’s kick lofted him into the air in a long curve that fetched him up against a cold, torn corpse. When Khârn dragged in a breath it was full of the reek of blood and offal. There was no way to tell whose the body had been.

Bare feet thumped along the stone floor, counterpointing growling heaves of breath as Angron closed the distance. He leapt and landed in a crouch beside Khârn as he tried to make his body move. The grip clamped around him again, around his jaw and face this time, and he was dragged half-upright to stare into the primarch’s eyes again.

‘Proud.’ Angron’s lips worked as though he were chewing on the word. ‘Your brothers. No warriors. None of you will fight. Why… are… you…’ He was shaping his words with difficulty, and one hand had risen to clutch at his head. “How, uh, how can, nnn…’ And then he lifted Khârn by the front of his tunic and slammed him back down. The ragged remains on the floor gave a bloody squelch as Khârn’s back came down across them.

‘No pride!’ roared Angron, in a voice that Khârn thought dizzily could finish the job of bone-breaking that his fists had started. ‘No pride in brothers who stand there with their wits slack! Dull-eyed as a steer on a slaughter-chute! None of you fight! My brothers, my brothers and sisters, oh…’ The grip on Khârn’s tunic lifted, and he blinked his vision clear and looked up. Angron was not looking at him any more. The primarch had sunk back onto his haunches, one great hand over his eyes. His voice was still a powerful rumble, but barely formed and harsh with accent. Khârn had to concentrate to make out the words. ‘My poor warriors,’ Angron was murmuring, ‘my lost ones.’

And then he dropped his hand and looked into Khârn’s eyes. The fury was still in his stare, but it had been banked like a furnace, glowing a dull vermilion rather than roaring crimson.

‘Your brothers,’ he said in a drained voice, ‘are not like my brothers, whoever you are.’

Whoever you are. It took a moment for the words to sink in, and the next thought was, He doesn’t know. How can he not know? Still flat on the floor, Khârn took a shuddering breath.

‘My name is Khârn. I am a warrior–’

‘No!’ Angron’s fist shattered the floor beside Khârn’s head. Stone chips stung his skin. ‘No warrior! No!’

‘–of the Legiones Astartes, the great league of battle-brothers in service to our–’

‘No! Dead!’ screamed Angron, his head back, muscles corded in his neck. ‘Uhhh, my warriors are dead, my brothers, my sisters–’

‘–beloved Emperor,’ said Khârn, fighting to keep his voice cool and level, facing down the urge to gabble and plead, ‘humanity’s master, our commander and general, by whose–’

At the mention of the Emperor, Angron had begun to shudder and now he threw his head back again, baying like a beast up into the dark, shocking Khârn into silence. Then, snake-fast, his hand closed around Khârn’s ankle and with a single wrench of his body he threw him spinning through the air.

There was no time to twist in the air or curl. Khârn managed to get his arms around his head before he crashed into a chamber wall and dropped limp to the floor. Through the red-grey mist in his head he could hear Angron’s voice, still filling the chamber with deafening, wordless howls. Within his own body he could feel twitching and roiling as his implanted organs worked on his system: somewhere in there Angron had damaged something badly. Something for the Apothecarion to study, he thought. If they’re up to the challenge of identifying which scraps are mine after all this, he found himself adding, and the grim little mental chuckle from that thought was what gave him the strength to push himself, groaning, up onto his elbows and knees.

Angron’s foot landed like a forge-hammer between his shoulder blades and flattened him back to the floor, cracked sternum sending out ripping bursts of pain, feeling the fused shell of his ribcage creaking as he fought for breath.

‘You don’t injure easily, do you, you meek little paperskins?’ came Angron’s voice from above him, the words bitten out in curt growls. ‘Who makes warriors who won’t make war? Your murdering bastard commander, that’s who.’

More shifts in him as Khârn’s metabolism noted the dwindling breath in his lungs and changed its pace to use its oxygen more efficiently. He felt the tickle of pressure as his third lung shifted to higher functioning to take up the shortfall, and a warm sensation in his abdomen as his oolitic kidney worked on the heightened toxins in his blood.

‘Sends his cowardly little paperskins to die for him, oh yes, I know his sort.’ Angron’s words were running together into an almost continuous growl. ‘Hands that’ve never felt the heat of blood. Skin that’s never parted. Brain-pan that’s never been kissed by the Butcher’s Nails. Tongue that’s never… huh.’

The weight had shifted on Khârn’s back. Angron didn’t have the leverage to keep the crushing pressure with his foot, and his other foot had started to come up off the floor. Then suddenly the pressure was gone, and Khârn whooped for air with all three lungs as Angron kicked him over onto his back.

‘You’re not dying the way I’ve seen men and women die.’ Angron stood over Khârn for a moment, head high like a ceremonial statue, then began to circle where he lay, back bent and head thrust forward, a great hunting cat scenting prey. ‘You take wounds the way… hnnn…’ He dug the fingers of one hand into scalp for a moment, and Khârn could see his fingers tracing the lines of deep, runnelled scars. ‘…the way I do. Your blood crisps itself like mine, it… smells…’ His hands balled into fists, and Khârn saw the tension roll up the forearms, into the shoulders, into the neck and finally once again pulling the primarch’s features into the rage-mask. Slowly, clumsily, Khârn managed to sit up and onto one knee, braced for a new strike, but Angron kept circling him.

‘You carry yourselves like men used to iron in their hands, not air. If I were killing you on the hot dust, I’d know your names, because you’d have paid me the proper salute and we’d have turned the rope together.’ Around and around him the padding footsteps. Khârn could feel the primarch’s gaze on him like heavy chain draped over his shoulders. ‘Does it bother you, dying to one who will never know your names?’

Did it bother him, Khârn wondered? But of course that wasn’t the question. He was an emissary, here to deliver a message, not to debate.

‘We are your Legion, Primarch Angron. We are your instrument and yours to command. The deaths of our enemies are yours to command, and so are our own.’

Not a punch or a kick or a grip, this time, but a ringing, open-handed clout to the side of his head that pitched him sideways.

‘Mock me again and I’ll crumble your skull in my fingers before your mouth has finished the words.’ Angron’s voice was shaking with a precarious restraint that was more frightening than a bellow. ‘My warriors. My brothers and sisters. Oh my brave ones, my brothers, my…’ For several seconds Angron simply paced, his jaw opening and working soundlessly, his head twisting from side to side. ‘Gone they are, gone without me, I…’

Angron’s fists began to move. He beat them against his thighs and chest, brought one fist and then the other around in long looping motions to smash into his mouth and cheeks. In the new quiet of the chamber the sounds of his own flesh splitting and his grunting breaths seemed magnified, textured. Khârn watched, unable to speak, as Angron dropped to his knees, fists doubled in front of his face, muscles locked taut and body shaking.

There was a silence. Finally, Khârn broke it.

‘We are your Legion. Made from your blood and genes, crafted in your image. We have fought our way from the world where you, my lord, were conceived. We have spilt blood and burned worlds, we have shattered empires and hounded species into oblivion. Searching for you.’

Just let me speak, lord, he thought as he felt the strength coming back into his voice. Just let me bring our petition to you and then my mission is fulfilled and I am content. Do as you will.

‘We do not fight you because you are our primarch. Not just our commander, but our blood-sire, our fountainhead. No matter what, I will not raise a hand to you. Nor will any of my battle-brothers. We are ambassadors to you now. We are here for our Legion and our… our Emperor.’ Khârn tensed, but this time Angron did not respond to the word. ‘We are coming before you to plead with you to take up the rightful place that was set for you at your creation.’

He began moving, wanting to shuffle closer to where Angron knelt and hunched and shook, but even now the violence that the primarch exuded like heat made him pause. Khârn took an unsteady breath. Pain from his wounds kept sawing at the bottom of his consciousness, nagging at him. He squeezed shut his eyes for a moment, pushed himself through the battlefield exercises that had been hypnoconditioned into him on the mountainsides of Bodt, smothered the pain with will.

That gave him a moment to think, and with the respite he brought his mind to bear on this task the way he would a battlefield, a fortification, an enemy’s swordwork. He thought about his own mission, about the reports he had heard from the Emperor’s own flagship before and after the disastrous visit to the planet’s surface, about the primarch’s own words. There had been battle down there, they all knew that. Khârn felt a flicker of envy. The rebels now lying as corpses down there had already had the glory of their primarch, their primarch, leading them in–

Understanding came in a flash, given a weird focus by the pain.

‘I envy them,’ he said quietly. ‘Those ones who fought with you. I wish I had known them. They followed you to battle. That is all any of my brothers and I ask of you, sire. The chance to fight with you as they did.’

Slowly the primarch’s hands lowered from his face. He was kneeling with his back to the nearest unbroken light, looming over Khârn in silhouette, but Khârn’s vision took in enough infrared to let him see the bitter little smile on the giant face.

‘You? No nails, no rope. Hope you’ve got a good head for mockery, Khârn of the so-called Legion. We’d have had sport with you in the camps. Jochura would have been merciless. Sharp-tongued, that boy was.’ The smile lost a trace of its bitterness. ‘I’d watch him bait the others. In the cells at first and then after, when we were roaming. He’d mock, they’d laugh, and he and the one he mocked would laugh harder than all the rest of them. It… was… good. Good to watch. Jochura always swore he would die laughing at his killer.’ The smile vanished and Angron’s mouth took a brutal downwards twist. ‘I told him… told him… uuh,’ and Khârn felt the impact as the great fists smashed into the floor again. He made to speak but the words were cut off as Angron’s arm shot out, quicker than sight, and then his hand was locked around Khârn’s neck and jaw, dragging him in.

‘I don’t know how they died!’ Angron’s shout was so loud that the words seemed to fuzz into white noise in Khârn’s ears. The hand shook him like a sack. ‘We swore! Swore!’ Khârn was being yanked backwards and forwards, and Angron’s other hand beat the floor in time. Amidst all the clamour a sharp new scent imprinted itself on his senses, and Khârn 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, Khârn’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 Khârn’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 Khârn crumple to the floor. ‘Because I don’t even know how they died.’

When Khârn 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 beast 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–’ Khârn 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 Khârn 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 Khârn, slightly wrongfooted by the question. ‘I did not come in here to fight you. I say again, no 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 Khârn 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 Khârn up by the throat, yanked him into the air and dropped him flat on his back again. By the time Khârn had shakily pushed himself back up, Angron had walked away to stand under one of the lights. He turned to make sure Khârn 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. Khârn 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 Khârn 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. Khârn jumped as Angron thumped a fist against his chest with a report like a gun.

‘Red twists! Nothing but red on my rope, Khârn! Of all of us, I was the only one. No black twists.’ Angron was shaking with rage again, and Khârn 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 Khârn’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 Khârn’s injuries. ‘I can’t go back to Desh’ea. I can’t pick up the soil to make a black twist.’ Angron flung Khârn 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…’ Khârn could feel little 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 Khârn doesn’t know. No triumph rope on Khârn.’ Khârn 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, Khârn,’ said Angron, spreading his arms again, ‘but I don’t deserve it.’

‘I understand you, sire,’ Khârn answered, and he found that he did. ‘Your brothers, your brothers and sisters,’ he corrected himself, ‘they were defeated.’

‘They died, Khârn,’ 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, Khârn?’

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.

Khârn 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 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 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.’ 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!’

And the War Hounds answered him. Hands and voices lifted in salute and axe-heads were crashed against the floor. Gathering around the warrior towering silently at their centre, they shouted and saluted again, and again, and Khârn found the strength and voice to stagger to join the circle and add his shouts to theirs.

‘Primarch,’ said Angron. His voice was a murmur, but it cut the War Hounds’ voices straight to silence. ‘I am a general again.’

‘Primarch!’ shouted Dreagher in response, ‘General! Your warriors were the eaters of cities, lord, but with you to command us the War Hounds will be the eaters of worlds!’

For a moment Angron swayed, his eyes and fists closed. But then he looked at Dreagher, from there to Khârn. And he smiled.

‘World Eaters,’ he said, slowly, tasting the sounds. ‘World Eaters. So you shall be, then, little brothers. You’ll learn to cut the rope. We shall bleed, and be brothers.’ This time they all met his eyes. Slowly, one of Angron’s great fists came up to return their salutes.

‘Come with me, then, World Eaters. Come down with me and we will speak.’ Angron turned on his heel and walked back into his chamber.

Silently, supporting Khârn in their midst, the World Eaters followed their primarch down into that darkness that stank of blood.

There is only one thing worth fighting for.

He knows this, while his father languishes in the ignorance of false righteousness; while his brothers play gods to a godless universe; while heartless weaklings claim to be his sons, walking the coward’s path over the way of the warrior.

But he knows – even if no one else will listen or understand – that there is only one thing worth fighting for.

He crests the barricade, the axes howling in his hands. The dead city sends its finest against him time and again, and time and again the dead city’s finest fall back in screaming, hewed chunks of flesh and ceramite. Some wear his brothers’ colours – the royal purple of preening Fulgrim, or the drab, pale hues of cadaverous Mortarion. They charge, dreaming of glory, and they die knowing nothing but pain and shame.

Some of them wear the filthy white of his own sons. They die no differently from the others. They bleed the same blood, and cry the same oaths. They stink just the same when their bodies are ripped open, organs bared to the cold air.

Flashes of insight come to him in the storm of swords – a name etched upon white armour seems familiar for the span of a heartbeat, or the angle of an axe reminds him of another fight, back in the age of the burning sun beating down upon the red sand.

He kills every warrior that rises before him, and chases those wise enough to retreat. The former he breaks open with single blows from his straining axes. The latter he hunts in leaping pounces, the way arena beasts once hunted starved men and women.

Glory?

Glory is for those too weak to find inner strength, leaving them hollow parasites, feeding on the affection of even lesser men. Glory is for cowards, too afraid to let their name die.

He stands upon their bodies now, grinding bootprints into their breastplates as he adds to their number. A monument to futility rises at his feet: each death means that he has to climb higher to welcome fresh meat. The hammer-blows of gunfire keep on pounding into his back and shoulders with bestial kicks. An irritation, nothing more. Scarcely even a distraction. This battle was won the moment he set foot in the dead city.

He buries an axe in the chest of another son, but feels it slip from his blood-slick fingers as the warrior tumbles back. The binding chain at his wrist pulls taut, preventing the weapon’s theft, but he sees what they are trying to do – three of his own sons shouting, scrabbling to cling to the axe they stole, even as the blade is buried in one of their bodies. A warrior’s ultimate sacrifice, trading his life for the chance to disarm an enemy. Their united strength drags at his arm, turning his panting breath to a wet snarl.

He does not pull back and resist. He launches into them, shattering their armour with foot, with fist, with his dark metal teeth. Their cunning sacrifice avails them nothing but death by bludgeoning rather than the shrieking blade of a chainaxe.

Their bodies are added to the corpse monument. Every movement is pain, now. Each breath comes from ragged lungs, through bleeding lips.

There is still time, still time, still time. He can win this war without his brother’s guns.

Conquest?

What tyrant first dreamed of conquest and clad violent oppression in terms of virtue? Why does the imposition of one will over another draw men like no other sin? For more than two hundred years, the Emperor has demanded that the galaxy align itself to his principles at the cost of ten thousand cultures that lived free and without the need for tyranny. Now Horus demands that the stellar nations of this broken empire dance to his tune instead. Billions die for conquest, to advance the pride of these two vain creatures cast in the shapes of men.

There is no virtue in fighting for conquest. Nothing is more worthless and hollow than obliterating freedom for the sake of more land, more coin, more voices singing your name in holy hymn.

Conquest is as meaningless as glory. Worse, it is evil in its selfishness. Both are triumphs only in a fool’s crusade.

No. Not glory, not conquest.

He follows the blood to his prey. The warrior slouches on the ground, with his back to the wall, his armoured thighs decorated with a sloppy trail of innards. Blood marks his face. Blood marks everything on this world, but the centurion’s face is a reflection of the battle itself. Half of his features no longer exist beyond bare, cracked bone – ripped away by the primarch’s axe. The officer’s remaining eye is narrowed by the preternatural focus necessary to remain alive, without screaming, when your intestines have been torn from your body.

He should not be alive, and yet here he is, lifting a bolter.

Angron smiles at the man’s beautiful defiance, and slaps the gun aside with the flat of his still revving axe.

‘No,’ he says, savagely kind. This warrior and his doomed brethren fought well, and their father is careful to offer no humiliation in these last moments.

His other sons, those loyal to him, are chanting his name, shouting it through the ruins. They chant the name his slave-handlers gave to him when he was Lord of the Red Sands. Angron. Angron. Angron. He does not know what name the Emperor had intended for him. He never cared enough to ask, and now the chance to do so is denied to him forever.

‘Lord,’ the dying centurion speaks.

Angron crouches by his son, ignoring the nosebleed trickling down his lips as the Butcher’s Nails tick, tick, tick in the back of his brain.

‘I am here, Kauragar.’

The World Eater draws in a shivery breath, surely one of his last. His remaining eye seeks his primarch’s face.

‘That wound at your throat,’ Kauragar’s words come with blood bubbling at his lips. ‘That was me.’

Angron touches his own neck. His fingers come away wet, and he smiles for the first time in weeks.

‘You fought well.’ The primarch’s low tones are almost tectonic. ‘All of you did.’

‘Not well enough.’ The centurion bares blood-darkened teeth in a rictus grin. ‘Tell me why, father. Why stand with the Arch-traitor?’

Angron’s smile fades, wiped clean by his son’s ignorance. None of them have ever understood. They were always so convinced that he should have been honoured by being given a Legion, when the life he chose was stolen from him the day the Imperium tore him away from his true brothers and sisters.

‘I do not stand with Horus,’ Angron breathes the confession. ‘I stand against the Emperor. Do you understand, Kauragar? I am free now. Free. Can you not understand that? Why have you all spent these last decades telling me I should feel honoured to live as a slave, when I was so close to dying free?’

Kauragar stares past his primarch, up at the lightening sky. Blood runs from the warrior’s open mouth.

‘Kauragar. Kauragar?’

The centurion exhales – a slow, tired sigh. His chest does not rise again.

Angron closes his dead son’s remaining eye, and rises to his feet. Chains rattle against his armour as he takes up his axes from the ground once more.

Angron. Angron. Angron. His name. A slave’s name.

He walks through the ruins, enduring the cheers of his bloodstained followers – warriors concerned with glory and conquest, who were born better than the aliens and traitors they slay. Fighting their own kind is practically the first fair fight they have ever endured, and their gene-sire’s lip curls at the thought.

Before he was shackled by the Emperor’s will, Angron and his ragged warband defied armies of trained, armed soldiers on his home world. They tasted freedom beneath clean skies and razed the cities of their enslavers.

Now he leads an army fattened by centuries of easy slaughter, and they cheer him the way his masters once cheered when he butchered beasts for their entertainment.

This is not freedom. He knows that. He knows it well.

This is not freedom, he thinks as he stares at the World Eaters screaming his name. But the fight is only just beginning.

When the Emperor dies under his axes, when his final thought is of how the Great Crusade was all in pathetic futility, and when his last sight is Angron’s iron smile... then the Master of Mankind will learn what Angron has known since he picked up his first blade.

Freedom is the only thing worth fighting for.

It is why tyrants always fall.

Before the primarch’s ascension, before his capture, the ship had carried a different name. In those more innocent days, it sailed as the Adamant Resolve, flagship of the War Hounds Legion.

But time changes all things. Now, the XII Legion were the Eaters of Worlds, and their flagship bore the name Conqueror.

It barely resembled the ship it had once been. Ridged by brutal armour plating, spiked by countless weapon batteries, the Conqueror had become a crude bastion beyond any other warship in Imperial space.

At the vanguard of an immense battle fleet, it hung in space with its engines powered down, rank upon rank of weapons batteries aimed at a golden warship leading an opposing flotilla.

The enemy ship had never changed its name. Beyond the desecration of the Imperial eagles that once lined its spinal battlements, it remained unchanged beyond battle scars earned in the name of rebellion. Here was the flagship of the XVII Legion, and along its prow, etched in High Gothic, was the name Fidelitas Lex – the Law of Faith.

The Bearers of the Word and the Eaters of Worlds stood upon the edge of war. Hundreds of vessels, suspended in the cold void, each side awaiting the order to fire first.

On the bridge of the Conqueror, three hundred souls were frozen in their duties. The only sounds were the background mutter of servitors droning about their work, and the omnipresent rumble of the ship’s reactor.

Most of the souls, human and post-human alike, felt an alloy of emotion. In some, fear mixed with guilty excitement, while in others, anticipation became a rush of sensation not far from anger. Every set of eyes remained fixed upon the oculus view screen, bearing witness to the fleet that lay beyond.

One figure towered above all others. Armoured in layered ceramite of gold and bronze, he watched the oculus with narrowed eyes. Where others bore a smile, he carried a slit of scar tissue and cracked teeth. Like all of his brothers, he resembled his father as a statue resembles the man it was raised to honour. Yet this statue was flawed by cracks and blemishes – a twitch in the muscles around his eye, a scarred ravine running along his shaven skull.

He reached a gloved hand to scratch at the back of his head, where an old wound would never quite fade. At last, he drew breath to speak, in the voice of a man distracted by pain.

‘We could open fire. We could leave half their vessels as cold husks, and Horus would be none the wiser.’

Behind him, seated on raised throne, Captain Lotara Sarrin cleared her throat.

The statuesque warrior didn’t turn to face her. ‘Hnnh. You have something to say, captain?’

Lotara swallowed before speaking. ‘My lord–’

‘I am no one’s lord. How many times must I speak those words?’ He wiped the beginnings of a nosebleed on the back of his hand. ‘Say what you wish to say.’

‘Angron,’ she said, choosing her words carefully. ‘We can’t go through with this. We have to stand down.’

Now the primarch turned. A tremor shivered its way along the fingers of his left hand. Perhaps a suppressed need to reach for a weapon, perhaps nothing more than the misfiring synapses at the core of an abused brain. ‘Tell me why, captain.’

The captain’s eyes flickered to the left. Several of Angron’s warriors stood by her throne, their helms turned to the screen, the very avatars of cold indifference. She eyed one of them in particular, imploring him to speak. ‘Khârn?’

‘Do not look to Khârn to argue on your behalf, girl. I asked you to speak.’ The primarch’s hands were twitching, the fingers shaking like serpents in spasm.

‘We can’t go through with this. If we attack their fleet, even if we win, we’ll be crippled behind enemy lines with a shadow of the force we need to carry out the Warmaster’s orders.’

‘I did not force this confrontation, captain.’

‘With the greatest respect, sir – yes, you did. You have pushed Lord Aurelian’s patience time and time again. Four worlds have fallen to us, and each one was an assault declared against our primary orders. You knew he would react eventually.’ Lotara gestured to the oculus, where the enemy fleet – dozens of warships that had been allies only hours before – drifted ever closer. ‘You forced this engagement, and both the crew and the Legion have obeyed you. We now stand upon the precipice, and it mustn’t go any further. We can’t cross that line.’

Angron turned back to the oculus, his scarred lips curled into something like a smile. He wasn’t blind to the truth in her words, but therein lay the problem. He hadn’t expected his brother to react. He’d never imagined Lorgar would suddenly grow a backbone.

‘Khârn,’ murmured Lotara, turning to the assembled captains again. ‘Do something.’

The primarch heard his equerry approach from behind. Khârn’s voice was softer than many of his kindred; not gentle by any means, but soft, low, and measured.

‘She’s right, you know.’

Such informality would be anathema within the other Legions. The World Eaters, however, obeyed no traditions but their own.

‘She may be right,’ the primarch conceded. ‘But I sense opportunity in the winds. Lorgar was always the weakest of us, and his Word Bearers are no better. We could wipe this miserable Legion and their deluded master from the face of the galaxy right now. If you tell me that doesn’t appeal to you, Khârn, I will call you a liar.’

Khârn removed his helm with a faint hiss of air pressure. Given his life so far, the fact that his face was unscarred seemed nothing less than miraculous.

‘Lorgar has changed, as has his Legion. They have traded naivety for fanaticism, and even outnumbered, they would bleed us.’

‘We were born to bleed, Khârn.’

‘Maybe so, but we can choose our battles. We’ve pushed our luck with the Word Bearers, and I agree with Lotara. We should rejoin the fleet, cease attacking worlds on a whim, and continue sailing into Ultima Segmentum.’

Angron exhaled slowly. ‘But we could kill him.’

‘Of course we could. But would you win a battle and cost Horus the war? That doesn’t sound like you.’

The primarch smiled. It was a slow, sinister thing – a curving of the gash where his lips had once been.

‘My detractors would say it sounds exactly like me.’ As he spoke, he rested his fingertips to his pulsing temples. His headaches never ceased, but they were always at their most vicious when his blood ran hot. Today, the primarch’s blood burned.

Lotara ignored the warriors as they conversed. She had other matters to deal with, such as three hundred bridge crew caught between staring at Angron, awaiting his orders, and watching the enemy fleet growing in the viewscreen.

‘The Fidelitas Lex is matching us. She’s accelerated to attack speed, and crossed into maximum weapon range. Her void shields are still up, and her weapon arrays are primed. Her support squadron will reach maximum weapon range in twenty-three seconds.’

Angron snorted blood onto the deck. ‘We won’t back down.’

‘Maintain all ahead full,’ Lotara called out. Then, quieter, ‘Sir, you have to reconsider this.’

‘Watch your tongue, human. Ready the Ursus Claws.’

‘As you wish.’ She relayed the order, and the shout was taken up across the bridge, officer to officer, servitor to servitor. ‘The Ursus Claws will be ready in four minutes.’

‘Good. We will need them.’

‘Incoming hololithic transmission from the Lex,’ Lotara called out. ‘It’s Lord Aurelian.’

The primarch chuckled his bass rumble again. ‘Now let’s see what the serpent has to say.’

The hololithic image appeared in the air before Angron, casting the master of the World Eaters with a flickering mirror image. Where Angron was broken, Lorgar was flawless; where one brother snarled a smirk, the other offered a cold, fierce smile. When Lorgar spoke after several long moments, he had only one question to ask.

‘Why?’

Angron stared at the distorted, crackling image of his brother. ‘I am a warrior, Lorgar. Warriors wage war.’

The image stuttered as interference took hold. ‘The age of warriors is over, brother. We need crusaders now. Faith, devotion, discipline...’

Angron barked a laugh. ‘I have never failed to win a war my way. I buy my victories with the edge of my axe, and I am content with how history will judge me.’

The image of Lorgar shook its tattooed head. ‘The Warmaster sent us here for a reason.’

‘I would take you more seriously if you did not hide behind Horus.’

‘Very well.’ The rasp of vox interference stole Lorgar’s voice for a moment. ‘I brought us here, and my plan stands on the edge of failure because you cannot control your rage. We will lose this war, brother. How can you not see that? United, we will take the Throneworld. Horus will rule as the new Emperor. But divided, we will fall. You may be content now, but will you be content if we lose? If history paints us as heretics and traitors? That destiny awaits us if we grind our Legions together out here in the void.’

Lorgar hesitated, studying the other primarch as if he could glean some hidden answer. ‘Angron. Please, don’t force this battle, as you’ve forced so many others.’

Angron’s hands began to shake again. He cracked his knuckles, to keep his fingers busy. The ache at the back of his head had become a rolling, tidal throb now – an unscratchable itch within his brain.

‘The Ursus Claws are ready,’ Captain Sarrin said softly. ‘Ready to–’

Her words trailed away as the deck sirens wailed.

They burst into the void in a silent storm. The violence of an Imperial arrival was nowhere to be seen: no vortices of howling light, no battlemented warships of dark iron spilling from wounds torn in reality. These vessels shimmered into existence, as if melting from the backdrop of distant stars. On they came, already cutting ahead at impossible speeds, each one a sleek paragon of bladed majesty.

The Lex and the Conqueror came about first, each reacting to the new threat in their own way. The Fidelitas Lex lessened its thrust, slowing enough for its support squadron to keep pace. As the destroyers and escorts moved into attack formation, the Lex led them right into the enemy.

The Conqueror powered ahead, heedless of the danger of going in alone. Gun ports rattled open, and the ship’s hull thrummed with the massing rise of its weapon batteries priming.

The alien vessels swooped and rolled past the Imperial warship, not even bothering to fire. The faster ships, black against the infinite black, stirred the void around the Conqueror without committing a single volley. The World Eaters flagship was already unleashing its rage, spitting payloads in futility, consigning ammunition to the void. The deck guns shuddered as they fired, striking nothing.

The alien vessels ghosted aside, as laser fire streaked the space between stars. More and more of the bladed warships joined the dancing formation, slicing around the surrounded Conqueror.

And then, with precision that could never be born of Imperial technology, they opened fire in the exact same moment, in the time it takes a human heart to give a single beat.

Hunting alone as she was, the World Eaters flagship lit up the darkness when her void shields caught fire. Pulsar streams lashed at the energy barriers, breeding violent colours across their domed surface, reflecting the flames back against the shadowed hulls of the alien raiders.

The sirens still wailed on the strategium. The deck shook, as if at the mercy of great winds.

Sarrin reviewed the ship’s tactical displays. ‘Shields holding,’ she called.

Angron wiped his lips, grunting at the painful tics twitching the muscles in the left side of his face. When he spoke, his voice was a low, dangerous growl.

‘Someone tell me why we are vomiting all our ammunition into the void and missing every single enemy ship.’

‘We’re firing blind.’ The captain sounded distracted, hammering in commands to the servitors on her throne’s keypads. ‘The enemy’s shields allow them to slip out of target lock.’

‘At this range? These bastard eldar are on top of us!’

‘The rest of our fleet is almost ready to engage from maximum range. The Lex is closer – she’ll be with us in under a minute.’ Captain Sarrin swore as her head cracked against the back of her throne. ‘Shields holding,’ she said again. ‘Though not for much longer,’ she added in a whisper.

The primarch roared as he aimed his axe at the oculus screen. One of the raiders shivered past the screen, while the slower Conqueror struggled to turn and keep it in sight.

‘Enough! I’m tired of shooting at ghosts! Fire the Ursus Claws!’

The Conqueror shuddered again, though not because of the assault raining upon its shields. From ridged battlements and armoured ports along the warship’s hull, a tide of what looked like spears burst out into the void. Each of the lances was the size of a smaller escort ship in its own right, and of the dozen fired, seven punctured home in the hulls of alien vessels. Once impaled, the immense spears came active, locking to their prey’s ravaged insides with magnetic fusion.

But while they were effective against conventional foes, the alien vessels were forged from synthetics beyond mere metal. Two of the ships managed to slide free, dragging their ruined carcasses away from the Imperial warship, their cores holed right through and open to space.

They were the lucky ones. The five eldar cruisers still impaled shook as they were dragged off-course, stalling in the void. Their engines burned in silent heat, but each of them remained anchored in place. The spears driven through their bodies were more than projectiles, lances launched to cripple. They were harpoons, fired to claim prey.

With malicious slowness, the Conqueror recalled its spears.

The lances began to ratchet back towards the vessel that fired them, dragged home on massive chains. Only the World Eaters would deploy something so barbarous and primitive on such a scale, and only the World Eaters would make such crude weaponry into something so efficient.

Link by link, the Conqueror dragged the five ships closer, its massive engines straining against their stagnant thrust. The other eldar raiders broke away, finding it increasingly difficult to fire at the Imperial warship now using five of their own ships as barriers to protect itself.

One ship sought to cut its flailing kindred free, focusing its weapons on the great chains reaching between the Conqueror and its prey. Diving close enough to fire brought it within range of the warship’s laser batteries, and the eldar raider’s shimmering shields collapsed in an anaemic sigh. A moment later, the vessel itself came apart under the Conqueror’s rage.

Angron watched all of this taking place, a smile on the slit of his lips.

‘Release the hounds.’

Boarding pods spat from the Conqueror’s hull, crossing the short distance in the blink of an eye, and disgorging World Eaters into the bowels of the impaled eldar vessels.

‘Retract the Ursus Claws that failed to strike. Khârn?’

‘Sire.’

‘Come with me. Let us greet these eldar.’

As he strangled the eldar warrior, Angron reflected on an unpleasant truth: perhaps Lorgar had been right.

The warrior kicked in the primarch’s grip, struggling against the one hand Angron had wrapped around his throat. A tightening of the fist ended all struggle with the muted wet crackle of ruined vertebrae. He cast the corpse aside, bashing its skull open against the sloping wall.

The eldar vessel sickened him. The sight and smell of it was an assault on the senses. As soon as he’d pulled his way from the boarding pod, chainaxe revving in his hand, the sheer alien foulness of the place set his mind aching. The bizarrely sterile, spicy scent that teased the nose. The odd angles of the walls, the twisting rise and fall of the deck, and the strange un-colours that seemed formed from a hundred shades of black. Beneath it all was the sickly-sweet smell of fear, and the copper tang of vein-fluid, leaking from broken skin. Even alien vessels could smell of blood, when their bellies were sliced open to reveal what lay within. There was purity in the smell – purity and purpose. He’d been born for such things.

Splinters of alien metal clattered against his armour, tearing fresh scars along what little of his skin remained exposed. But what was a scar, really? Neither evidence of defeat, nor a medal of triumph. A scar was nothing more than a mark to show that a warrior faced his enemies at all times, never once showing his back.

Angron shoved his own men aside as he chased the retreating eldar. Their crackable armour and stick-thin limbs had a perverse grace when they moved, but it was a sickening, alien thing. One could admire a snake’s lethality, but one could never be deceived into finding it beautiful, let alone worthy of emulation.

His axe fell without heed, without care, each of his merest blows slaying wherever it fell. Ahh, the Butcher’s Nails hammered into the back of his head were buzzing now. His muscles burned, and his brain boiled with them. All that mattered was keeping the feeling going. Each sensation was reddened by the delicious justification of honest anger. This was what it meant to be alive. Humanity was a wrathful species, and anger vindicated all of its sins.

Nothing was as honest as rage – throughout the history of the human race, what release of emotion had ever been more worthy and true than depthless anger? A parent confronting their child’s killer. A farmer defending his family against raiders. The warrior avenging the deaths of his brothers. In rage, anything was justified. It was the highest state of sentience. With rage came vindication, and with vindication came peace.

Angron charged through another cannonade of splinter gunfire. Blood bathed his neck as he felt the stinging crashes against his head. A sudden nerve-sharp coldness made him wonder, just for the shadow of a moment, if his face was blasted open to the bone. No matter. It had happened before. It would happen again.

He charged on, screaming without realising it, hearing nothing and feeling nothing beyond the disgustingly pleasant whine of the Butcher’s Nails in his brain.

The wrath brought clarity. At last, with the spikes buried in the meat of his mind finally spitting their most waspish outpourings, Angron was allowed to drift, to dream, to remember.

Serenity. Never peace, no, never that.

But serenity in rage, like the calm at the heart of a storm.

Three months before, when they’d started this Shadow Crusade, Lorgar had asked him why he mutilated his own Legion. The Butcher’s Nails, of course. He meant the Butcher’s Nails.

‘Do you know what these things do to you? Do you know what they really do to your men?’ Lorgar had asked.

Angron had nodded. He knew better than anyone.

‘They let me dream,’ he admitted. It was one of the few moments in his life he’d ever risked admitting such a thing. He still wasn’t sure why he’d said it. ‘They make it difficult to feel anything except the most fierce righteousness.’ A headache thudded behind his eyes, coiling all the way down his spine. He wasn’t in the right frame of mind to have such a talk, but Horus had sent them into Ultima Segmentum to work together. At this stage, so early in their journey, the cracks of tension had yet to show.

Lorgar had smiled sadly and shaken his head. ‘Your Butcher’s Nails were not made for a primarch’s mind, brother. They steal the healing hours of sleep from you, not letting your brain process the day’s events. They also cauterise your emotions, feeding everything back into your basest urges. To kill. To fight. To slay. That is all that gives you pleasure, isn’t it? These implants, crude as they are, have remapped the cartography of your mind.’

‘You don’t understand.’ Perhaps they did do all those things, but they also brought a maddening peace that had to be chased, and the purity of absolute fury. ‘They are not simply a curse, though they may seem that way to you.’

‘Then enlighten me. Help me understand.’

‘You want to remove them. I know you do.’ He’d die before he allowed that. For all the pain, for all the twitches, tics, spasms and aches right to his bloody bones, the Butcher’s Nails brought clarity and purpose. He’d never sacrifice that. He was not weak enough to even feel the temptation.

‘Brother,’ Lorgar had sounded disheartened then, his eyes cooled by concern. ‘They cannot be removed, not without killing you. I had no intention of trying. If it is possible for us to die, you will do so with those wretched things still inside your skull.’

‘You know we can die. Ferrus is dead.’

Lorgar looked away, as if staring through the metal chamber wall. ‘I keep forgetting that. Events are proceeding so very quickly, are they not?’

‘Hnnh. If you say so.’

‘So why would you inflict this upon your Legion? Answer me that, at least. Why would you order your Techmarines to hammer these Butcher’s Nails into the heads of every warrior in your service?’

Angron hadn’t replied at once. He owed Lorgar no answers. But a thought took slow bloom in his mind – the idea that if any of his kindred could understand, it might be Lorgar. After all, the lord of the XVII Legion had inflicted punishments of his own upon his favoured sons. Even now, the Word Bearers in the Gal Vorbak were severed beings, existing with daemons trapped in their hearts.

‘It is all I know,’ he admitted at last. ‘And it has never failed me. This is how I win my wars, Lorgar. You’ve done similar things to win yours.’

‘That is true enough.’

From there, the memory grew hazy and indistinct. The degeneration followed over the course of weeks, as the two Legions suffered the rise of their masters’ tension. Forty thousand warriors in Word Bearer crimson, and seventy thousand in World Eater white, filling the decks and holds of a vast flotilla.

In the beginning, the clashes between Legion ideology had manifested in manageable ways. Word Bearers warriors had been honoured to be invited into the XII Legion’s gladiatorial pit fights, and World Eaters had been offered entrance to the XVII Legion’s training chambers. It was only as the primarchs’ discontent filtered down to their warriors that divisions arose.

The first crack in the alliance had happened at the world of Turem, a planet loyal to distant Terra. The unified fleet had only dropped from the warp to resupply, refuel, and move on deeper into enemy territory. The Legions had cast aside the pathetic excuse for planetary defences with no effort at all, and ransacked the world’s refineries for everything they required.

Within a week, the Word Bearers had been ready to move on. The principal cities were put to the cleansing flame, and all icons venerating the Imperium were broken beneath ceramite boots.

But the World Eaters weren’t finished. What followed were the long days and longer nights of bloodshed and butchery, as the XII Legion, led by their primarch, pursued the ragged remains of the population across the globe.

Lorgar’s initial disagreement gave way to disgust, and in turn became the cold anger for which he was now becoming known. Angron couldn’t be summoned, couldn’t even be contacted, as he laid waste to what little life remained on the planet.

When the last World Eaters returned to their vessels, the flotilla was ten days delayed, lagging behind its targeted estimates.

Then came Garalon Prime. The first world of the Garalon system turned about its sun at the ideal distance not only to sustain human life, but to allow it to flourish. A rare jewel, a mythological Eden, Garalon Prime stood out as a beacon of Imperial compliance, providing vast numbers of men and women for the oh-so-glorious regiments of the Imperial Army.

After annihilating the modest orbital defences, Lorgar had ordered a portion of the population enslaved, and the world burned. He vowed to leave Garalon Prime as nothing more than a blackened husk, with his fleet’s indentured crew and servitor contingents swollen by fresh meat.

But once more, the primarchs’ desires diverged. Angron led the World Eaters down to the surface, ransacking the cities and destroying all hope of a cohesive assault. As ever, his tastes ran along bloodier lines. He had no desire to leave a charred cinder of a planet as an example to the Imperium. He would leave a grave-world, a planet of silent cities and a billion bones bleaching in the sun.

And so it continued. World after world, forcing the brothers apart through desire and ideology, bringing two of the Traitor Legions close to a civil war of their own. When Angron ordered his fleet to break from the warp to attack a fifth world, the primarchs at last came to the edge of violence.

‘If you seek to stop me, Lorgar, you and your deluded Legion die first.’

‘So be it, brother. We will not fire the first shot, but we will not allow you to pass us and waste lives and resources on worthless butchery.’

‘It is not worthless. They are the enemy.’

‘But not the true enemy.’

‘All enemies are true, Lorgar.’

Strange, how Angron could remember those words with such biting clarity, but not the look upon his brother’s face. It had only been a few hours ago, yet it felt as intangible now as a childhood dream.

‘Sire.’

The voice reached him from a great distance, faint through the coppery euphoria of absolute anger. Rage that deep left its taste on the tongue – something not far from fear or ecstasy, but sweeter than both.

‘Sire,’ the voice said again.

He turned, but for a moment he couldn’t see, until he wiped the blood from his eyes.

One of his warriors stood before him, carrying a black iron chainaxe, its teeth-tracks clogged with meat.

‘Sire,’ the warrior said. ‘It is done.’

Angron’s sigh released the last of his clinging fury. In its place, pain swept back into his skull, filling the void once more. The muscles of his right hand spasmed, and he almost lost his grip on his own axe.

‘You know I despise that title, even in jest. Hnnh. Back to the Conqueror.’ He hesitated a moment, looking about himself, at the dark walls streaked with blood dappling. ‘The ship is still. No movement. No shaking. No thunder.’

Khârn stood with his boot on a fallen alien’s breastplate. The dead warrior’s armour was sculpted in the image of the spindly, thread-thin musculature beneath.

‘The battle is over.’ He knew better than to ask if Angron had failed to hear the vox-net broadcasting the void battle’s resolution. The primarch never took kindly to reminders of his wandering mind. ‘The enemy flotilla disengaged. Our combined fleets were more than enough to break them.’

Angron watched the blood dripping from his chainaxes. ‘The battle made no sense from its very beginning. What did they hope to achieve?’

‘Captain Sarrin believes xenos witchery allowed them to foresee the moment that the Conqueror would be vulnerable, as it charged ahead of the fleet. Perhaps they sought to strike at us, kill the Legion’s command structure, and run back into the night.’

‘How many escaped?’

‘Most of them. Once the ambush failed, they ghosted back into the void before our fleet could engage.’

Angron mused upon this, as he watched the red droplets fall from the edge of his axes. Each one bred tiny ripples in the pool of blood by his boots.

‘We will chase them.’

Khârn hesitated. ‘Lord Aurelian has already ordered the fleet to form up and proceed deeper into the segmentum as planned.’

‘Do I look like I care what he wishes, Khârn? No one runs from the Conqueror.’

He faced the hololithic image, doing all he could to bite back the pain and keep his temper in check. The Butcher’s Nails itched and thumped with their own pulse, and concentrating through their maddening beat was a trial in itself. They never ceased, for they were never appeased. Even with bloodshed so recent, they wanted more.

In truth, so did he. The Nails’ curse was to make him crave that serenity at the heart of rage.

Lorgar’s image wavered with distortion, crackling in the interference of his flagship readying its warp engines.

‘Need I remind you that our Legions were on the brink of battle before that pathetic alien diversion? Angron, my brother, this is our chance to reunite and let calmer thoughts lead us onward.’

‘I will pursue the eldar. Your consent is irrelevant to me. Once we’ve hunted them down, we will rejoin your fleet.’

‘Divided we fall,’ Lorgar sighed. ‘You are supposed to be the warrior between us, yet you ignore the most basic tenets of staying alive in battle. If you leave me with a third of my Legion at the edge of Ultramar, do you believe there will be anything left for you to rejoin after your idiotic void-dance is concluded? Do you think what remains of your World Eaters will be able to withstand a full assault if you are caught by the Thirteenth Legion? Or Russ? Or the Khan?’

‘If you fear being outnumbered, perhaps you shouldn’t have sent countless thousands into the meatgrinder at Calth.’ Angron sniffed back another trickling nosebleed. ‘Then they would be here with you now, instead of sailing towards death in the Ultramarine’s stronghold. Why not call them back before they strike? Perhaps they will hear you shouting from the moral high ground.’

Both brothers stared at each other’s hololithic images for a long moment. It was Angron who broke the pregnant silence, but not with another insult.

This time, he laughed. He laughed for a long time, until tears ran down the ruination of his statuesque face.

‘I fail to see what is so amusing,’ Lorgar spoke through the vox-crackle, more irritated than confused.

‘Have you ever considered the easiest way to resolve this, my priestly brother, might be to just come with us?’

Lorgar said nothing.

‘I am not making some foolish jest,’ Angron laughed again. ‘Come with us. We’ll crush these alien bastards beneath our boots, and burn their fragile ships from the inside out. Tell me, do your crusaders have no wish to punish the filthy aliens that dared attack us?’

‘We have a duty to perform here, Angron. A sacred duty.’

‘And we will perform it. Our duty is to bleed the segmentum dry, to cleave right into the heart of the Imperium’s far reaches. We will do it together. You, I and the Legions that follow us, but in the name of the gods you claim are real, let us spare no one. And let us begin with these foul eldar. Vengeance, Lorgar. Taste that word. Vengeance.’

And, at last, Lorgar smiled. ‘Very well. We will play this game by your rules, for now.’

Captain Sarrin had never tried to track an eldar fleet before. She was finding that it didn’t compare to anything else in her experience.

‘Warp signature?’ she asked.

‘Negative,’ came the servitor’s dead-voiced response.

‘Not even from a focused auspex sweep with the coordinates I gave you?’

‘Negative.’

‘Well... Try again.’

‘Compliance.’

She tried not to sigh. Lord Angron – her master and commander, whether he liked to be addressed as ‘lord’ or not – had demanded she lead the combined Legion fleet in pursuit of the enemy. The problem with that was simple: she had no idea how. The eldar hadn’t run. They’d vanished.

The keen rumble of active armour drew her attention to the side of her throne. Khârn was approaching, his features masked by his crested helm as usual.

‘Angron’s patience is wearing thin.’ He sounded calm, casual, almost resigned.

‘So is mine.’ Lotara narrowed her eyes. ‘And I don’t take kindly to threats, Khârn.’

‘That is one of the many reasons you were given command of the Conqueror. And it was not a threat. Merely an offer of information.’

‘He’s asking me to chase phantoms. Eldar ships leave no warp signature, so how am I to follow them? My Mistress of Astropaths senses nothing. My Navigator can find no warp-wake to pursue. The auspex sees nothing.’ She looked at Khârn, her own temper mounting. ‘With the greatest respect, what does he want me to do? Fly the ship around in wide circles and hope the enemy returns?’

Khârn said nothing. He merely watched her impassively.

‘I have one idea,’ she confessed. Lotara reached back to tie her hair into a loose ponytail, keeping it from her eyes. ‘We can still punish the eldar. Angron wishes to see the enemy dead before him. I think I can arrange that.’

‘And how do you plan to do it?’ Khârn asked at last. ‘If you cannot chase them...’

‘They attacked when the Conqueror moved ahead alone, outpacing the rest of the fleet. Their target was us. More specifically, their target was our primarch. When they struck, they’d been waiting for the chance to catch us while we were vulnerable, and they were willing to risk a great many lives to see Angron dead. I’m betting they’ll run the risk again.’

‘I believe I see where this is leading.’

‘Sometimes it seems that Angron cares not from whence the blood flows. But he wants revenge, and I will give it to him. Order your warriors to battle stations, and ready your elite companies for when we prime the Ursus Claws.’

‘The Devourers will undoubtedly be ready, captain.’ He sounded amused, pleased with her plan. They knew one another well, for Lotara had served on the flagship as a helm officer for years before her promotion. Captain Sarrin enjoyed risks as much as any warrior in the Legion she served. ‘What brings that smile to your lips, Lotara?’

‘We’re about to prove the great truth of the Twelfth Legion, Khârn. No one runs from the Conqueror.’

They sailed alone, deeper into the void, farther from distant Terra and away from their own fleet. Lotara didn’t know when the aliens would strike again, only that they would. Eleven hours into their sedate drift into isolation, she was still on the strategium, reclining in her throne and staring into the reaches of space. She ardently refused to give rest to her aching, bleary eyes. Not while there was a job to do.

‘Come on,’ she whispered, little realising the words had become a murmured mantra. ‘Come on.’

‘Captain Sarrin?’

Lotara turned to her first officer. Ivar Tobin wore the same crisp white uniform as his captain, and looked considerably less tired. The only difference in their attire was the red palm print in the centre of her chest – a rare mark of honour awarded to the Legion’s most worthy servants. She’d earned this accolade from the Eighth Captain himself upon her ascension to the Conqueror’s command throne.

‘Something to report, Tobin?’

‘All auspex tracking shows nothing but dead space.’ He spoke again after a brief pause, unable to keep the concern from his voice. ‘You should sleep, ma’am.’

She grinned. ‘And you should watch your mouth. This is my ship as much as the primarch’s, and I’ll not sail into the enemy’s clutches with my eyes closed. You know me better than that.’

‘When did you last sleep, captain?’

Rather than admit the truth, she chose to hide behind a lie. Perhaps it would make Tobin leave her alone. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘Then I will tell you. You last slept forty-one hours ago, ma’am. Would you not rather be well-rested when we engage the xenos?’

‘Your concern is noted, Officer Tobin. Back to your duties, if you please.’

He snapped a sharp salute. ‘As you command.’

Lotara breathed out, low and slow. She stared at the stars panning past the oculus, and let the hunt continue.

Sixteen hours later, once the Conqueror was well and truly out of range of its support fleet, the bridge sirens began to wail again.

Lotara sat forward in her throne, smiling despite her bone-aching weariness.

‘Let’s try this again, shall we? Voxmaster Kejic?’

‘Aye, captain.’

‘Open a focused pulse transmission to the largest eldar vessel, if you please.’

‘Opening, ma’am. Priming now. Transmission ready.’

Lotara rose from her throne, moving to grip the handrail at the edge of her raised dais. ‘This is Captain Lotara Sarrin of the Twelfth Legion warship Conqueror to the miserable alien fleet ghosting into existence across our bow.’ She smiled, and felt her heartbeat quicken. This was what she lived for, and why she’d been given command of such a mighty vessel in the first place. Let the legionaries fight with axe and sword. Her arena was the void, and the ships that danced within it. ‘I wish to offer congratulations on the last mistake you will ever make.’

To her surprise, a voice crashed back over the vox. Flawed by incompatible communication systems, the words barely emerged from a tide of churning noise.

‘Mon-keigh filth. You will bleed for the thousands of sins your mongrel breed has committed in its pathetic lifespan.’

‘If you wish to kill us, alien, you are more than welcome to try.’

‘Dog-blooded mon-keigh. It is a miracle you mastered even this crude speech. Your mutilated prince with the pain engine inside his skull must die this night. He will never be given the chance to become the Blood God’s son.’

‘Enough of your religious madness.’ She was smiling now, not bothering to hide her malicious amusement at their arrogance.

‘History will be so much cleaner when you are erased from its pages.’

‘Brave talk from a race on the edge of extinction,’ she replied. ‘Why not come closer? Bring those pretty ships in range of my talons.’

With a shriek of wounded noise that may or may not have had organic origins, the eldar severed the link.

‘A charming species,’ Lotara gripped the handrail.

‘Enemy fleet inbound,’ Tobin called from across the strategium.

‘Deck Officer Tobin, prime everything we’ve got – all gun ports open, all weapons live, all engines burning hot. Tactical hololithics are to update in two-second pulses to compensate for the enemy’s speed. Gunnery, fix primary targets by threat level and assign secondary targets by range. Void shields to full layer extension. Helm, accelerate to attack speed, and be ready to kill thrust with inertial resistors when we fire the Ursus Claws. All stations, status report. Deck officer.’

‘Aye, ma’am.’

‘Tactical.’

‘Hololithics live, captain.’

‘Gunnery prime, secondary and tertiary stations.’

‘Aye.’

‘Aye.’

‘Ready, ma’am.’

‘Void shields.’

‘Compliance.’

‘Helm.’

‘Aye, captain.’

Lotara sat back in her ornate throne, feeling all traces of tiredness wash away with her racing heartbeat. She keyed in the eight-rune code to activate shipwide vox.

‘This is Captain Sarrin. All crew to battle stations. We are engaging the enemy.’

The Conqueror cleaved through the alien flotilla, broadsides booming, stinging lashes of enemy fire dancing in mad colours across the abused void shields. This time, the warship focused its hunt on a single target, chasing it down with the lumbering inevitability of a mammoth’s charge.

The enemy flagship was a contoured thing of arched wings and curving blades, all reaching from a lengthy, ridged hull – a torture device, given size and power enough to sail the stars. It rolled with insidious grace, dancing aside from the Conqueror’s dive. In its wake, its knife-winged support ships unleashed their crackling fire against the World Eaters warship’s shields. They sparked with unnatural fire, glowing as bright as Terra’s own sun, and burst with a brutal lack of ceremony.

The Conqueror dived on, heedless, uncaring. It rammed one alien vessel aside, crashing into it amidships and sending the shattered hulk spinning away into the void. The raider vented air in a long, final breath, and spilled its crew into space as though they were drops of blood running from a wound.

Still, the Conqueror dived. Its armour earned new scars, new burns, new injuries carved along the dense plating by the cutting kiss of alien lasers.

The enemy flagship was running now. It recognised the warship’s intent: not to fight off the entire fleet, but to ignore the lesser craft in favour of crippling the only one that truly mattered. With impossible agility, the eldar cruiser banked and rolled away again, boosting away from its bulky pursuer.

The Conqueror’s engines roared white-hot, wide open beast-mouths screaming into the silence of space. As the warship’s immense shadow eclipsed the fleeing raider, Captain Lotara Sarrin gripped the armrests of her shuddering throne, and through the smoke streaming across the strategium, she shouted a single command.

‘Fire the Ursus Claws!’

No wide dispersal of fire, this time. No attempts to puncture several enemy vessels and separate the boarding forces. The Conqueror fired all eight of its forward-arc spears. Every one of them struck home, punching right into the body of the nimble enemy flagship. For a single second, it jerked the Conqueror ahead, before the Imperial ship’s thrusters asserted their greater, more stubborn strength.

Like a bear gripping a wolf, the Conqueror began to pull, to crush, to heave. The immense chains ratcheted back, clanking link by clanking link, hauling the eldar flagship closer.

Boarding pods were already spilling between the ships, pinpricking into the enemy’s hull.

Lotara heard two voices crackle over the vox. Two brothers, fighting together for the first time.

‘We are in,’ Lorgar voxed. ‘The smell of these wretched inhumans is toxic to my senses.’

Angron replied with a grunt. ‘Follow me, brother.’

Few were the archives that could claim a legitimate record of two primarchs battling side by side. Even in an age of war and wonder, it was the rarest of events.

Angron perceived all his actions through the wrath-haze of the buzzing Butcher’s Nails. In those long moments of berserk clarity, he saw his brother fighting for the first time.

They couldn’t have been less alike in how they moved, and how they killed. Lorgar advanced in slow, driving steps, gripping his spiked crozius mace in two hands, and letting it fall in wide, sweeping arcs. Each strike tolled long and loud, as if some great temple bell heralded every death blow. When the maul crashed into packs of the slender, shrieking eldar, it sent their broken forms flying aside. These unfortunate wretches impacted against the ship’s curved walls, and slid down in the aftermath, like a horde of ruined puppets with cut strings.

In contrast to Lorgar’s lucid, meticulous fury, Angron was lost to his emotions and the mechanical tendrils vibrating inside his brain. His twin axes, Gorefather and Gorechild, fell in frenzied, hacking chops, ripping his foes apart, killing through decapitation as often as by cleaving the enemies in twain. Blood misted around him in gouting sprays, flecking his bronze armour until it became a crimson akin to Lorgar’s.

As the brothers advanced through a vast domed chamber, Lorgar drew alongside the Eater of Worlds.

‘You should just paint it red, brother.’

Angron’s focus was on the flow of blood, the rending of meat, and the breaking of bone. It took him several seconds to tune back to being able to comprehend others’ words.

‘What?’

‘Your armour,’ Lorgar paused, turning to hammer his crozius down at an eldar carrying a spear. He pounded the warrior almost flat, and crushed the remains beneath his boot. ‘Your armour. Just paint it red.’

Angron felt a grin peeling his lips back from his replacement iron teeth. His brother was far from the first person to speak those words, but the fact Lorgar had actually been serious earned him a chorus of fraternal laughter.

The World Eater kicked another eldar aside, and bisected a third with a backhanded swing of his chainaxe. He saw Lorgar at his side, slaying three aliens with a single swing.

‘You kill well now,’ Angron said. Saliva stringed between his teeth. Blood ran in hot, slow trickles from both nostrils, and his right eye was weeping red, making a mess of his cheek. ‘You’ve changed, Lorgar.’

The Word Bearer took the compliment with silent grace, killing at his brother’s side, but he could only hold his tongue so long.

‘Those implants are killing you.’

Angron roared in the same moment, surging ahead, butchering his way down the angular corridor and painting the walls red with the chemical stink of alien blood.

‘I know you hear me, brother,’ Lorgar said quietly, into the vox. ‘Those implants are killing you.’

Angron didn’t even look back. He was a blur of gore-streaked bronze armour, both toothed axes rising and falling in efficient, rhythmless murder.

Rather than defend the ship in hopeless desperation, the eldar captain awaited his uninvited guests in the comfort of the bridge. Angron came through the door first, after sawing through the xenos metal bulkhead with the snarling edges of Gorechild and Gorefather.

A withering hail of splinter projectiles clattered and clashed against his ceramite armour, blasting chips and scraps from the war plate. Venomous barbs sank into what little of his flesh was exposed, but Angron ignored the poison pumping through his veins, trusting his genhanced physiology to purify his blood.

Oh, how the Butcher’s Nails sang. They pounded at the core of his skull, as if drilling deeper into the brain-meat to avoid the caress of eldar venom.

He endured this savage hail of fire, and amidst the second volley, he levelled his axe at the figure seated upon the throne of sculpted alien bone.

Lorgar came through after him, a tepid disregard written plain across his golden features. The merest raising of his gloved hand formed a kinetic barrier around them both, psychically shielding them from the hail-fall of eldar splinter shells.

‘Have you ever set foot on the Nightfall?’ Lorgar asked, his calm eyes drinking in the foul scene. Corpse pits ringed the central throne, with the husks of men and aliens impaled on unclean spikes. Hooked chains dangled from the ceiling, many of them ripe with stinking fruit, in the form of inhuman bodies hanging without limbs or skin.

Angron could barely reply. Wracking twitches pulled his features tight, and forced his fingers to gun the triggers of his chainaxes in muscular spasms.

‘No. Never been on the Eighth Legion flagship.’

Lorgar’s lip curled. ‘This... This looks like Curze’s bedchamber.’

The World Eater crashed his axes together. ‘Let this be done, brother.’

‘As you wish.’

The primarchs raised their weapons, and charged as one. First, the white-masked wielders of klaive swords. Angron sawed his path through them, while Lorgar hammered them aside with his maul, or sent them reeling with bursts of psychic fire. For the first time in either of their lives, the two brothers fought in unity with another being. Angron turned, disembowelling a dark-armoured bladesman seeking to attack Lorgar from behind. In turn, the Bearer of the Word protected his blood-spattered kin, deflecting an eldar’s thrust with his maul’s head, and killing the warrior on the backswing.

The union was effort to control and maintain, for it didn’t come naturally to either of them. But they held it until only one other soul remained alive on the bridge.

‘Any last words?’ Lorgar asked. The ship shook around them with greater force now. The Ursus Claws had bitten too deep. The Conqueror was pulling its prey apart purely by the strength of its grip.

Angron staggered to his brother’s side, drooling and dizzy – a flawed statue of the perfect warrior, ruined by mistreatment. As bloodstained as they both were, they could almost have been twins.

The alien prince was a thing clad in baroque, ceremonial armour; a creature of angelically consumptive features and the foul stench of impure blood beneath oiled skin. The eldar lord’s final words hissed into the air, spat from pale lips.

‘Two mon-keigh god-princes. There was only supposed to be one. The one to become the Blood God’s son. The pain engines bend the soul to the Eightfold Path. That path leads to the Skull Throne.’

‘The Blood God’s son...’ Lorgar’s focus drifted to Angron, as the possibilities played out behind his soothing eyes. ‘It cannot be.’

Angron raised his axes. The raider didn’t move a muscle.

‘Wait.’ Lorgar reached for Angron’s shoulder. ‘He said–’

But the axes fell, and the alien captain’s head rolled free.

Three days later, the Conqueror limped back to its fleet. While its hull had sustained extensive damage, most of it was superficial. The real losses had been in terms of crew; fully half the indentured serfs and trained mortal adepts were dead. On a ship of such grand size, the several thousand that remained alive were almost counted a skeleton crew.

Of the three thousand warriors Angron took with him aboard the flagship, barely a third had returned. The eldar reaped a bloody toll in their defeat, and the XII Legion’s funerary rites lasted day and night, while the ship sailed back to its kindred. The airlocks opened and closed, silent maws yawning into the void, exhaling the shrouded bodies of slain World Eaters and crew.

Lorgar made ready to depart the Conqueror, and bid farewell to his brother on the embarkation deck.

‘It was good to purge some of the bad blood between us,’ Angron said. To his credit, he kept his rebellious muscles from twitching, no matter how the Butcher’s Nails stabbed at his nervous system.

‘For now,’ Lorgar agreed. ‘Let neither of us pretend it will last forever.’

Angron wiped his bleeding nose on the back of his hand. ‘You said something on the enemy ship. Something about the Nails.’

Lorgar mused for a moment. ‘I do not recall.’

‘I do. You said the implants were killing me.’

Lorgar shook his head, offering his kindest, most sincere smile. In his mind, he heard the eldar reaver’s words once more. The one to become the Blood God’s son. The pain engines bend the soul to the Eightfold Path. That Path leads to the Skull Throne.

‘I was wrong, and my concern was foolish. You have survived this long. You will endure into the future.’

‘You are lying to me, Lorgar.’

‘For once, Angron, I am not. Your Butcher’s Nails will never kill you, I am certain of that. If I could ease some of the pain you must be suffering, then I would, but they cannot be removed, and tampering with them is likely to kill you just as quickly as removing them. They are as much a part of you now as the weapons you wield and the scars you carry.’

‘If you not lying, you are at least hiding something.’

‘I am hiding many things.’ Lorgar spoke through a smile, deceitless in his regret. ‘We will speak of them in time. They are not secrets, merely truths that cannot bloom until the moment is right, and the pieces of this great puzzle begin to fall into place. There is much I do not yet understand myself.’

The World Eaters primarch bared his teeth in a metallic smile. It contained nothing of warmth.

‘Back to your ship then, crusader. It was a pleasure to shed blood with you, while it lasted.’

Lorgar nodded, not looking back over his shoulder as he ascended the ramp into his gunship.

‘Farewell, brother.’

Angron watched the gunship leave the docking bay, and streak away towards the Fidelitas Lex.

‘Khârn,’ he said quietly. The equerry moved forward from his master’s honour guard, who stood silently in their hulking Terminator armour.

‘Yes?’

‘Lorgar has changed, yet he still keeps his secrets beneath a forked tongue. What is the name of the Word Bearer you duel with?’

‘Argel Tal. The Seventh Captain.’

‘You have known him long, yes?’

‘Decades. We fought together in three compliances. Why do you ask?’

The primarch didn’t answer at once. He reached up to scratch the back of his head. The flesh felt raw, swollen. The headache was worse than usual, coming to a crest. He could feel a trickle of blood worming a warm trail down his neck, running from his ear.

‘We have many months of difficult unity with the Word Bearers ahead of us. Remain vigilant, Khârn. That is all I ask.’

The two warriors duelled the very next night: the sons of the crusader and the gladiator facing each other in the pit, chainaxe against power sword. Argel Tal’s crimson war plate was undecorated, missing the scrolls of faith and devotion he wore in battle. Khârn’s white ceramite was similarly unadorned, but for the chains binding his weapons to his arms.

Both warriors ignored the cheers and cries of their comrades at the pit’s edge. Helmetless, they duelled in the sand, blade cracking against blade.

When their weapons locked again, the two warriors squared against each other, boots grinding back through the sand as they sought leverage. Their faces were inches apart, breathing acid-stinking breath as they struggled to break the deadlock. Argel Tal’s voice betrayed a curious duality, his twin souls speaking through one mouth.

‘You are slow tonight, Khârn. What steals your attention?’

The World Eater redoubled his efforts, muscles straining to throw his enemy back. Argel Tal responded in kind, ichor forming stalactites along his upper teeth.

‘Not slow,’ Khârn forced the words through a sneer. ‘Difficult... to fight... two of you.’

Argel Tal gave a toothy grin. As he drew breath to speak, it was all the edge Khârn needed. The World Eater leaned into a turn, letting his adversary overbalance. The revving chainaxe howled through the air, only to crash against the Word Bearer’s golden sword edge yet again.

‘Not slow,’ he chuckled breathlessly, showing his exhaustion as plainly as Khârn showed his own. ‘But not fast enough.’

The accursed implants sent a bolt of jagged pain sawing down the World Eater’s spine. Khârn felt one eye flicker, and his left arm spasm in ungainly response. The Butcher’s Nails were threatening to take hold now. He disengaged, backing away with his axe raised, taking a moment to spit out the acidic saliva brewing beneath his tongue. Chains rattled against his armour as he came en garde.

The chains were a personal tradition, spread even among the other Legions after their popularity had escaped beyond the fighting pits of the World Eaters. Sigismund, First Captain of the Imperial Fists, had taken to the custom with his usual zeal, binding his knightly weapons to his wrists on dense black chains. He’d made an impressive name for himself here in the bowels of the Conqueror, duelling with the XII Legion’s finest warriors late in the Great Crusade. The Black Knight, they called him, in honour of his prowess, his nobility and his personal heraldry.

The Flesh Tearer was another to earn great glory in the World Eaters pits – Amit, a captain of the Blood Angels, who’d fought with the same savagery and brutality as his hosts. Before Isstvan, Khârn had counted them both among his oath-brothers. When the time came to lay siege to Terra and bring the palace walls tumbling down, he would regret slaying those two warriors above all others.

‘Focus,’ Argel Tal growled. ‘You are drifting, and your skill fades with your attention.’

Khârn disengaged with a twist of his axe blade, and attacked in a series of vicious, howling cuts. Argel Tal wove back, dodging rather than risk missing a block.

The Word Bearer caught the last strike on his sword’s edge, and locked Khârn in place again. Both warriors stood unmoving as they pushed against one another with equal force.

‘The war to come,’ said Khârn. ‘Does it not feel ignoble to you? Dishonourable?’

‘Honour?’ Argel Tal’s twin voice was throaty with amusement. ‘I do not care about honour, cousin. I care about the truth, and I care about victory.’

Khârn drew breath to reply, just as the chamber’s vox crackled live.

‘Captain Khârn? Captain Argel Tal?’

Both warriors froze. Argel Tal’s stillness was born of inhuman control over his body. Khârn was motionless, but not entirely still – he trembled with tics from the Butcher’s Nails cooling in the back of his skull.

‘What is it, Lotara?’ he asked.

‘We’re receiving word from the fleet. Lord Aurelian is sending a mass-pulse from all Word Bearers vessels, focused by the Lex. Kor Phaeron’s armada has just launched its assault on Calth.’ She paused, taking a breath. ‘The war in Ultramar has begun.’

Khârn deactivated his axe and stood in silence.

Argel Tal chuckled, a threatening lion’s purr in his daemonic twin-chorus. ‘It is time, cousin.’

Khârn smiled, though the expression held nothing of amusement. The Butcher’s Nails still hummed in the meat of his mind, flicking out their pulses of pain and irrational anger.

‘Now the Shadow Crusade begins, while Calth burns.’

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Matthew Farrer

MATTHEW FARRER lives in Australia, and is a member of the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild. He has been writing since his teens, and has a number of novels and short stories to his name, including the popular Shira Calpurnia novels for the Black Library.

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

AARON DEMBSKI-BOWDEN has written several novels for Black Library, including the Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Helsreach, The Emperor’s Gift and the New York Times bestselling The First Heretic for the Horus Heresy. He lives and works in Northern Ireland with his wife Katie, hiding from the world in the middle of nowhere.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

After Desh’ea first published in Tales of Heresy, copyright © 2009, Games Workshop Ltd.

Lord of the Red Sands copyright © 2013, Games Workshop Ltd.

Butcher’s Nails first published as an audio drama, copyright © 2012, Games Workshop Ltd.

This edition published in 2013 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Cover illustration by Neil Roberts.

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ISBN: 978-1-78251-016-1

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Table of Contents

Cover

The Horus Heresy

After Desh’ea - Matthew Farrer

Lord of the Red Sands - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Butcher’s Nails - Aaron Dembski-Bowden

About The Authors

Legal

eBook license