A squad of Word Bearers stood in a half-circle around one of their battle tanks. Their chanting was an impassioned chorus, sounding disgustingly close to worship. It was in Colchisian, of course. The Word Bearers rarely deigned to speak Low Gothic, even around their brother Legion. Yet another bone of contention.
Their murmured prayers broke off as Khârn came closer.
‘Captain,’ one of them greeted him. Behind the sergeant, three Ultramarines were lashed in crucified ruin to the tank’s hull. Iron spikes had been driven through the warriors’ arms and chests, impaling them in place. All three legionaries of the XIII were still twitching, still struggling – even the one with a spike through his throat. It was hard not to admire such tenacity.
Khârn lifted his axe to gesture at the crucified Ultramarines. ‘You truly have time for this desecration?’ He kept the edge of condescension from his voice. Just.
The Word Bearers sergeant, clad in the crimson of his Legion’s new livery, closed the holy book he’d been reading aloud to his men. The tome’s pages met with a soft thump, and the book fell to hang on a short chain bound to the warrior’s belt.
‘It seems you have time to run off into the dust and get separated from your men, World Eater.’
Khârn felt the tick-tick-tick of the Butcher’s Nails start again in the back of his brain. Misfiring signals from his skull made his fingertips tense, and he accidentally gunned his chainaxe’s trigger, making the saw-teeth whine as they chewed air. The Word Bearers clutched their bolters tighter, but made no overt threat of their own.
‘Watch your words,’ Khârn warned. ‘Get back into the fight, all of you. Victory is hardly guaranteed here.’
The sergeant, his faceplate silver against the red of his helm, looked back to the tortured Ultramarines for a moment.
‘This is a sacred observance. We do not take orders from you, centurion.’
‘And yet,’ Khârn said, smiling behind his faceplate, ‘this time, you will.’
The incoming whine of overburned jump pack engines punctuated his words. Skane was the first to land, hitting the ground running, skidding to a halt at his captain’s side. The rest of his Destroyers came down in ragged order, weapons holstered, bandoliers of radiation grenades rattling against their armour.
‘Is there a problem, captain?’ Skane asked. The gritty, dusty wind clattered against his scorched ceramite. The only colour on his war plate was the leering red of his eye lenses. Beyond that, he and his brothers could have been shadows born from the ash – the ghosts of warriors slain in flame.
Khârn didn’t answer. He kept staring at the Word Bearers sergeant. ‘Back into the battle.’
Khârn, Eighth Captain of the World Eaters
Buildings fell in the distance, with the distinctive thunder of dying architecture. ‘Yes, sir,’ the Word Bearers officer said at last.
Khârn finally turned to Skane. ‘Come with me.’
The Eighth Captain of the XII Legion left the Word Bearers by their Land Raider. His Destroyers followed.
‘Making friends, sir?’ Skane asked in Nagrakali, all guttural grunts.
‘Speak Gothic,’ replied Khârn. ‘Make the effort to cooperate, even if the Word Bearers refuse to do the same.’
Skane’s articulated collar gave a low whine as he turned to look at his captain. ‘I wouldn’t piss on a Word Bearer even if he was on fire. You think I care what toys they use to fly around in?’
‘Just do as I ask, Skane.’
The Destroyer shrugged. ‘Of course, sir.’
‘Report,’ Khârn prompted.
He could hear Skane’s quiet chuckle behind the scorched faceplate. ‘You’re not going to like this, sir.’
Khârn resisted the urge to sigh. ‘Where’s Angron?’
‘No one knows for certain. He was Lost to the Nails after we took the Krytica Junction half an hour ago. Delvarus was the last to report in; he says he saw the primarch eating some of the enemy dead.’
‘Tell me that’s a joke.’
Skane shrugged again.
Maybe Lotara was right. Maybe they should have just let her bombard Armatura into dust.
‘Why is Delvarus down here?’
‘It seems Lotara let him slip the leash. The flagship’s hardly going to be boarded by anything worthwhile during that mess in the sky.’
Khârn waved the matter away. ‘I need to get to the front line,’ he said. ‘Someone has to coordinate the assault with the Legio Audax. Damn it, I don’t even know if we’re winning.’
‘I can answer that one for you, sir,’ Skane replied. ‘We’re most definitely not winning.’
Magnus watched the warring heavens. Mostly, he watched the Blessed Lady and her twin sister, the Trisagion, making a mockery of Armatura’s orbital arrays, dismantling one of the best-defended worlds in the Imperium with barrage after barrage from their howling, flashing weapon decks.
‘You’ll need those at Terra,’ he said softly. Lorgar didn’t answer. His brother hadn’t answered anything in some time.
The ships’ size and scale rendered all countermeasures obsolete. For the first hour, nothing could punch through their shields. Nothing even managed to scrape their skin. It took the combined firepower of a battle-station, two orbital defence platforms and a suicidal ramming from the Imperial warship Steel Sky to finally burst the Blessed Lady’s shields. She sailed on, oblivious to the thousands dying within one of the flaming monasteries on her back, for their agonies made no difference at all to a crew of half a million.
Lorgar knelt at the basilica’s heart, head lowered in prayer. The mere sight of it made Magnus’s skin crawl. Despite the aetheric nature of his new form, some instincts died hard.
‘Lorgar,’ he said. His brother’s answer was to keep whispering his blasphemous, deluded devotions. ‘Lorgar,’ Magnus growled.
The Word Bearer looked up, his inked face one of transcendent focus. He blinked then, for the first time in half an hour.
‘Something is wrong.’ Lorgar rose to his feet, boots sending cracks along the mosaic floor. He held out a hand towards one of the hundred bookshelves, and his crozius maul slashed across the cold air to land neatly in his right fist. ‘We will speak soon. Farewell, Magnus.’
‘Going to war, brother?’ the sorcerer asked.
‘I am needed on Armatura,’ the Word Bearer replied.
‘Ah. Don’t you wish to talk me into the war? That is why you summoned me, is it not?’
Lorgar didn’t look back. ‘I know your decision, Magnus. You will stand with us at Terra. I was told this by the gods you insist aren’t real.’
The sorcerer shook his head in dismissal. ‘Tell me what demands your presence on the surface.’
Lorgar sealed his tri-horned helm in place, speaking before leaving the chamber.
‘Angron is in trouble.’
FOUR
Buried Alive
Communion
Valika Junction
Serenity fled from him.
He clawed after it, raging against the futility of his own desperation. The taste of failure was already coating his tongue with familiar bitterness. He screamed skywards, wanting rainwater to wash the taste from his teeth. His scream ended dry.
He’d been so close to serenity that time. So close.
Yet it fled, hurling him back into the world of bleeding meat and bruised bone – a life where his violated skull pulsed fire around his body in rhythm with his racing heart.
He wished for something, anything, to ease the clockwork agony engine in his brain, mutilating his mind with its poison.
And he was weak. Weak and blind. He trembled in the dark, shivering and pained and inhaling the reek of his own blood. He couldn’t see his hands before his face, but he felt how they bled.
Angron, said a voice.
Angron. The name meant
nothing.
Angron. Angron. Angron. Several voices. Ten, maybe twenty. He wasn’t sure. He roared a second time, bellowing for them to get out of his head.
I can’t reach him, the strongest of the voices said. The Nails have truly damaged his mind this time.
I can’t reach him, either, said another.
Then we have to risk Communion, said yet another.
The response was a silent wave of cold, cold repulsion, the psychic reflection of magnets refusing to bond.
No, one of the voices said in the wake of the nausea. Esca, no.
The strongest agreed. We cannot countenance Communion again. Think of the losses last time, and how much weaker we will be without them.
Then what? Do you trust Lord Aurelian?
An amusing notion.
Lorgar is powerful beyond our reckoning. He could reach Angron.
Lord Aurelian hasn’t even made planetfall, and I am unwilling to trust him in a matter this delicate. We have to risk Communion. It must be us.
And if we don’t?
The arguing voices fell silent. Their hesitation made him smile, though he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because it stank of indecision, and indecision stank of cowardice.
He’s dying, the lead voice finally said. This is one step beyond being lost to the Nails. He will never recover without our aid.
Leave me be, he thought. Leave me be. Get out of my head.
Vorias… said one of the voices. Give the order.
Another long pause, another hesitation that reeked of fear. Cowardice wasn’t the fear of death. Cowardice was having something to lose. What worth was a warrior who forged attachments to the impermanence of the world around him? Everything faded. Everything died. Everything decayed. Attachment was weakness.
The men behind these voices had something to lose, and it made them afraid. That made them weak.
Brothers, said the lead voice, reluctantly. Join me in Communion.
He turned from the irritating buzz the voices were becoming. His knuckles whitened and cracked as he clutched the drenched handles of his axes. When he opened his eyes, confronted by the utter blackness of his surroundings, he screamed through a mouthful of bloody froth and started digging. No surrender. No submission.
Despite no knowledge of who he was or why he was entombed, the kicking, thrashing part of his hind-brain focused on one thought. This wasn’t the first time he’d been buried alive.
With no up, no down, there was only ahead or dead.
Khârn tasted his own blood – a rare and unwelcome flavour. The Ultramarine before him refused to die, and while he could sympathise with the warrior’s will, he had enough to worry about already. The last thing he needed was the XIII dragging out their demise in a protracted last stand.
The wound in his side ached with an incessant pulse, throbbing in time with the beat of his heart. Pain nullifiers flooded his bloodstream from the intravenous injection ports at his wrists, close to his collarbone, and along his spine. Even so, warning runes flickered across his retinal display, in case he was somehow unaware of the blood haemorrhaging from the wound below his ribs.
The Evocatus moved in for another thrust, feinting and weaving, his footwork flawless on the rubble-strewn ground. Khârn stumbled back, blocking the gladius with his toothed axe rather than risk dodging on the unsteady rocks.
The warrior immediately riposted, coming in low with a second thrust. Khârn deflected it by slamming his fist into the Ultramarine’s faceplate, sending the legionary reeling. It bought the World Eater enough time to bring his axe up again, as he clanged back to back with Kargos behind him.
‘Captain,’ his brother breathed. ‘I’m having such a wonderful time.’ He seemed to be grinning, but every World Eater in a Sarum-pattern faceplate seemed to be grinning.
Around them was nothing but a chaos of crashing blades and cursing warriors. Blades against ceramite gave their distinctive dull toll, interspersed with the close-range bark of bolters. Flatlines played across Khârn’s eye lenses as more and more of his men fell to XIII blades. Slain Academy Guard were slumped across the rocks and Khârn was treading upon their bodies as much as he scrambled across the uneven ground.
The Evocatus refusing to die bore the insignia of a sergeant. The warrior’s cloak, once red, was stained with dust clinging to the blood and oil, scaled by encrusted dirt. A golden helm marked him as one of the honoured elite, those souls sworn to train successive generations of Ultramarines and send them forth into the Five Hundred Worlds. Khârn hated him for his stubborn tenacity as much as he admired him for it.
The Valika Junction wasn’t supposed to be a chokepoint. They should have seen this coming. Another Legion – one not dancing to the tune of the Butcher’s Nails in the back of their heads – would have seen it clearly, and that scraped Khârn’s temper raw. The World Eaters had poured into it in a howling rush, jostling each other as they sprinted, chasing the fleeing Academy Guard in their filthy blue uniforms.
The Academy’s towers detonated, and masses of falling rock came crashing down onto the avenues below. The roads had burst and crumbled, sinking into the earth. Hundreds of World Eaters gone in a handful of heartbeats, buried beneath a city district. The XIII had mined the avenues and rigged their own beautiful buildings for timed explosions, just as Lotara had warned. It was happening across the city, but the Nails stole caution, twisting it into the sick pleasure of joining a massacre.
Blood mattered, nothing more. Seeing the enemy break and flee invited howling laughter. The laughter lasted until the world exploded around the Legion’s vanguard.
Khârn arrived late, after half of the squads here were already buried in the wreckage. The avenues were cut threads, strangled by the rubble of priceless marble. Here and there, the tracks of a World Eaters tank were visible at the very edges of the settled avalanche.
Sniper fire spat from the remaining rooftops and balconies above, lancing through World Eaters helms and dropping the warriors where they stood. Ultramarines gunships roared overhead, their engines laughing in crescendo to the staccato chuckles of their heavy bolters. They fired and fired, pouring their anger down onto the dying Eaters of Worlds. The Nails stole pain, gave him serenity, and lent him strength, but Khârn cursed them every time he went into battle. He cursed them now, as his senses rang with the dissonant chime of the countless flatlines.
He needed an aerial view. They couldn’t keep fighting blind, with Ultramarines reinforcements pouring in from the east and west districts.
‘Skane,’ he breathed.
Skane was gone. Dead or too far away, Khârn wasn’t sure which. Even Kargos, at his back a moment before, was gone to chase another foe.
Khârn turned, releasing the charge from his shaking plasma pistol. Bolts of corrosive fusion-fire splashed against the three uniformed humans scrambling towards him, incinerating them where they stood. He spun back in time to catch the Evocatus’s descending blade, twisting it aside and levelling another kick to the Ultramarine’s emblazoned chestplate. The wound in his side caught fire again, burning in the backwashed heat from his plasma shot. Through clenched teeth, Khârn howled to the strangled skies, up at the dust that blocked them from the fleet.
The vox was useless, lost to scrambled shrieks and taunting static. They had to get out of the Junction. They had to reach the primarch. There was no front line among the fallen buildings, only clusters of desperate, isolated bands of warriors.
His axe lodged in the Ultramarine’s neck joint, finally dropping the Evocatus into the rubble. Khârn pulled the blade free on the third try, letting the whirring teeth cleanse themselves of blood. He was turning to seek another foe when he felt the first tingle of a teleportation flare itching at his gums.
For several seconds he stood there, turning slowly, trying to pinpoint the locus of arrival. Dust swirled around him, as the smallest rocks quivered an
d lifted from the destroyed ground. He saw, between duelling warriors in white and blue, where the flare would bloom and fade, bloom and fade, finding nowhere stable to lock. The uneven ground would murder a locus lock, as would the hundreds of moving bodies, and the interference from the dust.
‘Lotara.’ His voxed words melted together in a blur. ‘Lotara, abort the teleportation at the Valika Junction. Abort the teleportation at the Valika Junction. We’re fighting over cursed earth, there’ll be no locus lock.’
Her image crackled back into life in the corner of his retinal display, briefly enough to deliver a single sentence.
‘It’s not us, Khârn.’
Her image distorted, vanished. He was left looking at data-spills and a leaping targeting reticule that couldn’t ascertain which was the ripest kill in an ocean of enemy warriors.
A bolter shell cracked off his shoulder guard, the shell’s kick sending him stumbling as shrapnel shattered across his helm. He fired back blind, leaving his plasma pistol starved as it recharged.
Argel Tal, you whoreson, where are you?
Khârn?+ The voice was distant, weak, muffled by the Nails’ beat.
Argel Tal? Brother, where are you? Bring the Bearers of the Word. We’re being slaughtered here.
No answer. Nothing.
‘Anyone,’ he voxed. ‘Anyone who can still hear me, anyone still alive, this is Khârn at the Valika Junction. I have the Eighth, Twentieth and Sixty-Seventh Companies with me. We need armour and air support, immediately.’
‘Where are the Word Bearers?’ one of his sergeants demanded. ‘They’re supposed to b–’ Static ate the rest of the warrior’s words, but he was right. The XVII swore to reinforce them at Valika. Khârn had led the briefings himself.
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