‘I am Argel Tal,’ he said, in two voices through one throat. His face was a mask of canine metal, and the words were wet with the blood trickling from his fanged maw. ‘Khârn asked me to keep you alive.’
Keeda had survived the death of her Titan, murdered by a Lysanda Reaver in black and white that killed them without looking twice. She’d survived the wracking pain of severance from Syrgalah’s great-hearted machine-spirit – a soul she adored and would willingly die to defend. She’d pulled her mutilated colleague free from imminent death and bidden her dead mentor farewell. She’d even fired hopelessly at soldiers sworn to kill her, whom she knew she could never have harmed.
But she only started screaming when a daemon embraced her and said he’d come to save her life.
TEN
The Ghenna Scouring
The War is Over
Endings
Lotara Sarrin had told him where to hunt. She’d uploaded nine separate boarding pod points of entry across the Conqueror’s port side, and the casualty reports over the vox did the rest. They were dealing with an estimated ninety Ultramarines, with a sub-analysis detailing projected casualties given crew density and armsmen response predictions at each impact point.
Lhorke stayed with Krydal and Neras, for they were the worst. They needed guidance, and orders to follow.
The other Wounded spread out, their stomping tread taking them across the ship. Lhorke and Captain Sarrin tasked them with leading the defence, though the vox was still alive with reports of Ultramarines massacring the human crew and the naval armsmen sent to hold their ground.
Bodies lined the walkways. If a veteran’s guess was anything to go by, Lhorke considered the projected crew casualties on the wrong side of conservative. The Ultramarines invaders knew their lives would end on this ship, but that many warriors could easily tear the ship apart before they were brought down.
And they moved swiftly. Distasteful as it was, Lhorke was reduced to ordering armsman fire-teams to stand and be slaughtered in order to delay the Evocati squads for long enough that his Dreadnoughts might catch the boarders at all.
Still, the Space Marines were fragile enough, once they were in reach of his claws.
He paid almost no heed to the killing. What pulled at him most were the questions of this insane war against the Emperor and his empire. How had the Legion tolerated its own purge? How had they slaughtered their own brothers with impunity on Isstvan III? How could they betray their own blood? The War Hounds – and the World Eaters that followed after them – were a Legion founded upon brotherhood above all else. They taught it in the gladiatorial pits, bonding warriors from different worlds, chaining them together and forcing them to fight as pairs.
So how had it come to this?
Angron.
Angron and the Nails.
During the Great Crusade, the primarch’s discovery had been a long time in coming. The War Hounds bore witness to other Legions uniting with their primarchs for the first time and were no strangers to disconsolate jealousy. Speculation was rife, from the muttered worry that their primarch might already be dead, to the hope he would be a warrior and general to rival Horus, Guilliman, Dorn or the Lion.
And then, on that foul backwater world, they finally found him. His first and most dubious honour was to be the one primarch to refuse the Emperor’s benevolence and to turn his back on the Imperium’s claims of conquest. Angron, master of his doomed slave army, cared nothing for a galaxy’s worth of dreams and triumphs. He wished only to die with those rebels who’d escaped the gladiator pits with him. This ragged army of his brothers and sisters were holed up in the mountains with carrion birds and snow bears for company, waiting to starve or fall in battle – whichever death came first.
The Legion were told of his refusal. Their primarch had defied the Emperor.
The War Hounds didn’t hate Angron for his choice. They worshipped him for it. What primarch better understood the bonds of brotherhood than one who turned his back on the Emperor, on the Imperium, on life itself – to die side by side with his kindred?
Yet the Emperor denied him the choice. Angron would lead a Legion in the Imperium’s name whether he willed it or not.
Lhorke had been slumbering in the first of his necessary respites by the time they orbited Angron’s worthless little world. They’d woken him, though. They’d woken all of the first ones in the weeks after Angron’s arrival. The Legion had never known a more momentous event.
Gheer had been Legion Master, then. A good man, Gheer. An axeman to stand with the best of them. Uninspired around a planning table, admittedly, yet he’d managed to make bluntness into a virtue alongside brutality.
Dead the very night the primarch joined the Legion. Slain by their new father, in Angron’s first uncontrollable, melancholic fury.
But in those earliest days, the Nails were a virtue. None of the newly-renamed World Eaters would face the fact their primarch carried a curse from the years on his homeworld. They focused on his prowess, on the strength and speed gifted to him by the archeotech implants, and when the primarch demanded his sons lie under the Techmarines’ claws and the Apothecaries’ knives, few had resisted the chance to share the same virtuous pain as their noble primarch.
Everything changed with the hammering of the Nails.
The World Eaters, once known for their brotherhood, became known first and foremost for their savagery. Reports began filtering back of excessive Legion casualties in tacticless displays of horde warfare, and Imperial Army forces pleading for assistance from other Legions when the World Eaters were the ones to answer the call. Planets surrendered rather than face the XII Legion in battle, but not all who surrendered were spared the war. The Nails dulled all other pleasures, until the heady bite of adrenaline was the only certain way to experience anything but the dimmest memory of emotion. Their rewired minds allowed no other pleasure beyond battle.
Worlds bled. Worlds burned. Worlds died.
The Emperor, it was said, had become… how had rumour put it? Displeased. What a word. So polite, considering the madness that followed in its wake.
Imperial records stated that two primarchs came to Angron, both claiming to have been sent by the Master of Mankind. The first arrived soon after Angron joined his Legion. The second wouldn’t come until almost a century later. By then, it would be too late.
Russ was the first. He came, and he brought his Wolves. Already, they called themselves the Emperor’s executioners. Had he been given the title? Doubts were everywhere, among the primarchs and their Legions most of all. Why the Space Wolves? Lhorke still recalled the arguments on everyone’s lips. The Wolves lacked the Ultramarines numbers and Russ lacked the impartial wisdom of Guilliman. They lacked the Thousand Sons widespread gifts of sixth sense, and the Wolf King lacked the far-reaching knowledge of Magnus the Red. They lacked the ferocity of the World Eaters; the resilience of the Death Guard; and all but one of the twenty Legions lacked the grandeur, the reputation, and the victories of the Luna Wolves. More telling, every Legion but one lacked Horus, the First Primarch – suspected even then to be hailed one day as Heir to the Emperor.
But the truth twisted depending upon who told the tale. Russ lived the role as though it were his birthright. What mattered, in the shadow of that commitment? Nothing. Nothing at all.
They’d met at Malkoya, on the fields beyond the dead city of the same name. The World Eaters, battered and bleeding from Ghenna’s compliance, formed ragged lines before the assembled Space Wolves Legion. The primarchs stood before their hosts, armed and armoured – Angron awash with blood and carved up by fresh wounds; Leman Russ in resplendent plate the colour of the storms on his tempestuous homeworld.
Lhorke had stood with Angron, as had Khârn and the other captains. Even interred in his walking coffin, he’d been struck by the majesty of standing before Russ. Here was a being gene-coded to perfection: a reflectio
n of humanity’s beloved royal paragon. Russ bled authority without effort, and without the need for posture or pretence. In all ways, he should have been a barbarian – from the ragged blond hair to the frost-weathered skin that aged him far past his years. And yet, he inspired no mockery. He made barbarism a controlled trait, something noble to be understood and mastered, not a state of primitive regression. Leman Russ was the dynamism of a life free from civilisation’s shackles. He was strength and purpose and heart, where all else was grey with the promise of inevitable stagnancy.
He wasn’t a wolf because of how he fought and howled and bunched his men into packs. He was a wolf because of how he lived, forever echoing the vitality and honesty of the wildness at the heart of all life. It was said in smiling whispers that VI Legion genetic coding was tainted by canine blood. Lhorke believed it. Seeing Leman Russ made him yearn to breathe again, and feel anything beyond the cramped, cold-milk discomfort of his amniotic womb-tomb. Never had he felt more dead – not before, and not since.
The Wolf King hadn’t come to debate or offer pleasantries. Nevertheless, Lhorke remembered the nod of respect offered by the primarch.
‘Legion Master,’ Russ had said.
Lhorke’s ironform wasn’t made for obeisance, but he lowered his chassis in an awkward bow.
‘Great Wolf,’ he’d replied. ‘I am Legion Master no more.’
Russ had smiled, then. A crooked smile, offering the barest, whitest flash of his teeth. ‘More’s the pity. If you were, perhaps my presence would not be necessary.’
Angron spoke at last. Unlike Russ, he was savagery unrestrained by healthy dynamism. He brought no charismatic aura of life and passion. He was a god of war: broken, dangerous, and worst of all, unreliable. The Nails had forced his left eye to twitch open and closed in a madman’s blink.
‘Did he send you?’ the Eater of Worlds asked.
Russ said nothing. His silence had Angron smiling, though it was an ugly slice of a thing, showing no joy.
‘He didn’t, did he? The Emperor and Horus sail the stars together without a care for any of this. You’ve come to punish me because you believe it’s your place.’
In those early years, Angron carried his first axe, the precursor to all others. He called it Widowmaker. It would break this very day, never to be used again.
Russ carried Krakenmaw, his immense chainblade, toothed by some Fenrisian sea-devil from that blighted world’s many myths. The wind toyed with his bedraggled hair, blowing strands of the golden mane across his face. Eyes the colour of melting ice never left the bloodshot orbs in Angron’s cabled skull.
‘Reports reach my ears, Angron. The words of commanders and captains who have suffered at your side. Soldiers forced to fight without orders, losing hundreds when mere dozens needed to die. Your own allies speak of the butchery done to them at your sons’ hands. Report after report after report, witness after witness after witness. All of this comes to me, and I wonder, my brother: what am I to do?’
Two immense wolves circled the primarchs. Their fur was white, dusted by grey. One snarled, as wolves will always snarl when threatened, saliva-wet fangs on show, eyes sharp and ears low. The other merely paced, content to watch the speaking godlings, its dark eyes catching the light of the setting sun. The calmer beast came within Russ’s reach, and the warlord dragged armoured fingers through its thick coat.
‘I am not your lackey to judge,’ Angron stated. The cybernetic cables forming technological dreadlocks tensed as he clenched his iron teeth. ‘And you have no authority over me. Over any of us.’
Russ smiled again. ‘And yet, here I am.’
‘To do what? To commit to a war that will see both our Legions in ruins?’ Angron wiped a wounded hand over his face, as if the simple gesture could clean away the pain. ‘Leave. Leave before this becomes something you regret.’
The wind was picking up, now. Lhorke felt it as a dull whisper against his ironform, but it tore at the banners raised above the Space Wolf ranks.
Russ spoke again, pale eyes unwavering. ‘The surgery must end, Angron. The Emperor himself wills that it be so. The massacres end here and now, as well. Look what you have done to this world.’
‘Cleansed it.’
‘Butchered it. Reaved it. Ghenna is scoured of all life. Is this a deed you want listed beneath your name when statues rise to celebrate the Great Crusade?’
Angron cared nothing for statues, and said so plainly.
Russ shook his head. ‘You cannot sail the stars in this frenzy purely because you’re too damaged to learn the art of war. The implant surgery must be reversed. Your sons will submit to mine for a return to Terra. Once we reach the Palace, everything will be done to remove these parasitic engines from your men’s minds.’
Despite the twitches, Angron’s tortured eyes were wide in genuine surprise. ‘You think you have any authority over me? You think you can threaten me and expect to walk away?’
‘I think there’s a good chance of it, aye.’
Angron grinned, though it was an anguished thing. ‘And if you die?’
The wind pulled at Russ’s wolfskin cloak. ‘Lorgar wrote something several years ago that has nourished my thoughts each day and night since he shared it with me.’
The World Eater snorted, showing just what he thought of his pious, scrivener brother’s musings, but Russ was unfazed.
‘It is not enough that corruption is recognised,’ Russ quoted. ‘It must be opposed. It is not enough that ignorance is acknowledged. It must be defied. Win or lose, what matters is making a stand for the virtues we will bequeath to the human race. When this galaxy is finally ours, we’ll hold a worthless prize if we plant the last aquila, on the last day, on the last world, having led humanity into moral darkness.’
Angron listened, but cared little. Even then, he was a stubborn creature, taking spiteful pride in his own isolation.
‘Lorgar wages war with a quill,’ he said, ‘but the galaxy will not be brought to heel by crude philosophy. Your ideals are meaningless.’
‘Ideals are what we fight for, brother.’ There was something colder in Russ’s tone, then. A decision had been made, frosting his voice.
Angron had laughed, the sound rich and true. ‘Such pretty lies! We fight for the same reasons men have always fought: for land, for resources, for wealth and for bodies to feed into the grinders of industry. We fight to silence anyone that dares draw breath and whisper a different opinion from ours. We fight because the Emperor wants every world in his hands. All he knows is slavery, painted in the inoffensive cloak of compliance. The very notion of freedom is a horror to him.’
‘Traitor,’ Russ hissed.
Angron stood tall, still grinning. ‘Do we give choices to those we slaughter? A true choice? Or do we broadcast that they must throw their weapons into the fires of peace and bow down, faces pushed into the mud like beggars, thanking us for the culture we force upon them? We offer them compliance or we offer them death. How am I a traitor, wolfling? I fight as you fight, as loyal as you are. I do the tyrant’s bidding.’
‘We offer them freedom.’ Russ spoke through clenched teeth, the moon bright in his eyes. ‘You are mutilating your own sons and stealing their minds – now you preach of the Emperor’s tyranny? Are you lost so far in your delusions?’
Angron’s smile faltered, fading away. His face seemed slack, his eyes staring past Russ. Defeat was etched upon features still twitching in pain.
‘You are free, Leman Russ of Fenris, because your freedom matches the Emperor’s will. For each time I wage war against worlds that threaten the Imperium’s advance, there comes another time when I am told to conquer peaceful worlds that wish only to be left alone. I am told to destroy whole civilisations and call it liberation. I am told to demand millions of men and women from these new worlds, to make them take up arms in the Emperor’s hordes, and I am told to call this a t
ithe, or recruitment, because we are too scared of the truth. We refuse to call it slavery.’
‘Angron…’ Russ snarled.
‘Be silent! You have given your threats, dog. Now hear me. Listen to another hound barking, for once.’
‘Then speak,’ Russ had said, as if permission were his to give.
‘I am loyal, the same as you. I am told to bathe my Legion in the blood of innocents and sinners alike, and I do it, because it is all that’s left for me in this life. I do these things, and I enjoy them, not because we are moral, or right – or loving souls seeking to enlighten a dark universe – but because all I feel are the Butcher’s Nails hammered into my brain. I serve because of this “mutilation”. Without it? Well, perhaps I might be a more moral man, like you claim to be. A virtuous man, eh? Perhaps I might ascend the steps of our father’s palace and take the slaving bastard’s head.’
Both Legions tensed. Thousands and thousands of warriors clutched bolters and chainweapons tighter. Lhorke had even taken a step back, his joints loud in the sudden silence.
Russ felt no such hesitation. He drew his blade and launched at Angron, only to be met with the World Eater’s axe blocking the blow. The brothers breathed hatred into each other’s faces.
‘You are lost,’ Russ growled. ‘You gelded, black-hearted heretic.’
‘I am merely honest, brother. In all but this you are no different from me.’
‘If you cannot see the chasm between savagery and ferocity, then you are hopelessly gone, Angron.’
The World Eater threw Russ back, sending the Wolf King staggering. ‘Then I am gone. But we both know the day will never dawn that you can best me in combat.’
For several seconds, the primarchs stared at each other.
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