by Guy Haley
They wore green-and-white armour adorned with images of death. Where the Blood Angels were crimson and glorious, these beings were debased, though they wore the same wargear and had been created the same way. Their battleplate was filthy, and streaked with dirt and rust. From their vision and breathing slits oily fluids dribbled. Black smoke poured from the exhaust vents on their power plants. They shuffled forwards without the Blood Angels’ grace, while preceding them was a stench of sickness, the collective illness of a hospice ward in time of plague distilled. They were dead men walking, and yet they would not fall.
Autocannon rounds, bolts, lascannon shots and explosive shells fell among them. Armour shattered on their bodies. But if they dropped, they climbed back up. Katsuhiro saw one riddled with dozens of hits from the loyal Space Marines. Only when a bolt punched through his helm and detonated in his skull did the filthy giant collapse to his knees and pitch forwards into the mud.
Katsuhiro drew a bead on a warrior advancing without his helmet. He was getting close, close enough to see wild, lidless eyes in a face as drawn as a skull and a black-lipped mouth forever set in death’s humourless grin.
‘Fire!’ the officer ordered.
Katsuhiro squeezed the trigger. Hundreds of las-beams flickered through the fog. His own shot scored clean black through the slime weeping from the monster’s armour plates. But the guns of the mortals were of little use against legionary battleplate. Lucky shots to eyes and softseal joints might do some harm, but such wounds were nothing to the corrupted legionaries.
A battle cry went up behind the advancing traitors, and foes more suited to Katsuhiro’s gun emerged.
Through the gas, the lost and the damned charged the line again.
Jaghatai Khan’s ordu were nearing the wall when the gas shells choked the sky. Dirty smoke rushed out, so thick his jetbike engines coughed when the intakes sucked it in. Guns boomed on both sides. He raced between the tracks of death, his auspex picking out the features of the ground in pulses of lurid green. The Khan was blessed with the best eyesight that could be engineered into a human being, and marvellous wargear to enhance it, but in that murk he was half-blind. Drop pods screamed past him, blasting shafts into the gas that closed quickly.
He was close to home when a haywire shell, cast down from orbit to blind the Palace’s machine eyes, exploded right by his jetbike. A pulse of electromagnetism so violent it made his armour scream shut down his engines.
Like a javelin cast by the thunder gods of Chogoris, Jaghatai Khan’s jetbike plunged down. Its golden prow ploughed poison mist, then earth.
The Khan leapt free at the point of impact. He rolled twice, using the momentum of the fall to launch himself back to his feet, where he skidded to a halt, tulwar poised to strike.
He stood ready, every sense alert in the muffled battle zone. His warriors sped overhead. Guns coughed gently. Interference crackled in his helm, his communications useless in the electromagnetic bombardment.
Then they came for him.
The Great Angel watched the gases of the Death Guard envelop the defence lines, retreat momentarily under the blast of drop pod rocket motors, then surge back in, engulfing the top of Bastion 16 and banking high against the Palace walls. Throughout he kept his eyes forwards, following his brother’s progress. He watched the haywire shells crackle, and saw the Khan plunge into the gas banks as more drop pods screamed down from on high.
‘There,’ he said. He pointed with the Spear of Telesto into the gas. ‘The moment is at hand. Our foe blinds our communications, but you must find me. My brother, my brother! To the aid of my brother!’ he shouted.
Without waiting for confirmation from his men, Sanguinius spread his wings and threw himself from the top of Bastion 16 into the deadly fog.
Khan of Khans
Courage’s reward
Brothers at war
Palace outworks, Daylight Wall section 16, 7th of Quartus
The Khan was alone and the enemy saw immediately what a prize was within their grasp. Hundreds of Mortarion’s sons closed in from the fog, boltguns blazing. His armour sparked with impacts; for the moment it withstood the assault, but even his panoply was not immune to concentrated fire. The Warhawk lived by one rule of war above all others, one learned the moment his adopted family were slaughtered by the Kurayeds, and borne out in his war against the Palatine on Chogoris.
Attack was the strongest form of defence.
The Khan fought with silent fury, charging into the ranks of the Death Guard with his tulwar spinning in a blurring figure of eight. He crashed into them without slowing, his sword cutting them down. Ceramite was atomised by the blade’s disruption field. Viscera spilled onto the earth. Polluted blood showered him.
Through his armour filters he smelled the corruption upon Mortarion’s sons. Theirs was sickness of flesh and soul. They fought slowly, without the finesse of other Legions, but the doggedness they were known for had been intensified by their fall into darkness, and no matter how many he killed they pressed at him without cease.
In the thick of them he was safe from the firestorm they unleashed; hand-to-hand combat was on his terms, not theirs. The Death Guard favoured disciplined lines and overwhelming close-range fire to bring down their enemies, taking whatever they received in return with grim stoicism. The Khan refused them their preference, leaping among them, barging down ranks before they formed. He fought unpredictably, throwing off the offensive of his foes, who rightly guessed he wished to regain the Palace. Though he rushed them and pushed them back, or cut diagonally through their formation, always the pattern of his movements took him closer to the defences; if he was forced to take fifty steps away from the walls to throw them into disarray, he would take fifty-one back.
His fury would have inspired a thousand bards had any been able to see it. The fogs made his fight a lonely struggle. Hidden from all knowledge he faced the Death Guard alone, his vox and locator beacon jammed by haywire ordnance. The enemy died by the dozen, for not one was the match of a primarch. But though he fought like a god of old, he was but one being against an army, and not even the sons of the Emperor were tireless or supplied with infinite battle fortune.
The first cut to break through his armour came after his fortieth kill. A son of Mortarion lunged at the back of his knee while he was engaging four to the front. The weapon he sought to slay a primarch with was a simple combat knife, but perseverance pushed it through the armoured ribbing of the joint seal. The Khan felt the blow as an angry, hot sting, and the attacker paid for the injury with his life. The Khan smashed backwards with his tulwar’s pommel, his Emperor-given strength caving in ceramite perished by rot and the greening head beneath. He bellowed in anger, slashing across at transhuman chest height to drive back the assailants to his front. Three of them died in a storm of disruption lightning, their innards laid open to the chemical fog. A fourth lost his left arm, a fifth took a blow to the head that spun him around and knocked him down. The Khan would have finished him, but he was reaching instead for his damaged left knee, trying to pull out the knife lodged in his suit. At the first attempt his fingers slipped off a blood-slicked hilt made for hands smaller than his. His second attempt was foiled by a renewed attack.
The knife penetrated seven centimetres into his flesh, no more, interfering minimally with the bones of his joint. He had suffered far worse from deadlier weapons and fought on. Trusting to his engineered physiology to blunt the pain, he pressed forwards, but as he did so, he felt the strength running from his body along with his unstaunched blood.
Another Death Guard died, then another. Explosives were raining down on him now from the enemy side, seeking him out, as the XIV Legion shelled their own troops in their lust to slay a primarch. The Khan wondered if Mortarion saw his battle there, and grimly ordered his death whatever the cost to his sons. There was a soulless pragmatism to the act typical of the Lord of Death.
The fog swirled with the rain of fire, lifting to reveal a horde of warriors in dirty white and gr
een. A hotness spread from the piercing knife, infecting his blood with a fever. Incredulous, the Khan fought still, but the touch of worry grazed his heart. Never in all of his days had he been ill, but he instinctively recognised disease in him. He was human, after all, on some distant level. His bones ached like ice, and his flesh blazed like the forge. Sweat dripped from his brow. He looked around at his brother’s corrupted sons, and wondered what awful pact had been agreed to make them so, and give them the power to sicken a primarch.
‘Mortarion! What have you done?’ he shouted.
There was no answer.
His body warred with the infection of the knife. Wellbeing came and went as the knife’s poisons overcame each trick his engineered physiology deployed. He scrabbled for the knife again as fought, his great tulwar burning through the air to obliterate yet more of the traitors, but he could not take enough time to pull the knife free. It was so firmly embedded, and too delicate for his fingers to easily pluck out.
A surge of bile rose in his throat. His limbs shook. He was slowing. The enemy were gathering closer, like the pack hunters of ancient Earth’s steppes, closing in on the great beasts of those times.
His next blow was weak enough to be turned aside. Arms clad in algae-green gauntlets grappled with his forearm. With a bellow of anger he wrenched himself free, and stood for a moment unmolested, before they surged forwards, hacking and stabbing with more diseased weapons, and dragged him down.
The Khan of Khans ends his days, he thought, not upon the sea of grass in one final, glorious charge, but dragged down and butchered in the mud.
They wrestled with him, their filthy knives dragging grooves into his ceramite. They tried to get at the joints in his arms, groin, legs and neck, crawling on him like vermin. He threw them off, once, twice, but the third time was an exhausted heave. His body burned with disease, and his strength left him.
A creature of unclean gods – they were no longer the Emperor’s work – brought forwards a huge, rusted axe for the executioner’s stroke.
‘I am Jaghatai Khan!’ he shouted, the passion of his words driving them back. ‘I am Jaghatai Khan, loyal son of the Emperor, and I have ridden well.’
The axe swung up to its apex, and hung poised on the cusp of descent. It never fell. The legionary bearing it fell backwards, his headless corpse pulled over by the weight of his weapon.
Jetbikes cut through the gas, and the air was filled with the sound of engines and Chogorian voices.
‘The Khan! The Khan! To the Khan!’
A warrior of the ordu leapt from his steed, the speed of his fall turning him into living ordnance that ploughed through the grimy ranks of Mortarion’s brood. The warrior was brought to an end as he attempted to rise, hacked apart by a flurry of rusted, dull blades, but he had done his work; his genefather was free.
The Khan erupted from the pile of Death Guard, his tulwar flaring again with the lightning of its energy field. This time, he firmly grasped the knife hilt sticking from his leg. This time, he wrenched it free.
The source of contagion removed, his body redoubled its efforts to purge the sickness. The disease fought with a traitor’s hate to undo his cellular biology, but the light of ancient knowledge shone from every curl of the Khan’s genecode. Defeat was inevitable.
Still weak, still shivering, the Khan went back on the offensive.
‘My ordu! My ordu! To me! To me! Chogoris calls! Ride to me!’
Flights of jetbikes streaked overhead, twin boltguns tearing into the foe. Putrid organs ruptured in rusting armour, and they fell. Land Speeders banked around, vaporising the Death Guard with their meltaguns, and hammering them to pieces with heavy bolter fire.
Now the sons of Mortarion turned their attentions outwards. Away from the Khan, they formed their lines and opened up, weight of fire accomplishing what aim could not. Jetbikes were shot from the sky to gouge tracks of flame and blood into the horde. Warriors punched from the saddles were pinned down and slain.
The Khan abandoned his dancing feints and misdirection, pushing instead directly for the wall.
The fog parted.
Between him and the Palace, a company of Death Guard formed three lines, all presenting bolters. Some fell to bolt or shell fire from the wall, but their ranks closed up as each warrior died. Behind them seethed Horus’ damned mortal followers in uncountable number, most half-dead from the gas already, but driven on by hate.
He presented his sword, saluted them and prepared to die.
‘A rush into the jaws of death, snatched free, to plunge therein again at will,’ he said. ‘I greet death with a smile on my face.’
Sanguinius’ voice sliced through the muffling fog as if it were not there.
‘My brother, my brother! To the aid of my brother!’
Katsuhiro snapped off shot after shot. Leaving the Traitor Space Marines to the attentions of the Blood Angels, he downed mutants, sickly men and turncoat army soldiers. When the call went out, the Blood Angels looked out into the gas, following something he could not see. They stood from the wall as one, and leapt over the sloping rampart.
‘Drive them back!’ roared their sergeants. ‘Into them, for the Emperor! For Sanguinius!’
Caught up in their bloodlust, the Nagandan conscripts rose alongside the Blood Angels and charged after them. Katsuhiro ran behind a line trooper of the IX Legion, snapping off opportunistic shots and jabbing with his bayonet. The Blood Angel smashed his way through the lesser humans of the enemy, his fists alone enough to slay the rabble with single blows. He saved his bolts for his traitor kin.
‘The primarch! I see the Khan!’ someone called.
Horus’ wretches parted for a moment, and Katsuhiro saw a line of Death Guard forming up ahead. Raised above them on a pile of corpses was a giant in white, another primarch, the Warhawk himself.
The Khan was utterly different to his brother Sanguinius, yet fundamentally the same. Like the Great Angel, he was forged of high science and lost arts. Like Sanguinius, he inspired dread and awe in Katsuhiro in equal measure. But where Sanguinius recalled higher, more refined creatures than men, and so inspired humanity to excel, the Khan was a being of caged lightning. He was a storm’s fury poured into the shape of man. Where calmness and a near-holy beauty radiated from the Angel, the Warhawk was a restless wind that filled Katsuhiro with the need to rush forwards, to charge through the enemy, to ride them down and never stop moving, to doubt all, to know all, to laugh and live fully through the best of times and the worst of times, and then at the last to greet death with a defiant smile.
‘To the Khan! To the Khan! For the Emperor!’ the Blood Angels shouted.
They pressed forwards again, the poison fog and the swirl of combat obscuring the fate of Jaghatai Khan. Katsuhiro speared a man covered in weeping sores through the throat with his bayonet, and hurled back another diseased specimen with a shot to the chest. Many of the enemy had no protection against the gas and were dying as they fought. The traitorous soldiers of the earlier landings had been replaced by wild-eyed lunatics with sigils of their evil religion burned into their skin. There were people of every desperate sort, hive-dregs, mutants, abhumans and others of the lowest positions in Imperial society. Katsuhiro had wondered how anyone could turn on the Emperor, but confronted with the hatred he saw in the eyes of these savages, he gained an inkling that the dream of Imperium was a nightmare for some.
The damned came at them in large numbers, forming a buffer between the Death Guard’s line and the Blood Angels. The IX Legion fought with terrifying ferocity, but their way was blocked no matter how many they slew. Katsuhiro’s world closed to a few square metres delineated by the faces of the foe, time measured not in seconds but in kills. He saw but barely registered light blazing through the gas. The Blood Angels roared the name of their primarch, ‘Sanguinius!’ and pushed the enemy harder. Katsuhiro and his fellow mortals were sucked deeper into the horde in their wake, embattled, sure to die, until the last line parted, and the enemy dr
egs fled back into the fog. In reward for his courage, Katsuhiro was privileged to glimpse two of the Emperor’s warrior-sons fighting side by side.
Light shone through the gas, and Sanguinius was there; bright and devastating as a cometary impact, he dived from the heavens into the enemy’s midst. In one hand shone his golden sword, in the other he wielded the Spear of Telesto. The sword felled traitors with every blow, but the spear’s arcane technology was particularly deadly to the tainted Death Guard. With each blast from its gilded head, the Death Guard writhed and gave inhuman squeals, and melted in its rays.
‘For the Emperor!’ Sanguinius called, and saluted his brother.
Behind his filth-smeared mask, the Khan grinned and replied, ‘For the Emperor!’ and joined his brother’s slaughtering.
Battle cries went up, and through the gas a mixed group of Blood Angels, White Scars and human soldiers came, cutting through the crowds of men and mutants. Jetpacks howled, and golden, winged warriors thumped down behind the Khan, forming a perimeter. Together, back to back, the primarchs fought until the Death Guard were reduced to a tattered handful who slipped away into the gas clouds.
Gunship engines thundered from the direction of the Palace.
‘We must depart now,’ Sanguinius told his brother. ‘They will return.’ Already the shelling was picking up pace around them.
‘Not quite yet, my brother,’ said the Khan, pushing past his guardians.
‘What are you doing?’ yelled Sanguinius, but followed after the limping Khan.
‘My jetbike. I must go to it and inload the images I gathered. The haywire wiped my armour’s datacache.’
‘They are returning, my lords!’ a Blood Angel shouted. The crackle of boltgun fire began anew.
‘Then fight them off. I need only seconds,’ said the Khan. ‘With this we shall know our enemy better, and beat him all the more soundly.’
‘This is unwise, brother!’ Sanguinius shouted, loosing off a blast from the Spear of Telesto.