by Guy Haley
The Khârn of old would have interrogated her as to how the Alpha Legion gave her this message, and why, but such finesse of thought was beyond him now, lost under an ocean of blood.
‘How?’ he said. It was all he could manage to say.
‘You’ll have to do it,’ she replied. She rubbed her hand over her face again. ‘You’ll have to do all of it. The arrogant dogs won’t answer my requests for communication. They might listen to you.’
‘Might,’ said Khârn. His sense of self floated on a sea of red, threatening to sink at any time. He could taste the blood. Hear the screams.
‘Yes, curse you!’ she snapped. ‘Might! It’s the best chance we have. Send the message,’ she commanded. Her hololith master nodded and began to direct his few remaining serfs. A floating orb coasted down from the ceiling near to Khârn, ready to capture his image for transmission.
‘I did not agree,’ said Khârn, his voice dreamily murderous. In his mind’s eye he saw Terra burning, and bodies falling before his axe.
‘Another damn thing we don’t have time for,’ she said. ‘Send my request again to the Nightfall. Inform them Lord Khârn, Eighth Captain of the Twelfth Legion, equerry of the primarch Angron, wishes to speak with their leader.’ She turned her attention back to Khârn. ‘There’s some treacherous whoreson in charge now. No sign of Curze. Sevatar I have heard is dead. Khârn!’ she said.
His attention drifted back to her. ‘Who will I speak with?’
An acceptance chime tolled from the hololithic communications station.
‘My lady, I have their assent.’
‘Activate the projection field,’ she said.
The hololithic phantom of a youthful-looking Space Marine stood upon the deck, life-size. He was unusually flamboyant in appearance for one of his kind. The long, pale hair draped over his shoulders was more characteristic of Fulgrim’s warriors than Curze’s, and his armour gleamed, sub-surface projection plates making it squirm with lightning effects. He lacked the skulls and fetishes of bone worn by his brethren. Most striking were the vertical black ovals tattooed over his eyes, and the large sword strapped to his left side. Khârn recognised it as a weapon of the warp. He growled instinctively. A weakling’s weapon.
‘My Lord Skraivok, the Painted Count,’ said Lotara, bowing. ‘Might I present to you the Lord Khârn, equerry to the primarch Angron, master of the Eighth–’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Skraivok, waving his hand. ‘Your minions relayed all this. Besides, who would not recognise the great Khârn! Such a reputation.’ He clucked his tongue. ‘My, my, Eighth Captain Khârn, what an unexpected pleasure.’ Everything about the Night Lord howled with insincerity: his posture, his smile, the tone of his voice. ‘What can I possibly do for so vaunted a warrior as yourself?’
‘I want a service from you,’ said Khârn bluntly.
Skraivok laughed. ‘How very forwards! You are not speaking with some fame-dazzled captain. I am the commander of the Night Lords in this warzone, perhaps leader of the Legion itself.’
‘By what right?’ said Khârn.
Skraivok gripped the hilt of his sheathed sword with his left hand. ‘By right of conquest. I thought you might respect that.’
I have never respected any Night Lord, Khârn managed not to say. He wanted to challenge the captain to a duel right there. Enough of his wits remained under the punishing thump of the Nails that he refrained.
‘Battle is what we are made for. If you have triumphed, then I will speak with you.’
This seemed to satisfy Skraivok.
‘That’s better. I don’t want us to get off on the wrong foot. Now, to business. This service, whatever it is it will cost you. Times are not what they were. Nobody gains the Night Lords’ aid for free. I have a price in mind, depending on what you require, naturally.’
This fool offended him. The Butcher’s Nails pounded harder in his skull at the affront. Khârn managed, somehow, to keep his voice level.
‘First tell me something, Painted Count. I have heard rumours about your vessel. Before we bargain, I must know whether they are true.’
Skraivok’s eyes narrowed. ‘What rumours might they be?’
‘That in your flagship is a prison for a primarch.’
The Night Lord’s face crinkled with humour. Starting around his eyes in the depths of his tattooed stripes, his smile was entirely dark in nature. ‘Don’t tell me. You’re having trouble with your transcendent lord! Favoured of Khorne, or whatever this god’s name is. I suppose that is what happens when one hearkens to gods. You wish me to take that monster aboard my vessel?’ He smiled condescendingly. ‘My my, what an interesting proposition.’
‘This is getting us nowhere,’ said Khârn. ‘Cut communications before I decide to go and cut off his head.’
‘No, wait!’ countermanded Lotara, holding out her hand to stop her communications officer. ‘Forgive me, Lord Skraivok. Khârn is much troubled by his father’s predicament. At least, let us know if it is true. Is there somewhere upon the Nightfall that might hold our lord until it is time for him to join the battle? Does this prison exist?’
‘A prison? No,’ said Skraivok. ‘It is more than that. It is a labyrinth, devised by Perturabo himself to torment Vulkan. As you might imagine, it is ingenious and deadly in design. The Drake was one of the Emperor’s more intelligent sons.’
‘How do you know this?’ growled Khârn. ‘How do I know you speak the truth?’
‘Mostly because I was put into it,’ said Skraivok.
‘You escaped?’ said Khârn. ‘You. Then it is not fit to hold a primarch.’
Skraivok smirked. ‘It’ll hold your primarch. He is a mindless monster. I did escape, but I confess I had help. The labyrinth will hold your lord. Not forever, I imagine all those little traps and dilemmas will slow him down not at all and he’ll simply batter his way out, but it will occupy him for a time.’
‘How long?’ asked Lotara.
‘Long enough,’ said Skraivok. ‘The moment approaches when he will be able to manifest on Terra, does it not? That is the Warmaster’s plan.’
‘And how do you know that?’ said Khârn neutrally. The Nails burned into his hindbrain. He did not like this Skraivok. He was pompous, melodramatic, playing the villain’s role like an actor.
‘As I said, I have help.’ Skraivok’s hand twisted around his sword’s leathern grip. He thought a moment. ‘I will do it,’ he said. ‘We will take him. But I require something from you in return.’
‘What do you require for this service?’
Skraivok’s unpleasant grin spread wider. ‘This will surprise you, but I want something you have in great supply, Lord Khârn. I want glory, and you have so much of that I am sure you can spare me a little.’
Khârn passed through heavy blast doors from the upper levels of the ship into the abattoir of the thrall decks. The doors were multiply layered, and strong. Even with his mind half-drunk on the lust for blood, Khârn saw the irony inherent to those doors. Angron had spent his youth as a slave, fighting for other slaves. His anger towards the Emperor sprang from his inability to save his fellows, yet he became a master of slaves himself, and wary enough of them to keep them under tight control as brutal as that meted out by his former owners. As time had passed and the Legion degenerated, the doors had provided a little safety to the abused multitudes of the crew. This part of the ship was one place where Khârn’s brothers could not easily go.
The decks had been in a terrible state even before Khârn shut Angron in. Now, they were close to ruinous. The lumens were out. Sparks spat lethargically from severed cabling. Bodies clogged every corridor of the thrall decks, not a single one of them entire. The whole warren of workshops, service ways, barracks, food halls and conduits stank – that nauseating battle reek of spilled guts and fear. Viscera festooned the walls like celebratory flags. Scraps of flesh spattered every surface. Khârn paused and swung his head around, tasking his auto-senses with a deep sweep of his immediate surroundings.
Boosted by the ship’s internal auspex, his helm senses scried fifty metres in every direction, providing him with an accurate cartolithic display of the area – a long way in the convoluted bowels of a void-ship. Among the maze of corridors he found not one sign of life. It was so quiet. In the dark there he could feel the Conqueror itself. The machine soul of the battleship had grown fierce with the spilling of blood. It was watching Khârn.
None of Angron’s victims could have put up much of a fight. Where the bodies hadn’t been smashed into a pulp by the primarch, Khârn saw only wounds to the rear. They’d died running.
The sight could not disturb Khârn, he who had slaughtered civilisations. For years now blood and death had ruled the corridors of the Conqueror. Angron had despatched him below decks to kill three hundred thralls himself, to build a throne from their skulls. Even so, the extent of Angron’s massacring stirred disgust in his flinty heart. There was no honour in this, no skill, no point, only butchery for the sake of killing. Blood must be spilled, their god demanded it, but there were better ways to make sacrifice than this.
He stopped to let his cartolith update. This part of the vessel had never been legionary territory, and he would be lost down there without the map. More pressingly, he did not know if Angron’s otherworldly form would register on his battleplate’s auto-senses. He had no desire to stumble across his genesire unprepared. He shifted his grip on Gorechild, his axe. Its teeth glinted. His thumb hovered over the activation stud.
‘My lord!’ he called into the darkness. ‘It is I, Khârn!’
The drip of blood and creaking of cooling machinery replied.
Mag-locked to his thigh next to his holstered plasma pistol was a teleport beacon. There were no armourers left in the Conqueror’s ruined workshops, so Khârn himself had fastened a heavy, barbed spike to the shaft. Khârn hadn’t checked the homer mounted at the other end. Its ready light blinked when activated, but he had forgotten how to run the checks needed to ensure it definitely worked, another part of his past drowned in the ocean of blood filling his soul. Either it would perform, or he would die according to the will of his god. He paid it little attention, letting it bump along the ground as he prowled through the under-decks.
Each turn of the corridors, each open door, showed him the same bloody ruin. The steady blink of the teleport homer’s ready light flashed on thousands of lifeless thralls. The dead were scattered everywhere. In places they were reduced by Angron’s ferocity to thick slurries of gore where recognisable body parts were few and far between. In places the primarch’s sword had cut into the walls, and there the wounded metal shone with dark light.
Khârn passed a spur corridor leading to the upper decks closed off at the far end by an armoured door. According to his cartolith, the corridor was over fifty metres long. He could not see to the end, for the corridor was packed by the standing dead. The bodies nearer the main way were smears of red. Further into the crowd, the thralls’ wounds became less severe, until, about ten metres in, they exhibited no sign of physical harm. The mortals had crushed each other in their panic to escape, creating a press so tight that Angron could not get to them all. It had done them no good, for they had suffocated.
Khârn grunted at the sight and moved on.
He neared the enginarium section and several possible routes of escape for the primarch. Blast doors leading out to the lower embarkation decks and stores were scarred by accidental cuts. Evidently Angron had been focused on his quarry or he would have sliced his way out there. No mortal material could stop the otherworldly blade of Angron’s sword for long.
Shortly after, Khârn emerged onto the observational gallery of a long, hexagonal hold. The walls were punctuated by four sets of doors down the sides, also hexagonal, and surrounded by hazard striping splashed with blood. Corpses lay about like storm-tossed leaves. When he descended stairs to the hold floor, his feet splashed through deep puddles of blood. The hold had been exhausted of supplies some time ago. Thralls had set up tents in the corners and more elaborate homes in empty containers, turning it into an ugly shanty town. If they sought sanctuary there, it had done them no good. Their bodies were sprawled over the wreck of their possessions.
‘Lotara,’ he voxed. His voice was obscenely loud in the confines of his helm. ‘Lotara, this is Khârn. Have you any sign of him?’ The vox-beads hissed in his ear. ‘Lotara?’
The vox clicked. ‘Khârn. We’ve lost him.’ Lotara’s voice was faint.
Khârn stopped walking.
‘Where?’
‘Before he reached the enginarium. He’s gone to ground. We can’t find him on any of the augurs. Most of the internal systems are out. We’re…’
Lotara’s voice dropped out in a burble of static dominated by the pulsing of an electromagnetic heart. He was so close to the reactor it interfered with the vox. Its beating sounded uncannily like the throb of the Nails.
‘Lotara?’ he said.
Her voice reasserted itself over the pulsing hiss. ‘The vox-relay downdecks must have been compromised. Shielding around the reactor blocks signals from outside. You could try to find a hardline.’
‘I see none,’ Khârn said. ‘Will Skraivok be able to receive my notification?’
‘Keep your vox-channel open to me,’ said Lotara. ‘I will relay the order when you have him.’
‘Do not trust the Night Lord,’ said Khârn.
‘This is the best chance we have. Stop your father, or our war is over.’
Khârn left the channel open, and moved on again.
More holds came and went, all emptied long ago. The dried-up corpses of past rampages lay black in the corners. The pulse of the reactor on the open vox-channel grew louder. The temperature rose. Khârn reached the edge of the thrall decks and stores, beyond which the enginarium sections began.
In a hold half a kilometre long, he found his father.
Khârn felt the primarch’s presence as a great warm patch of rage welling up from the dark spaces between stacked cargo containers. In the hold, a place of silent cranes and dusty supplies, Angron’s fury was as obvious as a volcano spewing lava. But exactly where the primarch was, Khârn could not say. Every avenue dividing the supply stacks was a potential ambush site. He could not fight his father and win. When Angron was united with his Legion, many years gone by, he had killed every captain sent to speak with him apart from Khârn. None of them had fought back. Khârn vowed to defend himself this time, but even so he would die. Though he was renowned as the greatest warrior among the Legiones Astartes, even Khârn could not beat Angron before his transformation. Now, infused with the power of the warp and sharing the God of War’s infinite rage, Angron was practically invincible.
Khârn unhooked the teleport beacon and proceeded in a crouch with his axe ready. He did not need to fight to win, only long enough to tag his genefather with the device.
The sooner it was done the better. There was no honour in skulking around in the shadows.
‘Father!’ he called. ‘Father! It is I, Khârn!’
His amplified voice echoed through the hold.
‘Father!’
Something huge moved way off in the dark. Khârn turned around while his auto-senses struggled with the echoes in their attempt to triangulate the movement.
‘Father!’
‘Khârn,’ Angron’s voice rumbled from the dark, so low and powerful the deck trembled. ‘Why are you here?’
‘I have come to find you, father. The Conqueror is at risk. We can afford no more deaths among the crew.’
Angron laughed. ‘Khârn, Khârn, Lord Khorne demands blood and skulls. Do you not hear his cries? Blood and skulls.’
Khârn felt a stir of unease. He heard the whispers. The words remained elusive, but the furious insistence that murder be done and blood spilled was clear enough. He feared hearing what the words would say. He knew that enlightenment would come in time.
‘I do not hear him, my lord,’ said Khârn.
‘You will. He va
lues you, my son.’
Heavy footsteps thumped deep in the stacks. Knocked chains jangled.
‘These slaves are unworthy offerings for the Blood God, but you, Khârn… Your skull will make a fine gift.’
Angron came out of nowhere. Khârn barely had time to twist aside from the blow of his unholy sword. The blade, longer than Khârn was tall, embedded itself in the deck. Green fire sheathed it, eating into the metal. Khârn leapt back too late. Angron’s backhand clipped him, sending him noisily into the side of a cargo container. Khârn’s bulk pushed a deep dent into the metal, and he struggled to get out before Angron wrenched his sword free and whirled it around at his head. Khârn fell forwards from the dent just as the blade hissed through the air, splitting the container’s side wide open. Plastek-wrapped packets bounced off the floor. He pushed up with his legs, parrying the next blow with Gorechild. The impact jarred him from head to toe, and he reeled back down an avenue between the containers, turned, and ran.
Angron pounded after him. Khârn slipped into a dark space, and eluded his father.
He leaned back against metal. Both his hearts thundered. The Butcher’s Nails sang their melodies of pain into the meat of his brain, urging him to fight.
‘You stole my axe, Khârn,’ Angron growled. ‘You took my weapon from me. Now you steal his favour. Khorne’s eye strays from me to you.’
‘I serve only you, my father,’ Khârn called.
‘You serve me by hunting me in the dark?’
‘Only to bring you to the battle, my lord.’
Angron snarled. Khârn risked glimpsing down the avenue. Angron strode past, a monster from myth: horned, huge, red-skinned, nostrils twitching as he sniffed out his son. Blood stink and anger washed off him in hot waves. He was mighty, but his god-given gifts had robbed him of all art other than killing, and Khârn remained hidden.
‘What battle would that be?’ Angron rumbled. ‘The battle against tedium as we watch Mortarion’s sons fight where we should? The battle against my brother’s arrogance? Horus defies Khorne. Khorne demands we fight for him now, yet the Warmaster keeps us caged.’ Metal squealed as he upended a stack of containers hundreds of tonnes in weight as if they were empty card boxes. The boom of them falling to the deck took a long moment to die. ‘I am the avatar of rage. The power of the warp runs through me, my son. I will not be chained like a dog any longer, not by the Emperor, not by Horus, and not by you. You are a fool to come here. I will kill you. There will be blood, there will be skulls. Khorne cares not whence the blood flows!’