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 lighten
ing 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 fi
ngertips 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.’
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