Lotara handed back the flask. 'Apologies. Our maintenance crews are…'
She couldn't summon the effort to finish the excuse.
Thankfully, it was not more than nine conveyor-less levels back up to the ordnance bay where the medicae triage station had been established. As they rounded the corner of a doubleback intersection leading into it, the first two armsmen faltered in their stride, and a startled whimper came from one of the Navigator's retinue.
A legionary stood guard in the wide doorway. He held two notched axes, loose and ready, and his once white battleplate was stained with old blood and other, less savoury filth. He wore a tabard of mail, and a trio of woefully small skulls hung from his belt.
The warrior did not move to block Lotara, nor any of the mortals accompanying her. He merely glared down at them through cold, emerald-green eye-lenses, shifting his weight slowly from foot to foot, his breath audible through the vox-grille of his helm.
Casualty estimates from the collision varied, since there were no solid numbers for the flagship's current crew, and there were certainly too few to mount any sort of organised sweep of the most heavily damaged areas. The compartments that had suffered full decompression had been automatically sealed off, and Lotara was forced to concede that they would likely remain that way for some time. She had seen for herself the void-frosted bodies on the other side of the internal bulkhead viewports.
Even so, there were scores of bodies here too.
Many had been bagged. But when the bags ran out, they had been covered with stripped tunics, or cargo tarps, or whatever else came to hand. The deck drains ran dark red - now a fairly common spectacle at any place on the ship - and the few medicae adepts that remained looked more like apprentice butchers.
Kharn, thankfully, was being tended to. The Apothecary, Kargos, was squatting on his armoured chest, stapling his face back together.
It had taken a while to subdue him. His frenzy claimed two more of the bridge crew before any legionaries had arrived to help, and Kargos hit him with enough tranq to kill an ogryn. When Kharn regained consciousness almost two hours later, he was surprisingly coherent, and remembered nothing of any of it.
Lotara wasn't sure if it was still entirely necessary, but the captain's arms were being held down by that leering, pallid ghoul Skane and one of his Destroyer squad. The sergeant looked up at her and grinned; he probably intended it to be shark-like, but she could see more empty gums than teeth, and sharks were not known to drool.
'Flag-captain,' he wheezed, straining his augmetic vocal cords. 'We're trying to decide who it was that gave him these new scars - the helmsman on the Metzgerei, or your Navigator. Well, former Navigator. I don't recall anyone ever cutting his face before, not even in the fighting pits. It's worth noting. There might yet be a score to settle.'
Lotara didn't respond. She was used to seeing Kharn covered in blood, but it tended to appear brighter and more unsettling whenever it was mostly his own.
She turned. Ramosz and his gaggle of attendants were all staring hard at their own feet.
'Kharn,' she called out. 'He's here.'
The reply she got was nothing more than a questioning grunt. Lotara waved Ramosz forwards.
'Chief Navigator from the Scathlocke. He's House Tevu. No blood ties to Andrasta that we could find.'
Ramosz bowed deeply, even lowering his astrolabe. 'Lord, we are honoured to serve you and the primarch. Doubtless you have no reason to recall such a trifle, but we were a member of Mistress Nisha's retinue for a while some years back.'
Kharn growled. 'Don't say her name again. That weak-willed bitch.'
Pausing to give Ramosz a pointed, sidelong glance Lotara prepared to dig her heels in once again. 'He's the best chance we've got. No one else comes close, not for guiding a Gloriana.'
To her surprise there was no further protest, but Kharn shifted in agitation beneath the Apothecary's weight.
'Aren't you done? Get off me Bloodspitter. Get off me now.'
Kargos pushed himself to his feet wiping his tools on the back of one leather gauntlet, while the two Destroyers moved to haul the reluctant patient up.
'Arise, Kharn the Bloody!' Skane chuckled, clapping him on the pauldron. 'May you—'
Kharn felled the sergeant with a single, barehanded blow to the side of the head, sending him crashing into an empty shell hoist cart. No one said anything for a long moment.
'Where are we?' the captain demanded. His face was puffy and raw around the rough metal fastenings, his left eye half closed and bloodshot. 'You. Navigator. Can you tell me that, at least?'
Ramosz still would not look up. 'We have been comparing the fleet's position against the cartae, lord. We believe this to be somewhere at the periphery of the Ruthan Marches. Beyond the range of local system scrying, certainly.'
'Ruthan. One of Dorn's conquests. Should we expect a Seventh Legion presence?'
'Unlikely,' Lotara replied. 'There have been few reports of them operating outside the Segmentum Solar in years, so I doubt we'll face them until we reach the Throneworld. Assuming that's still our plan.'
The ship juddered softly beneath their feet. Casting a cursory glance over the rows of bodies in the chamber, Kharn turned and made to leave, without ceremony. 'Have all of these incinerated. Don't bother with funerary rites. And get our new Navigator installed immediately. We must be ready.'
'Ready for what? Lord Aurelian was orchestrating our combined attacks from system to system, and now he is gone. We have no target.'
'I do not need Lorgar's permission to make war,' Kharn spat, stepping over Skane's unconscious form. 'We are on our own now, Lotara. We will serve our own primarch. No other.'
She nodded wearily, re-tying her lank hair behind her head. 'So, where are you going?'
'Time is running short. It has been more than a month since we spilled an enemy's blood. Should I tell Angron that his brother has left him here to die? Or should we simply ask him who he would have us kill next?'
The legionary guard stepped aside, but Kharn halted unsteadily at the open doorway. He placed his palms on the dark iron bulkhead, and slowly put one ear to the metal.
The other World Eaters looked on, uncertain as to what they were seeing.
'Something wrong?' Lotara called out.
'Maybe,' the captain murmured. 'For the first time in a long time, I cannot hear my father's roar.'
What manner of warp-born sorcery can turn plasteel and adamantium to rippling flesh? Often have I trodden these halls since we returned to Nuceria, and yet still it unsettles me: the transitional space in which the pulse of the ship's great reactor seems to become a true heartbeat.
Only now, it is the silence beyond the heartbeat that unsettles me more.
Once, this was the broad colonnade that led to Angron's triumphal hall. The anteroom with its great doors, the wide steps leading down, down. In the earliest days, after Desh'ea, a handful of us stood here and learned what his prolonged bouts of silence could herald.
Bloated and venous, these living walls have almost - but not entirely - obscured the ancient words that grace the arch high overhead.
IRA VINCIT, IN SANGUIS LAVANTO.
The XII Legion bathes in blood now, for true.
Two warriors stand beneath this legend. Their hulking Cataphractii suits have left bruises on the floor where they have paced back and forth. They are clad in red and brass and bronze, in imitation of the primarch's own Martian plate from the latter years of the Great Crusade.
We are, all of us, an echo of Angron at some level or another. Splinters of his fractured psyche, perhaps?
'Devourers,' I call out. 'Stand aside. I will pass.'
The first raises his bladed fists in defiance of my rank, traceries of power arcing between the razor-sharp claws. Over the points of his exaggerated, toothy gorget, his eyes are weary.
'Hold, captain. You are not welcome here.'
His name is Tarugar. An unremarkable centurion, he claimed his place among
the primarch's supposed honour guard after I slew his predecessor Borok, and walked away. Tarugar did not even earn this paltry thing for himself.
He is no champion of the Legion.
I do not break my pace. I stride right up to them both, the second warrior levelling his chain-glaive and gunning the motors.
The click-whine of his Terminator armour's heavy actuators gives him away. In the instant before his all-too-obvious lunge, I slap the weapon's blade down with one hand and break the haft beneath my boot.
Tarugar slashes at me with his claws once, twice. Drop. Turn. Come up behind him. The other legionary tries to grapple, to hold me in place for the killing strike. His strength is immense. The breath is forced from my lungs. I snatch the combi-bolter at his hip, and press it to his bare forehead.
Single shot.
Brain matter, dark blood.
How many Devourers have I slain, now? How many more will I?
The dead warrior topples over backwards, taking me down with him. It is a few seconds before I can slip free of his spasming arms, tossing the gun aside.
Tarugar stands dumbfounded. He raises his claws another fraction, but takes half a backward step as I move inside his guard unopposed. I can feel the blades' field prickling the hairs on my forearm.
I lean in close. His adrenaline levels are spiking. My voice is a pitched, cold whisper.
'Does Angron even know your name, Tarugar? I doubt it. Stand aside.'
He grinds his teeth. He battles not against me, but against his Butcher's Nails. I can read my brothers as easily as I could once read our father, and Tarugar's sense of self-preservation soon outweighs his need to test himself any further against the primarch's favoured son.
'Damn you, Kharn,' he hisses. 'I hope he eats you alive.'
I glare at him wordlessly as I unbar the doors and haul them open. He turns away, cursing under his breath in guttural Nagrakali.
No champion of the Legion. No fit guardian for our primarch.
If we still have any primarch left to guard.
Yawning black before me, the steps descend into what has become Angron's dungeon cell. I take them slowly, one at a time, knocking aside the debris that litters them with the edge of my boot. The air is foul. I measure my breathing urging my hearts to slow.
Know no fear. Show no fear. Show no pity, and no doubt.
We have played this game many times before, the primarch and I, and I have tried to learn from every beating I received.
The last step delivers me onto the triumphal hall's floor.
'Father?'
I freeze. The word, half-formed upon my lips and yet spoken aloud by another voice, brings me up short.
I scan the darkness in the chamber's recesses. The spaces between the skull piles. The vaulted reaches of the high ceiling. The only light comes from the anteroom at my back. I slowly, cautiously, risk another step forwards, and scattered shards of bone crackle beneath my tread. I cannot see my primarch, though at least l now know for certain that he is still here.
Half a legionary - the lower half - lies twisted on the flagstones like a discarded plaything, capped with a protruding kink of broken vertebrae. There are large teethmarks in the buckled ceramite of his war-plate. I see no point in questioning who he was, or where the rest of him might be.
Another step. Another. I carefully turn my back to the nearest wall, and let my vision adjust.
There.
Angron's eyes smoulder with their own infernal light, though far less so than the last time I stood before him in this place. Then, his inhuman gaze had been fierce, and fearsome, so that not one of us could long hold it. The murderous glare of the gods' most lethal creation.
But now the daemon prince watches me with something like… wariness?
He is crouched in the shadow of his throne - and such a thing is no small marvel for a being of his warp-gifted size and majesty.
No. Not crouched.
Cowering.
I cannot process what I am seeing. The Nails' ticking is an aneurysmal pulse in my ears, as well as my mind.
'Father?' he calls again. Gone is the bestial growl, the hoarse rumble of a throat no longer capable of screaming itself raw. I would say, rather, that he sounds more like himself again. His old self. His former self. The broken warrior he was, before… before his…
I do not know the correct term. I do not care to know it. This is beyond me, beyond any of us. We no longer trouble ourselves to wonder.
His immense, clawed fingers slip from the side of the throne as he pulls further back into the gloom, edging away from me.
'Father… is it over?'
He has broken his chains again. I can see them trailing on the floor. No one has ever been able to imprison Angron. Not for long. And yet, he has not tried to leave.
I steady myself, offering a cautious half-bow. To avert my eyes would be to invite death. I am staring down an unleashed monster.
'Sire, it is Kharn, of the Eighth Company.'
'Khorne…'
'Khârn, sire.'
Silence. Then, 'Grave-grub Kharn. Yes. Yes, I remember you.'
This is the most lucid he has been in many months. Do I dare to dream, dare to hope, dare to pray that this could be the beginning of something more? Perhaps even the salvation that Lord Aurelian claimed to have sought for him?
'Where is the other paperskin?'
'Sire?'
'The sighted one. I do not feel her nearby. The… The…'
He is straining for something he cannot recall.
'Chief Navigator Andrasta. I am sorry to tell you, sire, that she is dead.'
The daemon shifts, and dry bones fracture beneath his immense weight. 'Did you end her?' he asks. The question takes me somewhat by surprise.
'I did not. She took her own life.' I imagine all the ways this conversation might play out, and decide that any further detail would be an unnecessary risk. 'We cannot be certain why. We have arranged for a replacement.'
The primarch reaches slowly for his blade, half-buried but not forgotten amidst the detritus of the hall. As his fist closes around the scaly hide grip, the runes etched into the black metal begin to throb with un-light, enough to set the Nails fizzing and buzzing behind my eyes. This weapon is not like Gorechild, or Brazentooth, nor any other that Angron has carried before. It was forged for none but him, and it is always hungry.
I have seen it cleave through the hulls of Imperial battle tanks.
But he does not raise the great sword now. Perhaps he merely needed to remember how it feels in his hand. The links of his chains graze the flagstones.
'How long do they live, when no one takes their skulls?'
I cannot recall the last time anyone exchanged this many words with him. I slowly, carefully lower myself to the floor, making sure to keep our eyes locked the entire time. I will answer any question, no matter how mundane, if it will hold him here in the moment for just a little while longer.
'Mortals are feeble things, sire. Without intervention, they will endure for less than a hundred years, and much of that is spent in pain. But Mistress Nisha Andrasta was somewhat older than that, and curiously frail-minded. It is possible that she would not allow herself to understand what your Legion is becoming.'
Angron grows very still for a creature capable of such unnatural and unpredictable rage.
'My Legion,' he growls.
I do not respond. I regret having seated myself so close to him.
'What is it becoming, Kharn?'
The words gaoler and plaything leap unbidden to the forefront of my agitated mind, almost making me flinch. I have no reason to believe that the daemon prince can read my thoughts, but those two felt disloyal, and irreverent, nonetheless.
I consider my response.
'We are following you, sire. We will follow you into eternity.'
'Why?'
'Because you are our father.'
The truth of this statement appears to confound him. He looks me up and down, t
hen scrutinises his talons, his forearms, the tips of his folded wings, lingering just a moment longer than I would like upon the heavy iron manacles around his wrists. Then he shakes his head, rattling the dreadlock-cables that still frame those animal features. It is like watching a mindlocked servitor trying to comprehend the myriad hypocrisies of The Apocrypha Terra - a mind that once held the capacity to understand, now torn between the memory of what it was and the promise of what it could yet be.
'I am not your father, grave-grub. You are not like me. I should not be here.'
The words sting. They always have.
Slowly, Angron begins to rise out from behind the throne. He towers over me, the great sword dragging in his grip, his hunched shoulders pushing aside the empty lumen fixtures that hang overhead.
I keep my voice level and measured. 'We have only ever wanted to please you, sire. My brothers and l, we—'
'I should not be here,' the daemon rumbles again. His attention is drifting to the doors at the top of the steps. His eyes are growing fiercer. I need to bring him back, to hold him in this now dwindling moment.
There is an empty battered helm lying on the flagstones near my foot. It will serve.
'Do you remember the red sands, sire?' I ask quickly. 'Do you remember the honour of the caedere remissum? Do you remember what it signifies?'
Angron twitches. He peers at me once more, a blast of hot breath gusting from his snout.
I continue.
'When we found you, we did not know what you wanted of us. Not really. Nothing we did could earn your approval. The rulers of Nuceria, the high-riders, quickly made their peace with Guilliman after your rebellion was ended, and gladly joined with the empire of Ultramar. Though you would not allow us to return there, we thought to mark the sacrifice that you and the Desh'ean gladiators had unknowingly made for us. For the Imperium.'
I pluck the helmet up from the floor. The eye-lenses are broken, the grille dented inwards.
The primarch's expression is unreadable. But he has not killed me yet. That is something.
I turn the helmet over in my hands.
'Here - the twin-crests of the remissum, like bladed horns. When a warrior in the arena knew their mind was failing, when they had spilled too much blood and could no longer find pleasure in anything else, then they would wear them as a warning to their foes. The bout would be sanguis extremis. To the death. My brothers and I saw that it was a bold and noble thing to proclaim oneself beyond hope, sire. Beyond redemption.
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