Angron Read online

  The Horus Heresy®

  Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Earth have conquered the galaxy in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races have been smashed by the Emperor’s elite warriors and wiped from the face of history. The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons.

  Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful and

  deadly warriors. First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superheroic beings who have led the Emperor’s armies of Space Marines in victory after victory. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation. The Space Marines are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

  Organised into vast armies of tens of thousands called Legions, the Space Marines and their primarch leaders conquer the galaxy in the name of the Emperor.

  Chief amongst the primarchs is Horus, called the Glorious, the Brightest Star, favourite of the Emperor, and like a son unto him. He is the Warmaster, the commander-in-chief of the Emperor’s military might, subjugator of a thousand thousand worlds and conqueror of the galaxy. He is a warrior without peer, a diplomat supreme.

  As the flames of war spread through the Imperium, mankind’s champions will all be put to the ultimate test.

  ‘You don’t have to do this,’ said Dreagher, breaking the long silence, and the relaxing of tension from the other War Hounds was audible even without Astartes senses. Khârn looked around the loose square of warriors and saw sneaking relief in their expressions. Someone had finally come out and said it.

  ‘You need not do it.’ Dreagher could not quite bring himself to step between Khârn and the doors, but his voice was steady. ‘You should not do it.’

  But other signs gave the lie to the composure in Dreagher’s voice. Khârn watched his fellow captain’s respiration move at just below combat-preparation speed, watched the veins in his face and shorn scalp tick at an elevated rate, took in the motions of his eyes, the subtle shifts of his shoulders as his body went through the muscle-loosening routines that had been part of their deep conditioning. Dreagher’s skin carried the scent of scouring-gel but underneath it, coming off his skin, was the scent of adrenaline and the inhuman essences that the Astartes body made for itself when the danger instincts rang.

  They were all keyed up; Khârn’s own metabolism was escalated too. He could hardly have helped it. The air cyclers had not yet been able to carry away the tang of blood that had washed through the anteroom the last time the double doors had opened.

  As Khârn worked his palate and tongue, processing and tasting the air, he realised something else: the rest of the ship had fallen as silent as the anteroom they stood in. The anteroom’s semicircular outer wall opened through to the barrack-decks, and normally the broad colonnade was alive with sounds. Voices, the clank of boots and the softer tread of the menials and technomats, the distant sound of shots from the ranges, the almost subsonic buzz of the new power weapons, all gone now. The decks were as silent as the great chamber beyond the steel-grey double doors at Dreagher’s back. The strangeness of that silence tautened his nerves and muscles further still.

  Khârn ignored his body, letting it do what it will. He kept his eyes cold.

  ‘Eighth Company makes me the ranking captain aboard, now,’ he told them. ‘My rank, my oath and my Emperor. Together they close the matter. In case anyone is insolent enough to think there’s even a matter to close.’

  ‘No,’ came a voice from beside him. Jareg, the Master Shellsmith from the artillery echelon. ‘The matter to close is that we must find a way to, to…’ Jareg motioned wordlessly towards the doors, face twisted in distress.

  ‘We… don’t know how this will end,’ said Horzt, commander of the Ninth Company’s Stormbird squadron. Khârn watched the man’s hands form fists, shaking to match the shake in his voice. ‘And so we have to plan for the worst. One of us here, now, may need to command the Legion yet, and–’

  He broke off. In the space beyond the doors a voice, deeper than a tank-rumble, mightier than a cannon-blast, was roaring in anger. If there were words to it, they were blurred and muffled by the slabs of metal in the way, but still the War Hounds fell silent. They had shouted oaths and orders and obscenities over the clamour of gun, grenade and chainaxe, over the scream of Stormbird jets, over the keen and bellow of a dozen different xenos, but Khârn was the only one who dared to speak now over that distant, muted voice.

  ‘Enough,’ he said, and his voice was flat. ‘I’m not stupid enough to deny what we all think and know. You all owe Horzt a salute for being the only one to find enough Astartes guts in his belly to say it. The Emperor has brought us our lord and commander. The heartspring of our own bloodline. That is who is with us now. Our general. The one of whom we are echoes. Do you remember that? Do you?’ Khârn looked from one to the next, and the War Hounds stared back at him. Good. He would have struck any of them who hadn’t met his eyes. On the other side of the scarred grey plate of the doors, the distant voice roared again.

  ‘Now, this,’ he went on, ‘this thing we are doing here, this is right. It is not for any Lord Commander, it is not for any high-helmed, gilt-edged Custodian, it is not for anyone–’ his shout stiffened their backs, widened their eyes ‘–to come between the War Hounds and their primarch and live. Only for the Emperor himself will we stand aside, and the Emperor has shown his wisdom. He has taken this duty and he has laid it on our shoulders.’

  He looked at Dreagher again. Like Khârn, the man was dressed in white, bands of blue glittering across the high-collared tunic, boots and gauntlets a dark ceremonial blue rather than functional shipboard grey. The Emperor’s lightning-bolt emblem gleamed at his collar and shoulder. His dress matched Khârn’s own: the formal garments with which the War Hounds symbolised they were about their most solemn business. It was obvious why. Dreagher wanted to go in Khârn’s place. Wanted to go in and die.

  ‘We have our primarch now,’ Khârn told them, and even now he felt a little shiver at the words. All these years since they had launched outwards from Terra, watching as one mighty creation after another emerged from unreclaimed space to take their places in the ranks. Khârn had heard how the Salamanders had waited in orbit around the burning moon, waited for the Emperor’s word that the one he had found there was indeed their sire. He remembered the first sight of chilly-eyed Perturabo walking at the Emperor’s shoulder the day they took ship for Nove Shendak, and the change in the Iron Warriors when they knew who was to command them. Every Legion still with that empty place at its head felt the same longing, sharper with every voyage, every campaign. Would this next star be the one where their blood-sire lived? Would this ship, this communiqué, bring the news that their father-commander had been found, out there in the dark? And then that electric day when the word had come to the mustering docks at Vueron, the news that their own primarch had been found, their lord, their alpha, their…

  And it had come to this.

  ‘We have our primarch now,’ he repeated, ‘and he will lead his Legion in whatever manner he chooses. We are his just as we are the Emperor’s. What we wish or plan no longer matters. The commander of the War Hounds will meet the primarch of the War Hounds, and what happens will be as the primarch wills it. So be it. No more talk.’

  Besides, he thought as Dreagher saluted and silently walked to the doors, I don’t suppose it will be long before he works his way down to you. He was surprised at the thought, but surprised also at the lack of emotion
that came with it. For all that the War Hounds were a hot-blooded Legion, Khârn found his thoughts flat and colourless. He took a moment to wonder if this were how others felt, the enemies who had advanced to their doom under War Hound chainaxes, or the condemned men of the auxilia in the days before the Emperor had banned the Legion from decimating allies who disgraced them on the field.

  Dreagher worked the key controls and the doors swung silently outwards. Beyond them, oddly prosaic, a plain set of broad steps went down into shadows. Another roar, wordless and deep-throated, came echoing up from the gloom.

  Khârn shook the thoughts away, walked forwards, and let the darkness fold over him as Dreagher swung the doors closed at his back.

  Khârn came down the broad, shallow steps into the great space that had been built into the ship as Angron’s triumphal hall. He had been in it many times but it was a different space now, even with most of it lost in the dark. It felt different. Khârn registered that sensation, of walking into a strange space unfamiliar to him, and wondered if any room that held a primarch could feel the same again. He walked three slow, measured paces onto the smooth stone chamber floor, and pushed his enhanced vision through its darkness adjustments – the primarch had shattered most of the lights, or torn them from their mountings. Here and there the survivors cast glow-pools that did little more than texture the darkness around them. Some of the glows showed dark spatters and puddles across the floor, but Khârn did not bother to look closely. Even if the smell of it were not drowning his senses, he had seen the aftermath of death too many times not to know it.

  He felt the urge to look around him for his brothers. Gheer, the Legion Master, who had come in here first when the Emperor had told the War Hounds they must take this duty upon themselves and then taken ship to meet the Thirty-seventh Fleet at Aldebaran. Kunnar, the First Company Champion, who had donned his formal cape, taken up his axe-staff and walked down the steps after the noises coming through the doors had convinced them that Gheer was long dead. Anchez, who had captained the assault echelon, had walked down next. He had joked with Khârn and Hyazn as the doors had been opened for him, despite the blood they could already smell on the air. The man had never known what fear was. Hyazn had been next, and two of the banner-bearers from his personal command coterie had insisted on marching down the steps into the dark with him. They had meant to block the primarch’s fury for long enough that Hyazn could speak with him. It hadn’t worked. Vanche, the master-at-arms to old Gheer, had insisted on being next, even though the next to inherit the Legion’s command, and so the duty of taking up embassy to their lord, should have been Shinnargen of the Second Company. The point was moot now. Shinnargen had met his end in here an hour after Vanche.

  I am, primarch, the servant of your will, thought Khârn, and I would never dare to pronounce you the servant of mine. But still, my newfound lord, if you would make your peace with your Legion while there are still any in your Legion to draw breath…

  He exhaled, and took another step into the room. For a moment he thought he could hear movement, the padding of feet, a rush of air that felt like breath before everything splintered and whirled and he crashed into a pillared wall to land hard on his back, gasping in pain.

  By the time the gasp had entered his lungs, reflex had taken over and he was up on one knee, turning to put his broken right arm and shoulder to the wall and holding and tensing his left arm ready to ward as he scanned for motion, eyes sifting the gloom, pushing into infrared to see the hulking shape hurtling forwards to fill his vision–

  Will overrode reflex, and with an iron effort Khârn forced his hand towards his side. Then he was skittering on his back across the floor, breath hammered out of his lungs and cracked clavicle flaring. Unthinkingly he drew his knees to his chest, turned the skidding tumble into a backwards roll. Training, determination and Astartes neural wiring let him shunt the pain to the back of his mind as he came up into a combat crouch.

  Then will took over again, and Khârn made himself stand upright and placed his hands by his sides. He looked back and found the spot where he had rested a moment ago, but the floor was empty, no shape or heat-trace.

  Was this how it was for the others? He caught himself wondering, and stopped thinking about it when the lapse in concentration started him swaying on the spot. He focused, half-heard movement closing in behind him and opened his mouth to speak, and a moment later was jerked up from the floor, the back of his head and neck in the grip of a hand that felt bigger and harder than a Dreadnaught’s rubble-claw. Will, will over instinct: Khârn stopped himself from kicking backwards, trying to wrench free.

  ‘Another one? Another one like the rest?’ The voice in his ear was a rasp, a rumble, words like handfuls of hot gravel. ‘Warrior made, warrior garbed, uhh…’ For a moment the grip on the back of Khârn’s neck juddered and his body shook like a Stormbird hitting atmosphere, then the animal growl from behind him became a roar.

  ‘Fight!’

  He was being carried forwards one-handed in long blurring strides across the width of the hall.

  ‘Fight me!’ With the words, a slam into the wall hard enough to leave Khârn’s wits red-tinged and reeling.

  ‘Fight me!’ Another slam and the red was shot through with black. His limbs felt sluggish and only half there. The voice was bellowing, drowning his hearing, pouring into his head and trampling his jangled thoughts.

  ‘Fight!’ Another steel-hard grip closed about his broken arm and for a brief moment Khârn whirled through the air. Another impact and his back was to the wall, his feet dangling, broken shoulder incandescent with pain as one of the great hands pinned him against the dark marble.

  It took a moment for things to clear. Astartes biochemistry stabilised his pain and his cognition, glanded stress-hormones slammed into his system and Khârn looked at his primarch’s face with clear eyes.

  The cabling from crude cranial implants tumbled away from a high brow, pale eyes sat deep behind cheekbones that angled down like axe-strokes to an aquiline nose and a broad, thin-lipped mouth.

  It was the face of a general to follow unto death, the face of a teacher at whose feet the wise would fight to sit, the face of a king made for the adoration of worlds: the face of a primarch.

  And rage made it the face of a beast. Rage pushed and distorted the features like a tumour breaking out from the skull beneath. It made the eyes into yellow, empty pits, debased the proud lines of brow and jaw, peeled the lips back from the teeth.

  And yet it was a face so maddeningly familiar, the face of the sire whose template had made the War Hounds themselves. Khârn could see his brethren in the bronze skin, the set of the eyes, the lines of jaw and skull. Pinned there and staring, the thought that flicked into his mind was of the Legion’s battles against the capering xenos whose masks wove faces out of light, taunting them with distorted mockeries of themselves.

  The primarch’s grip tensed, and Khârn wondered if he had heard the thought – didn’t they say some of their sires had that trick? Slowly Angron’s other hand rose up before Khârn’s face. Even in this light he could see the crackling shell of quick-clotting blood coating the fingers. The hand made a trembling fist before his face that seemed to hang there for an age before it slowly opened to make a stiff-fingered claw. Khârn could tell how the claw would strike: a finger in each eye, powerful enough to punch through the back of the socket and into his brain, the thumb under his jaw to crush his throat, the whole hand then ready to clench and rip away the front of his skull or pull his head from his neck. Astartes bone was powerfully made – did the primarch have the power for that in just one of his hands? Khârn thought he did.

  But the hand did not strike. Instead Angron leaned forwards, the snarling gargoyle-mask of his face closing, closing, until his mouth was by Khârn’s ear.

  ‘Why?’ And his whisper was like the grate of tank-treads on stone. ‘I can see what you’re made for. You�
��re made to spill blood, just as I am. You’re not born normal men, any more than I was.’ A long, savage growl. ‘So why? Why no triumph rope? Why no weapon in your hand? Why do you all walk down here so meek? Don’t you know whose blood I really – eh?’

  They were close enough that he had felt Khârn’s smile against his cheek, and now he pulled back to see it. Angron’s eyes squeezed shut for a moment, then flashed open again as he twitched Khârn away from the wall and slammed him back again. It seemed to Khârn that he could feel the fingers of the hand that held him thrumming with checked violence.

  ‘What’s this? Showing your teeth?’ Another slam against the wall. ‘Why are you smiling?’ By the end of the question the voice was once again at that shattering roar, and even Khârn’s hearing, more resilient than human, rang for whole seconds before it cleared. And in those few seconds, he realised that the question had not been rhetorical. Angron was waiting for an answer.

  ‘I am…’ His voice, when he found it, was hoarse and brittle. ‘I am proud of my Legion brothers.’ He swallowed to try and soothe his dry throat so that he could speak again, but before he could take another breath he was pulled from the wall and dropped. Angron’s kick lofted him into the air in a long curve that fetched him up against a cold, torn corpse. When Khârn dragged in a breath it was full of the reek of blood and offal. There was no way to tell whose the body had been.

  Bare feet thumped along the stone floor, counterpointing growling heaves of breath as Angron closed the distance. He leapt and landed in a crouch beside Khârn as he tried to make his body move. The grip clamped around him again, around his jaw and face this time, and he was dragged half-upright to stare into the primarch’s eyes again.

  ‘Proud.’ Angron’s lips worked as though he were chewing on the word. ‘Your brothers. No warriors. None of you will fight. Why… are… you…’ He was shaping his words with difficulty, and one hand had risen to clutch at his head. “How, uh, how can, nnn…’ And then he lifted Khârn by the front of his tunic and slammed him back down. The ragged remains on the floor gave a bloody squelch as Khârn’s back came down across them.