Angron Read online

  ‘No pride!’ roared Angron, in a voice that Khârn thought dizzily could finish the job of bone-breaking that his fists had started. ‘No pride in brothers who stand there with their wits slack! Dull-eyed as a steer on a slaughter-chute! None of you fight! My brothers, my brothers and sisters, oh…’ The grip on Khârn’s tunic lifted, and he blinked his vision clear and looked up. Angron was not looking at him any more. The primarch had sunk back onto his haunches, one great hand over his eyes. His voice was still a powerful rumble, but barely formed and harsh with accent. Khârn had to concentrate to make out the words. ‘My poor warriors,’ Angron was murmuring, ‘my lost ones.’

  And then he dropped his hand and looked into Khârn’s eyes. The fury was still in his stare, but it had been banked like a furnace, glowing a dull vermilion rather than roaring crimson.

  ‘Your brothers,’ he said in a drained voice, ‘are not like my brothers, whoever you are.’

  Whoever you are. It took a moment for the words to sink in, and the next thought was, He doesn’t know. How can he not know? Still flat on the floor, Khârn took a shuddering breath.

  ‘My name is Khârn. I am a warrior–’

  ‘No!’ Angron’s fist shattered the floor beside Khârn’s head. Stone chips stung his skin. ‘No warrior! No!’

  ‘–of the Legiones Astartes, the great league of battle-brothers in service to our–’

  ‘No! Dead!’ screamed Angron, his head back, muscles corded in his neck. ‘Uhhh, my warriors are dead, my brothers, my sisters–’

  ‘–beloved Emperor,’ said Khârn, fighting to keep his voice cool and level, facing down the urge to gabble and plead, ‘humanity’s master, our commander and general, by whose–’

  At the mention of the Emperor, Angron had begun to shudder and now he threw his head back again, baying like a beast up into the dark, shocking Khârn into silence. Then, snake-fast, his hand closed around Khârn’s ankle and with a single wrench of his body he threw him spinning through the air.

  There was no time to twist in the air or curl. Khârn managed to get his arms around his head before he crashed into a chamber wall and dropped limp to the floor. Through the red-grey mist in his head he could hear Angron’s voice, still filling the chamber with deafening, wordless howls. Within his own body he could feel twitching and roiling as his implanted organs worked on his system: somewhere in there Angron had damaged something badly. Something for the Apothecarion to study, he thought. If they’re up to the challenge of identifying which scraps are mine after all this, he found himself adding, and the grim little mental chuckle from that thought was what gave him the strength to push himself, groaning, up onto his elbows and knees.

  Angron’s foot landed like a forge-hammer between his shoulder blades and flattened him back to the floor, cracked sternum sending out ripping bursts of pain, feeling the fused shell of his ribcage creaking as he fought for breath.

  ‘You don’t injure easily, do you, you meek little paperskins?’ came Angron’s voice from above him, the words bitten out in curt growls. ‘Who makes warriors who won’t make war? Your murdering bastard commander, that’s who.’

  More shifts in him as Khârn’s metabolism noted the dwindling breath in his lungs and changed its pace to use its oxygen more efficiently. He felt the tickle of pressure as his third lung shifted to higher functioning to take up the shortfall, and a warm sensation in his abdomen as his oolitic kidney worked on the heightened toxins in his blood.

  ‘Sends his cowardly little paperskins to die for him, oh yes, I know his sort.’ Angron’s words were running together into an almost continuous growl. ‘Hands that’ve never felt the heat of blood. Skin that’s never parted. Brain-pan that’s never been kissed by the Butcher’s Nails. Tongue that’s never… huh.’

  The weight had shifted on Khârn’s back. Angron didn’t have the leverage to keep the crushing pressure with his foot, and his other foot had started to come up off the floor. Then suddenly the pressure was gone, and Khârn whooped for air with all three lungs as Angron kicked him over onto his back.

  ‘You’re not dying the way I’ve seen men and women die.’ Angron stood over Khârn for a moment, head high like a ceremonial statue, then began to circle where he lay, back bent and head thrust forward, a great hunting cat scenting prey. ‘You take wounds the way… hnnn…’ He dug the fingers of one hand into scalp for a moment, and Khârn could see his fingers tracing the lines of deep, runnelled scars. ‘…the way I do. Your blood crisps itself like mine, it… smells…’ His hands balled into fists, and Khârn saw the tension roll up the forearms, into the shoulders, into the neck and finally once again pulling the primarch’s features into the rage-mask. Slowly, clumsily, Khârn managed to sit up and onto one knee, braced for a new strike, but Angron kept circling him.

  ‘You carry yourselves like men used to iron in their hands, not air. If I were killing you on the hot dust, I’d know your names, because you’d have paid me the proper salute and we’d have turned the rope together.’ Around and around him the padding footsteps. Khârn could feel the primarch’s gaze on him like heavy chain draped over his shoulders. ‘Does it bother you, dying to one who will never know your names?’

  Did it bother him, Khârn wondered? But of course that wasn’t the question. He was an emissary, here to deliver a message, not to debate.

  ‘We are your Legion, Primarch Angron. We are your instrument and yours to command. The deaths of our enemies are yours to command, and so are our own.’

  Not a punch or a kick or a grip, this time, but a ringing, open-handed clout to the side of his head that pitched him sideways.

  ‘Mock me again and I’ll crumble your skull in my fingers before your mouth has finished the words.’ Angron’s voice was shaking with a precarious restraint that was more frightening than a bellow. ‘My warriors. My brothers and sisters. Oh my brave ones, my brothers, my…’ For several seconds Angron simply paced, his jaw opening and working soundlessly, his head twisting from side to side. ‘Gone they are, gone without me, I…’

  Angron’s fists began to move. He beat them against his thighs and chest, brought one fist and then the other around in long looping motions to smash into his mouth and cheeks. In the new quiet of the chamber the sounds of his own flesh splitting and his grunting breaths seemed magnified, textured. Khârn watched, unable to speak, as Angron dropped to his knees, fists doubled in front of his face, muscles locked taut and body shaking.

  There was a silence. Finally, Khârn broke it.

  ‘We are your Legion. Made from your blood and genes, crafted in your image. We have fought our way from the world where you, my lord, were conceived. We have spilt blood and burned worlds, we have shattered empires and hounded species into oblivion. Searching for you.’

  Just let me speak, lord, he thought as he felt the strength coming back into his voice. Just let me bring our petition to you and then my mission is fulfilled and I am content. Do as you will.

  ‘We do not fight you because you are our primarch. Not just our commander, but our blood-sire, our fountainhead. No matter what, I will not raise a hand to you. Nor will any of my battle-brothers. We are ambassadors to you now. We are here for our Legion and our… our Emperor.’ Khârn tensed, but this time Angron did not respond to the word. ‘We are coming before you to plead with you to take up the rightful place that was set for you at your creation.’

  He began moving, wanting to shuffle closer to where Angron knelt and hunched and shook, but even now the violence that the primarch exuded like heat made him pause. Khârn took an unsteady breath. Pain from his wounds kept sawing at the bottom of his consciousness, nagging at him. He squeezed shut his eyes for a moment, pushed himself through the battlefield exercises that had been hypnoconditioned into him on the mountainsides of Bodt, smothered the pain with will.

  That gave him a moment to think, and with the respite he brought his mind to bear on this task the way h
e would a battlefield, a fortification, an enemy’s swordwork. He thought about his own mission, about the reports he had heard from the Emperor’s own flagship before and after the disastrous visit to the planet’s surface, about the primarch’s own words. There had been battle down there, they all knew that. Khârn felt a flicker of envy. The rebels now lying as corpses down there had already had the glory of their primarch, their primarch, leading them in–

  Understanding came in a flash, given a weird focus by the pain.

  ‘I envy them,’ he said quietly. ‘Those ones who fought with you. I wish I had known them. They followed you to battle. That is all any of my brothers and I ask of you, sire. The chance to fight with you as they did.’

  Slowly the primarch’s hands lowered from his face. He was kneeling with his back to the nearest unbroken light, looming over Khârn in silhouette, but Khârn’s vision took in enough infrared to let him see the bitter little smile on the giant face.

  ‘You? No nails, no rope. Hope you’ve got a good head for mockery, Khârn of the so-called Legion. We’d have had sport with you in the camps. Jochura would have been merciless. Sharp-tongued, that boy was.’ The smile lost a trace of its bitterness. ‘I’d watch him bait the others. In the cells at first and then after, when we were roaming. He’d mock, they’d laugh, and he and the one he mocked would laugh harder than all the rest of them. It… was… good. Good to watch. Jochura always swore he would die laughing at his killer.’ The smile vanished and Angron’s mouth took a brutal downwards twist. ‘I told him… told him… uuh,’ and Khârn felt the impact as the great fists smashed into the floor again. He made to speak but the words were cut off as Angron’s arm shot out, quicker than sight, and then his hand was locked around Khârn’s neck and jaw, dragging him in.

  ‘I don’t know how they died!’ Angron’s shout was so loud that the words seemed to fuzz into white noise in Khârn’s ears. The hand shook him like a sack. ‘We swore! Swore!’ Khârn was being yanked backwards and forwards, and Angron’s other hand beat the floor in time. Amidst all the clamour a sharp new scent imprinted itself on his senses, and Khârn realised it was the primarch’s blood, freshly shed. Angron had battered his hands bloody against the stone.

  ‘We swore an oath,’ Angron went on, his voice dropping to a groan like wrenching steel. ‘On the road to Desh’ea I had each of them cut a new scar for my rope, and I cut theirs. And we swore an oath that by the end of all of our lives we’d cut the high-riders a scar that would bleed for a hundred years!’ Despite himself, Khârn’s hands came up as Angron’s grip tightened around his neck and he fought the urge to try and grapple free. ‘A wound their great-grandwhelps would still cry from! A wound to haunt any of them who dared look on the hot dust again!’ Angron’s grip shifted, and air flooded back into Khârn’s lungs. He hung half-kneeling with one of the primarch’s hands pressed into each side of his head. ‘All this,’ Angron said softly, ‘and even my sworn oath wasn’t enough.’ He parted his hands and let Khârn crumple to the floor. ‘Because I don’t even know how they died.’

  When Khârn opened his eyes Angron was sitting cross-legged a little way from his feet, elbows on knees, head thrust out in front of his shoulders, watching him. He could no longer smell the primarch’s blood as fresh as he had – had he lost consciousness for a time? Or had he just lain disorientated in the gloom? Or did Angron’s blood clot and seal even faster than his own? He thought it probably did. He took a breath, torso flickering with pain, and pushed himself up on his elbows.

  ‘And so how do you meet death, paperskin?’ The coolness in Angron’s voice was startling after the raving beast that had battered and flung him like a puppet. ‘Do you make your salutes when you’re on the dust? Declaim your lineage like the high-riders? Declaim your kills like us? Tell me what you do while you’re waiting for the iron in your hand to warm up to blood-heat.’

  ‘We–’ Khârn began, but the unbecoming sprawl was cramping his chest. He pushed himself the rest of the way up and knelt, sitting back on his heels, keeping his breathing steady and composing himself through the pain. Even slumped over as he was, Angron was taller than Khârn by half a head.

  ‘The oath of moment,’ he said. ‘Our last act before we embark for combat. Each of us prepares our vow to our brothers in the Legion. What we will do for our… our Emperor,’ Angron snarled at the word, ‘our Legion and ourselves. We witness the oaths. Some Legions write them and then decorate themselves with the written oaths.’

  ‘Did you take one of these oaths before you came in to see me?’ Angron asked.

  ‘No, primarch,’ replied Khârn, slightly wrongfooted by the question. ‘I did not come in here to fight you. I say again, no one in the Legion will raise a hand to you. Oaths of moment are for battle.’

  ‘No challenge,’ rumbled the looming shape. ‘You do not ask their names when you walk the dust, and you don’t give yours. No salutes and no showing of ropes. This is how they fight who say they are my blood-cousins?’

  ‘This is how we fight, sire. We exist to make the Emperor’s enemies extinct. We’ve no need of anything that does not serve that end. And we rarely fight enemies who have names worth knowing, let alone saluting. What the rope is, forgive me, primarch, I do not know.’

  ‘How do you show your warriorship, then?’ The puzzlement in the primarch’s voice seemed genuine, but when Khârn hesitated over his answer, Angron lunged forwards and punched him over onto his back.

  ‘Answer me! You little grave-grubber, you sit there and smirk at me again like some high-rid… uhhh…’ The primarch had sprung to his feet and now he picked Khârn up by the throat, yanked him into the air and dropped him flat on his back again. By the time Khârn had shakily pushed himself back up, Angron had walked away to stand under one of the lights. He turned to make sure Khârn was watching, then turned and spread his arms.

  The primarch’s torso was bare, packed with inhuman musculature on the Emperor’s design, broad, heavy and angular to accommodate the thickened bones and the strange organs and tissues that Astartes legend said the Emperor had grown from his own flesh and blood, modified twenty different ways for his children. Khârn found himself wondering for a moment if Angron had grown up with the slightest idea of what he truly was, before he realised what the primarch was showing him.

  A ridge of scar tissue began at the base of Angron’s spine. It travelled up his backbone, then veered to the left and around his body, riding over his hip and curving around to his front. Angron began to turn in place underneath the light and Khârn saw how the scar seemed to expand and thin again, ploughing and gouging the skin, in some places vanishing entirely where the primarch’s healing powers had overcome it. The scar looped around and around Angron’s body, spiralling up over his belly, around his ribs, towards his chest. A little past the right of his sternum, it abruptly stopped.

  ‘The Triumph Rope,’ Angron said. His hand moved to indicate the upper lengths of the scar, where it was smoother, more continuous, less ugly. There were no healed patches in its upper reaches. Khârn jumped as Angron thumped a fist against his chest with a report like a gun.

  ‘Red twists! Nothing but red on my rope, Khârn! Of all of us, I was the only one. No black twists.’ Angron was shaking with rage again, and Khârn bowed his head. His thoughts were bleak: I’ve started this now, and I wish to finish it, but primarch, I don’t know how many more of your rages I can withstand. Then Angron’s hands had gripped his shoulders, cruelly grating the bones in the broken one, and the muscles in Khârn’s neck and jaw locked rigid as he worked to stop himself crying out.

  ‘I can’t go back!’ came Angron’s voice through the pain, and the note in his voice was not fury now but an anguish far greater than the pain of Khârn’s injuries. ‘I can’t go back to Desh’ea. I can’t pick up the soil to make a black twist.’ Angron flung Khârn away and dropped to his knees. ‘I can’t… uhh… I need to wear my failure and I can’t. Your Em
peror! Your Emperor! I couldn’t fight with them and now I can’t commemorate them!’

  ‘Sire, I, we…’ Khârn could feel little stings and blooms of heat inside his abdomen as his healing systems worked on wounds inside him. ‘Your Legion wants to learn your ways. You are our primarch. But we haven’t learned them yet. I don’t know…’

  ‘No. Grave-grub Khârn doesn’t know. No triumph rope on Khârn.’ Khârn kept his eyes on the floor but the sneer was all too audible in Angron’s voice. ‘For every battle you live through, a cut to lengthen the rope. For a triumph, let it scar clean. A red twist. For a defeat you survive, work some dust from where you fought into the cut to scar it dark. A black twist. Nothing but red on me, Khârn,’ said Angron, spreading his arms again, ‘but I don’t deserve it.’

  ‘I understand you, sire,’ Khârn answered, and he found that he did. ‘Your brothers, your brothers and sisters,’ he corrected himself, ‘they were defeated.’

  ‘They died, Khârn,’ said Angron. ‘They all died. We swore to each other that we’d stand together against the high-riders’ armies. The cliffs of Desh’ea would see the end of it. No more twists in the rope. For any of us.’ His voice had softened to a whisper, heavy with grief. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be drawing breath. But I am. And I can’t even pick up the dust from Desh’ea to make a black twist to remember them by. Why did your Emperor do this to me, Khârn?’

  There was silence after the question. Angron, still standing, had let his head fall forwards and was digging his knuckles into his forehead and face. The lights made strange shadows across his skull, lumpy with metal and scars.

  Khârn got to his feet. He swayed, but his balance held. ‘It isn’t my place to know, sire, what the Emperor said to you. But we–’