(Matthew Farrer)
‘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.