‘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.
‘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 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.