‘The Iron Warriors were with us too, and Perturabo landed with the assault pioneers after our lances scoured our drop-zone bare and dry. He worked out how to dredge and shape the ground. The earth there, well, there barely was earth. Just muddy slops, full of trace toxins, the bedrock deep enough that a man’d drown if he planted his feet on it.’
‘How did you stop them?’ demanded Angron. ‘If you couldn’t stand on the ground?’
‘Sentries with high-powered lasguns, sire, devices to read the movements of the mud to hear them moving through it towards us, explosives we seeded around the earthworks and allowed to sink to where the worms burrowed.
‘Perturabo’s earthworks were a miracle. He built trenches and dykes, penned in the mud seas and drained them, drove the worms back, reclaimed land these wretched humans could build on. And when the worms came out to fight us, they met the Emperor and his War Hounds.’
‘You’re speaking of yourself,’ said Angron. ‘Yourselves.’ Khârn nodded.
‘The War Hounds. XII Legion Astartes. Made in your image, as your warriors, primarch. He saw us fight in the Cephic hive-sprawls and named us for the white hounds the Yeshk warriors in the north used. He did us an honour with the name, primarch. We are proud of it, and we hope you will be too.’
Angron gave a growl, but he did not speak. The hand that had been a fist had opened again.
‘The southern anchor of Perturabo’s earthworks was a rock, the closest thing that place had to a mountain, the only one the sludge tides hadn’t been able to wear down. When the worms saw the Mechanicum begin to change the world’s face they mustered to break us under the peak.
‘They buried themselves in the sludge beyond our range and came forwards under it to meet us.’ Khârn’s voice was speeding up as his memory filled with the sharp reek of the poisoned ground and the warning cries from the Imperial Army artillerists as the mud ocean heaved. Angron had backed away, his head pushed forwards and his eyes were full of concentration.
‘They first came in a wave,’ Khârn said. ‘They had skulked around the fringes of the earthworks, carried off some of the crews working the pumps and dredgers. We had not fought a decisive action against them for months. But now Gheer and Perturabo had read the patterns of their attacks and placed us for the counter-assault. We formed up among Perturabo’s aqueduct walls, only half-built they were and still blocked half the sky. We took our oaths of moment and primed our bolters.’
‘Bolters?’
‘A firearm. A powerful one. The weapon of the Astartes.’
‘Ehh. Get on with it. The worms came for the earthworks.’ Angron was staring over Khârn’s head, yanking his hands back and forth, shuffling his feet. It was a moment before Khârn realised the Primarch was playing the defence out in his mind, ordering the lines, mapping out the ground. ‘So they came up like chaer-dogs at a spike-line? Stupid to rush a shield wall. Tell me what you did.’ Khârn closed his eyes, focusing past his injured body to run the conditioned routines that ordered his memories.
‘The first line of them broke the mud with their jaws and filaments,’ he said, ‘and they came at us behind a wall of their power-arcs. The mud steamed in front of them and where the arcs converged they shattered rock. They sent a rolling bombardment ahead of them. We worked to break it with thudd guns, dropping shells behind their blast-front, and we broke up the rock in front of them with grenades. We thought we had their measure when the counter-bombardment made their front lines shiver, but they were simply filling up our attention, measuring where our own line was wavering. When their blasts dropped away they came in force to the weak points. Drove wedges into our front. To flank and envelop we’d have had to go out onto the mud where we could barely walk, and where the mud was shallow enough for us to try it, they had second and third lines ready to drag the flankers under or cook them in their armour. To break the assaults we had to get them onto rock, where we could manoeuvre better than they. Perturabo had built traps into his earthworks. False outer walls, double emplacements, killing zones along the drainage canals.’ Angron nodded approvingly, looking up and down the dark chamber as though he could see the great rough walls, lit by orange bolter-flare and the blue-white power-arcs of the worms.
‘But still we had to bring them inside our lines to break them. Hold them back and then fall to second positions, one formation at a time, through the Army lines to where we were waiting to drop the axe. There were a lot of worms, primarch.’ Khârn grinned. His wounds throbbed as the vividness of the memory prompted his metabolism to begin glanding combat stimms. ‘Our axes weren’t dry for a month.’ In answer Angron growled again, making a quick double motion of his arm as though swinging a blade forwards and backwards at something below his own height. Barely thinking about it, Khârn’s warrior brain filed away the Primarch’s footing and balance, his arm and shoulder motions, noted where a riposte might land home. Then, still in his combat stance, Angron pinned Khârn with his gaze again.
‘The Emperor. You talk about fighting down there in the mud but you don’t talk about the Emperor. High-rode, did he? Hung above you, did he?’ Angron’s voice was rising, turning ugly and ragged. ‘Laughed at you, did he? Called your blood-spills, did he? Admit it, Khârn!’ In a blur he crossed the distance and knocked Khârn to one knee with a looping, glancing arm-sweep.
‘The Emperor,’ Khârn said, and couldn’t stop himself from smiling at the memory. ‘The Emperor was a golden storm descending onto Nove Shendak’s filth. When the worms were in amongst us he came down from the peak and it was as if he had brought a fragment of the sun down for us in amends for the sun we couldn’t see through those filthy fogs. He shone out over the battle lines like a beacon. His custodians were like living banners, the troopers rallied to them, but he…’ Khârn closed his eyes, looking for the words.
‘Imagine, sire, did they fight in your home with grenades? Explosive weapons, small enough to hold in the hand and throw?’
‘High-rider weapons,’ snarled Angron. ‘Not fit for a warrior on the hot dust.’
‘But imagine, primarch, some,’ he searched for the word Angron had used, ‘some paperskin who takes a grenade and simply grips it in his fist until it explodes. Imagine how it would destroy the hand, shatter the arm, ruin the body! Wherever the Emperor met one of their columns head on it shattered like that. He didn’t repel them, sire. Didn’t defeat them. He ruined them. Assault after assault, not even Perturabo when he came down to the lines for the final–’
‘You’ve said that name already,’ boomed Angron from behind him. ‘Who is he?’
‘Forgive me, sire. Another primarch. One of the first we found. I was new to the War Hounds when the message went through the fleets, and I almost didn’t understand what it meant. Not until I saw the Iron Warriors and how they reacted. The very air seemed to change around them. They and we and the Ultramarines, we were travelling together. We envied them. They had found their blood-sire and their general. Now we have found ours.’
‘Another. Another one.’ Khârn risked a look around and up. Angron was standing still, hands pressed to his face again, teeth grinding as he concentrated. ‘Another one of me?’
‘Not like you, primarch. A brother to you. Made for conquest and kingship as you are. The Iron Warriors, they’re his Legion now.’
‘Brave fighters?’
‘Brave enough,’ Khârn answered, ‘with a wall to sit on or a trench to stand in.’
‘Walls.’ Angron growled the word. ‘Walls can be broken.’
‘So we tell them, sire. Perhaps you can–’