Khârn: Eater of Worlds Read online

  It is the 41st millennium. For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the master of mankind by the will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of his inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that he may never truly die.

  Yet even in his deathless state, the Emperor continues his eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in his name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

  To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

  Skalathrax [origin: Nagrakali]

  1. Place of judgement/ending [See. Time of Ending, ref. MCXVII]

  2. Destruction (partic. burning)

  Prologue

  The pain engine embedded in his brain grew silent. Slowly, his awareness returned.

  A counter blinked in the upper right of his vision.

  Two hours, thirty-seven minutes and twenty-three seconds. That’s how much time he had lost to the cortical implants.

  For now, the beast was sated. For now, it slumbered, retracting its claws from the meat of his mind.

  His body ached from injuries he didn’t remember receiving. His arms were leaden from kills that he didn’t remember making.

  He reached up and removed his helmet. The stink of blood filled his nostrils.

  Two hours, thirty-seven minutes and twenty-three seconds ago this had been a living, breathing world. Now it was a wasteland of death.

  He stood in the middle of a sea of corpses, a vast ocean that spread out as far as the eye could see. In the distance were the ruins of a once-great city. Smoke rose from its sundered walls.

  Other World Eaters picked their way through the sea of the dead, stripping weapons and armour from fallen brothers, claiming skulls and cutting the threads of those that still lived. All of them were liberally coated with gore.

  Overhead, the warships of the Legion hung in low orbit, like carrion-eaters awaiting their turn to feed.

  For a few moments he was able to think clearly, without the Butcher’s Nails screaming in his head, stabbing into his brain, urging him to do their bidding.

  ‘We cannot continue like this,’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’ growled a voice from behind.

  Dreagher glanced around. A legionary garbed in rad-scarred black armour was down on one knee nearby, cutting at dead flesh. Chunks of meat and hair clung to the razor wire wrapped around the Destroyer’s pauldrons and shoulder plates. Ruokh.

  Blood of the primarch. Had he been so lost in the Nails that he’d been fighting alongside that berserker?

  ‘Killing every world we come upon,’ Dreagher said. ‘We’re bleeding the Legion dry.’

  Ruokh stood, having finished his grisly task. He held a human head by its hair, blood leaking slowly from the ragged stump of its neck. He regarded Dreagher with the hostile lenses of his Sarum-pattern helmet. The Destroyer said nothing.

  ‘Angron is gone. Horus is dead,’ said Dreagher. ‘Is this all there is for us now? Endless butchery, our numbers slowly whittling away, until we are all lost to the Nails, or dead? Is that to be our fate?’

  ‘You think too much,’ said Ruokh. ‘This is what we do. This is what we are.’

  ‘There has to be something more.’

  Ruokh turned away, shaking his head.

  ‘Khârn,’ said Dreagher. ‘We need Khârn.’

  Ruokh laughed. It was an ugly sound. Bitter and harsh.

  ‘The Legion would follow Khârn,’ he said, ‘But he is lost to us. He is not coming back.’

  ‘He has to,’ said Dreagher. ‘Or else the Legion is already dead.’

  Khârn; even then it was a name that evoked fear, awe and respect, even amongst his own genhanced, hyper-augmented brethren, the fraternity of killers, psychotics and berserkers that made up the XII Legion.

  Perhaps fear is the wrong word. ‘They shall know no fear’, as the rhetoric goes. Caution. Unease. Discomfort. Wariness. These words are perhaps more fitting, certainly less likely to incur a killing rage.

  His was not a name that evoked hatred, though, at least not among his own Legion. Not yet. Nor was distrust a word that the legionaries of the XII would have associated with him, or at least any more distrust than any of the Legion had for another.

  He had, of course, already been called traitor – they all had – but only by those now being dubbed ‘loyalists’. He’d not yet been called that by his own, not then.

  No, that would come later.

  He was a figure of contradiction, of course, both before and after Terra, as were all the best of them. He was broken, as were they all.

  Too long the Nails had been grinding into their minds. They’d been caught in the death-grip of those hateful implants too long. They’d been dragged too far down the crimson spiral. There was no coming back.

  What they were before had been largely obliterated, and what remained was but a shadow; fragments and splintered glimpses of who they could have been before they willingly destroyed themselves in emulation of the primarch. They didn’t know it, though. Not back then.

  But even if they did, would they have made another choice? Perhaps. Some of them.

  The best of them – and Khârn was, at least for a time, counted as the very best – were the most confounding. They were the most torn, the most tragic. The most contradictory. Khârn epitomised that more than any.

  Khârn the Equerry, the most rational of the Legion. The cool head to balance Angron’s rage. The diplomat. The wise.

  Khârn the Bloody, the most berserk of them all when the Nails took hold, which they did with increased regularity after Angron’s… change. All of the Legion were devolving before then, but after Nuceria their inexorable descent spiralled into a plummeting free fall.

  Now, after the fact, it is easy to regard Khârn as the worst of them all, the chief sinner, but it is certainly true, then if not now, that he was also the chief sufferer.

  Perhaps he was the wisest, even then, even in the grip of his blackest madness. Perhaps he foresaw what the Legion would become and sought to end it.

  But then… perhaps not. It’s possible that I read too much into the actions of a madman. Perhaps I construct a façade of rationality as something to cling to, a buoy in a raging storm, unwilling to accept the alternative – that he truly had no reason for what he did.

  Before Skalathrax he was Khârn, captain of the Eighth Assault Company, equerry of the daemon-primarch Angron. Afterwards, he was the Betrayer, most hated of the World Eaters, even among his own.

  First onto the walls of the Em
peror’s Palace, he was, and last to leave – or at least so it is now being said.

  I do not know the truth of that. I was not there to see it.

  What I did see was the aftermath.

  – Hhal Maven, Seneschal Senioris, 17th Company

  Chapter 1

  So this, then, is Khârn, enthroned like a warrior king of a bygone age, the gifts and offerings of lesser beings piled before him.

  The helms of noted enemies. Weapons pried from the grasp of bested foes. Ornate standards taken from worlds left in ruin by the fury of the Legion. The acid-cleaned skulls of the mightiest enemy champions. Offerings to appease, to honour, and, perhaps, to beg favour.

  His massive arms are bare, as ever, criss-crossed with the scars of the past. His wounds – or at least the wounds of his flesh – have healed, though they have left their mark. His chest too is bare. Every scar has a story. Without exception, every being that inflicted those injuries is dead, killed by his own hands.

  Those murderous hands, thick-knuckled, deadly and dripping with blood – metaphorically if not literally – are, for now, at rest, palm down upon the throne’s armrests.

  The immense war-axe, Gorechild, is before him. It takes pride of place. The Legion’s artificers have restored it, doing their best to replace its missing and blunted mica-dragon teeth. It is as much a touchstone to the Legion as Khârn himself. Many covet it, though none yet dare to claim it while Khârn breathes, despite his condition.

  His frame: immense, heavily muscled yet lean. He is a giant to unaugmented mortals. Among his own, he is no taller nor heavier than any other. It was never his physical presence that made him stand out among his brothers. His fire came from within.

  His downcast face: narrow, stern, serious. It is, for the moment, mercifully free of the pain, suppressed rage and facial tics that personify the Legion now courtesy of their neural aggressor-implants.

  That peace is an anomaly.

  Even at rest, the warriors of the Legion were tortured. Pain stabbed into their cortices like vile knives whenever they were not doing the bidding of those cruel devices, driving in deep, grinding and twisting, eroding any joy to be had beyond the act of killing. Only bloodshed relieved the merciless assault, and even then, never for long.

  Only in death do the devices relent.

  That then, Apothecary Khurgan surmised, was why Khârn’s face was not twisted by pain like his brethren.

  He’d died on Terra, after all.

  Dreagher stalked back and forth like a beast driven to madness by enforced confinement.

  His breath was rapid and shallow, and the servos of his gauntlets whined as he clenched and unclenched his hands. His scarred, short-shaven head was bare, and his mouth was twisted into a scowl. His teeth were grinding. His brow was creased, and the eyes below narrow, their irises contracted to pin-points. The muscles around his left eye twitched, lifting his lip to expose file-sharpened teeth.

  The Nails were torturing him today.

  Over the years he’d come to regard them as a living entity, a parasite nestled in the back of his skull. It enhanced and fed off his hate, gorging itself on the aggression it encouraged and the thrill of the kills it shared with him. Its segmented arachnid legs pressed deep into his brain, and when angered, it would clench them, punishing him. When sated it would slumber, the pressure in his mind easing, giving him a moment of blessed respite. Right now, it was ravenous.

  Still pacing, Dreagher ground his knuckles into his temples, screwing his eyes tightly shut. An animal growl rumbled from deep in his chest. The headache was a corkscrew pain in his cortex, a throbbing agony that made him nauseous and his vision contract.

  Kill, the Nails said to him with each painful pulse.

  Kill.

  Kill.

  Kill.

  He slammed one of his fists into a wall, buckling the sheet metal plating.

  Once, all the ills of the warriors of the XII – the blood-letting, the uncontrollable, psychotic rages, the butchering of innocents and the utter lack of conscience that followed – could perhaps have been blamed on the aggressor engines. No, warriors was the wrong word – its fighters. Once, the Nails could have been blamed for all of it.

  But now? No. Now, something far darker and more powerful held the Legion in its death-grip. And that grip was tightening with every turn of the universe.

  Focus, he told himself, ceasing his relentless pacing, and attempting to forcibly slow his breathing. It did little good. The beat of his primary heart continued to race, like the pounding of war drums.

  ‘Enough,’ he snarled, eyes flicking open. They were bloodshot, and his gaze flitted around the round room without taking anything in, seeking… what? An escape? An enemy?

  Where was he? How had he come to be here?

  The last thing he could recall was sharpening his falax blades in his arming chamber, then… nothing.

  Worse than not knowing how he came to be here was the niggling unease; what had he done in the time that he had lost?

  He looked at his hands. His gauntlets were free of blood. That was good. That was something.

  There was an antiseptic smell in his nostrils.

  His vision stabilised and he began to discern his surroundings. Life-support systems and cogitator units wheezed and chimed. Vitae-sacs dripped their life-giving fluids. Data screens scrolled with information. Cells lit with bright fluorescent glow-globes, each hermetically sealed by armourglass.

  He was within the apothecarion secundus, one of the medicae-wards on the rear decks of the Defiant. The area was a sealed, secure environment. Gene-code locked. He didn’t remember coming here.

  Medicae support servitors shuffled to and fro, checking the blinking machines and scanning the streams of data-tape being spat out at intervals from the mouths of other servitors hard-wired into the cogitators’ processor-banks. They all appeared ignorant, oblivious or uncaring of his presence.

  How long had he been here? He had no way of knowing.

  Surgical mech-apparatus with articulated, multi-jointed arms replete with hooked blades, digi-lasers, suture-staplers and scalpels were folded in upon themselves on the ceiling.

  Set into two of the walls were nutrient-rich restoration tanks with plexglas fronts. An unconscious legionary floated in suspension within one of the tanks. Kholak of the Second Battalion. His veins were pierced with tubes and a respirator was strapped across his face like a grotesque xenos parasite. He twitched and jerked in his induced healing coma. His wounds were recovering well.

  A lone servo-skull swung in near Dreagher, probes and needles jutting from below its upper jaw. Its grav-suspensor buzzed loudly, making him twitch. He swatted it away.

  While the apothecarion secundus did, when needed, still serve as an overflow for the ship’s primary medicae hall, and it remained the chief recovery ward for the echelon, the room no longer felt like a medicae ward.

  No. It felt like a shrine.

  Dreagher glared at the comatose figure seated within the central isolation cell, bright fluorescence shining down on him.

  ‘Wake up,’ he snarled. ‘Come back to us. Your Legion needs you.’

  With a final glare, he turned and strode from the room.

  The crowd roared at the muffled smack of fists striking flesh and the sharp twig-like crack of breaking ribs.

  The faces of the onlookers were twisted and bestial as they watched the pair of combatants circle one another. They stamped their feet and beat their fists against the metal sheeting of the barricade separating them from the combatants, making the underdeck vault, deep within the bowels of the Defiant, shudder and boom.

  Alone amongst the savage, braying crowd, Maven was silent, a slight smile playing upon his lean, hard face. He could see in the dance on the sand below that Skoral would win.

  He breathed deeply the hot animal stink of huma
n sweat. It was not a pleasant smell, but nor was it overtly repellent. It was the smell of brotherhood, of shared adversity. It was a warrior smell.

  He stood with his arms folded. His muscles were raw and beginning to ache, but that was nothing to what he’d feel tomorrow. His knuckles were grazed and bloody, and he could already feel them swelling. He’d taken a beating tonight.

  His eyes, granite grey and intense, stared unblinking at the two adversaries bleeding in the pit below.

  The first, Skoral; a broad-shouldered woman with tattooed arms as thick as Maven’s thighs and a heart as big as an oroxen’s.

  Thick ropes of blood dripped from her lower lip, and ugly welts marred her flesh. Her hair was shaved to the scalp on the left side of her head. One eye was swollen shut, the skin around it bulging and purple. She was still smiling, though. She was loving this. Her teeth were tinged red with her own blood and there were several gaps in her grin where five minutes ago there had been none.

  The second, some low-deck munitions loader; a brute of a man, middling in years with the body of an ogryn and a face that few mothers would love. He was breathing hard and blood was running freely down the side of his face from a gash above his left eye. His hands were like rockcrete mitts. His eyes were glassy and his neck muscles wound as taut as springs; he was spiking, Maven realised. Sump-cooked aggressor-stimms most likely. He stalked around the confines of the pit, contemptuously turning his back on Skoral, and lifted his arms into the air, revving up the crowd.

  The fool, thought Maven. That’s only going to piss her off.

  Both the fighters were big. Not legionary big, of course, but certainly big for mortal humans. They’d both undergone gene-therapy, enhancing their bulk, strength and reflexes beyond what was normal. There was nothing unusual in that.

  Skoral went for him as his back was turned, but that had been anticipated. He turned swiftly – he was surprisingly quick – and swung a murderous hook at her head. She ducked under it and hit him with an uppercut to the chin that snapped his head back, hard.