Echoes Of Eternity, page 22
The crunching snap of an elbow to the zygomatic bones of the face. A princely blow, shattering the cheekbone and eye socket. An eyeball hangs, mulched to worthlessness. Laughter is the backbeat, then – laughter and cheering. The sound of the crowd, no longer individual beings but a gestalt, a single god that feeds on blood and sweat and wasted life. It cares not from whence the blood comes, only that it flows in abundance.
And it flows, it runs, it sprays. Not jetting with the hyperbole of poor poetry, ripe with symbolism, but the altogether more mundane arc of blood spurting from cleaved arteries. The thick smell of it in the air. The scalding kiss of it on the skin of his face; though it cools fast, in that first split second it’s always a splash of boiling water.
Darkness and light, alternating, one and then the other, over and over. The thunder of a skull hammering into the metal deck, stressing the fractures of already breached bone. Crying out, not for mercy but for a brother’s aid, because as his skull is ground into the iron, a blade lays open his back with clumsy chops and carvings. The unreal sensation of fingers, curling with hate, reaching into the body, clawing at the spine itself. The knowledge of disassembly.
The heat of blood-need stealing all words somewhere between the brain and the tongue. Angry words becoming snarls and bestial breathing punctuated by ropes of slaver. Hating so fiercely it breaks the ability to speak.
Tonguing the roof of the mouth, forcing the saliva glands to gush, milking one’s own mouth to pull forth the flow of poison. Spitting it, missing, hearing the gobbet of saliva hissing on the deck. Trying again, closer this time, not spitting but opening the jaws wide, letting it trickle, letting it flow over the teeth… Drooling acid into the man’s quivering, desperate eyes. Licking the eyeball to seal the deal and steal his sight, lathering the window of his soul with corrosive venom.
Side by side with his brother again. Wrapping their shared chain around a single throat, and pulling, pulling. Flailing hands grip weakly and slap uselessly against sweating, bleeding bodies. A mouth opens, becomes a maw, but bites nothing and draws in no air. No bones crackle and snap and crunch this time. This time, they make it last. This time he will die, and it will be the criminals’ death, the bloodless death, extinction by strangulation.
The thud of dead meat onto the arena deck.
The animal roar of the god-crowd.
The looks in the eyes of the lords of two Legions: one distantly approving, the other mournfully accepting. One seeing a victory. One seeing failure.
The picking up, with trembling fingers, of a fallen sword.
The sawing of a fight-dulled blade through unresisting flesh.
The raising of a severed head, still dripping blood and marrow. The stink of it, which is utterly familiar but never quite pleasant.
The honour of fighting at the side of a man he can trust above any other. The gratitude, the fraternal love in weary and bloodshot eyes, after enduring something so few souls ever go through together.
The lifting of two fists, his own and his brother’s, their wrists still bound by a length of bloodstained chain.
Thralls bathed them in the aftermath. Apothecaries sealed their wounds. Kargos was still riven by Nails-heat, trembling, sweating. Amit was calm, practically placid, licking his incisors in contemplation. That was always the difference between them after a bout; the Blood Angel’s rage faded fast, the World Eater’s took forever to swallow.
They sat opposite each other in the ward chamber, where the wounded of the evening’s previous fights were likewise being stitched up, and the dead were harvested for their gene-seed. Amit was a statue as his thralls sponged and cleansed his lesser injuries. He barely flinched as the Apothecaries did the deeper work with their wet, scarlet tools.
Kargos had none of his serenity. His scarred lips kept twitching into a self-satisfied sneer, partly from the Nails triggering muscle memory, partly from the sight of Jegreth and Ferakul’s bodies on nearby slabs. There they lay, chopped up, cut open. It wouldn’t take much effort at all to widen the wounds for gene-seed extraction.
Around them, the grunts and grumbles quieted down, and the bone saws ceased their whining. All eyes turned to the figures entering from the main concourse: two towering icons flanked by their respective sons. All eyes, that is, except Kargos’. He kept watching Amit.
He’d known Amit, back in the days of the Revenant Legion. Not as well as he knew his chain-brother now, but the Revenants and the War Hounds had fought together in several campaigns, forced into collusion by the dismissive grind of Imperial bureaucracy. He’d seen the other man with his lips reddened by gory rituals. He’d seen Amit fighting the way the Revenants fought back then, motivated by a brutality so absolute it held no place for considerations of morality. They achieved victory, they ate the flesh of the dead in their rites of remembrance, and they moved on. No banners raised in glory. No triumphs held in their honour.
And back then, both Legions bore reputations that were, at best, stained by their demeanour in war. Both Legions found themselves assigned to some of the Great Crusade’s bitterest conflicts, doing their bloody work out of sight and out of mind.
But year by year, the Legiones Astartes had rediscovered their primarchs. Changes whipped through each Legion in the wake of finding its founding father. The War Hounds became the World Eaters, and they broke their central nervous systems in emulation of their wounded overlord. They beat the Butcher’s Nails into their skulls, scarring their minds. No longer ashamed of their blood-soaked past but exulting in it, pissing away their capacity to feel pleasure outside of battle. The World Eaters were a finer weapon than the War Hounds ever were, if the only measure of success was the number of corpses in their wake. They stopped at nothing, shied away from no massacre, cared nothing for guilt or innocence, only the purity of compliance.
And that was Kargos now, sat opposite his chain-brother. Twitching with electrical signals worming through his nervous system. A parasite machine squatted in his skull, biting into the meat of his mind. He looked at Amit, watching the way his comrade mastered his rage behind that angelic façade.
The Revenant Legion hadn’t followed customs of barbaric surgeries and adrenal resculpting. They’d been gore-crows and carrion feeders first, but their primarch had inspired them to restraint. Sanguinius had promised them that if they mastered their darkest desires, they would be all the stronger for it. The changes came thick and fast, then. The Legions kept echoes of their fraternal unity, but they drifted to different paths. The Blood Angels were no longer assigned to belligerent shitholes on the galactic map. They were given campaigns where they drenched themselves in glory. They were bestowed with accolade after accolade, while the World Eaters amassed censure after censure – more than they ever had before the Butcher’s Nails changed their fate.
Looking at Amit, he could no longer see the angelic ghoul that he’d first met all those decades before. In its place was this meditative creature, capable of absolute violence one moment, possessed of saintly calm the next.
In moments like these, Kargos hated him. The Nails bit hard at the thought, spiking his blood with narcotic delight. He felt his fingers curl, imagining Amit’s throat within his grip.
‘Here we go,’ Amit said, drawing Kargos back to the present.
The World Eater turned as the two primarchs drew near. He looked up into their faces; Angron was as twitchy as Kargos himself, while Sanguinius’ beatific features were set and resolved. The two brothers couldn’t look less alike for children rendered from the same genetic template. Any similarities in bone structure and facial feature were overshadowed by disparities in posture, in scarring, in expression, in bearing. In every way but the basest physicality, they were utterly unalike.
Behind the two brothers stood Khârn and Raldoron, First Captain of the Blood Angels. Khârn looked implacable, but when did he not? Noble Raldoron was choosing not to hide his expression of mild disgust, and Kargos suspected that said a great deal about why the primarchs had come.
‘You did well,’ said Angron, and as ever, his voice was something between a wheeze and a growl. Talking pained him. Thinking pained him. All his Legion knew it, for they felt lesser echoes of it themselves.
Kargos saluted him, fist against his heart, and couldn’t help but notice the trickle of silvery spittle at the corner of his father’s mouth. He wiped the back of his hand across his own lips, reflexively.
Sanguinius didn’t commend Amit. The Angel, his wings furled tight to his body, seemed careful not to touch anything or anyone in the chamber. The only contact he made was with his own son, when he closed his golden-gauntleted fingers on Amit’s chin, the gesture one of surpassing gentleness. Amit was already looking up at his primarch father. Sanguinius’ touch denied him the chance to look away.
‘You disappoint me, Nassir.’
Amit nodded in his sire’s delicate grip. He made no excuses, didn’t play for forgiveness.
‘I know, lord.’
‘You are an intelligent soul,’ Sanguinius said softly, ‘so you know what I am going to ask of you. I will not force this upon you, and if you do it, it will not redeem your performance in this wasteful display. But I want you to remember this moment, Nassir. I want you to go forward with this night imprinted upon you. Would you do that for me?’
‘Yes, lord.’
The Angel released the hold on his bloodstained son and said, ‘Thank you.’
Amit’s pale eyes flicked to Angron, then back to his father. From the impassive expression written on that scar-tissue visage, Angron had already granted his permission for what was about to take place.
To Kargos, the exchange between Sanguinius and Amit sent uneasy prickles along his skin. If one of Angron’s Legion disappointed their primarch, that warrior tended to die. None of this gentle, disapproving acceptance.
Amit rose from the slab with a last glance to Kargos. It was a look that conveyed nothing clearly enough for certainty; Kargos wasn’t sure if there were flecks of apology in that momentary contact or not. The World Eater watched as his chain-brother took a surgical blade from one of the watching human medics.
As Amit walked over to where Ferakul lay, the ward room’s harsh lighting flashed off the bone saw in his hand.
In the end, it wasn’t much of a thing. No chanting. No prayers. Like so many elements of Legiones Astartes life, it was an act of human horror reduced to workhorse mundanity. Bone was carved and cracked open. Slivers of grey meat were sliced free and devoured. Blood and fluid marked an unhungry mouth that chewed and swallowed with easy stoicism.
Amit didn’t empty the dead man’s brainpan. He ate sparingly, pointedly, to absorb memory and sensation, not to saturate himself with Ferakul’s entire existence.
Kargos watched his chain-brother perform the Revenants’ old ritual of remembrance, wondering at the taste of Astartes brainflesh. He’d eaten the minds of slain xenos and countless humans, to learn the secrets of their cultures and their armies, but the idea of consuming another legionary’s brain matter made his skin crawl. There was something quietly perverse about that. He didn’t want Ferakul’s memories in the back of his head. The ache of the Nails was enough of a distraction.
Although…
It could be pleasant to experience the dead fool’s final moments in such a way. That might make for a fine and visceral retelling of the tale…
Kargos’ scabbed lips parted in a smile.
A golden hand rested on his shoulder, gently holding him back. Kargos hadn’t even realised he’d started forward. He turned his head, looking from Amit’s silent cannibalism and up into the pale eyes of Lord Sanguinius.
‘No,’ said the Angel. Either he’d read the World Eater’s mind or inferred enough of the truth from that single step forward.
To Kargos’ recollection, this was the one and only time in his life he’d met the Angel’s eyes.
When it was done, paltry little ritual that it was, Kargos and Amit said their farewells. Amit offered no insight as to the sensation of devouring their opponents’ memories, and Kargos didn’t ask. They shook hands, gripping wrist to wrist, and embraced. It was always a strange sensation for one who lived his life in armour, to be skin to skin with another being. But they were brothers, and the embrace was fierce and sincere.
‘Thank you,’ Kargos told him. ‘Thank you, brother.’
Amit wasn’t much of a smiler, but there was warmth in his gaze – in those pale eyes, so like his father’s.
‘Until next time.’
They broke the embrace and parted ways. Their Legion fleets parted ways the next day.
I saw him out there
The last days of the Siege of Terra
The Gladiators
Nassir Amit stood on the Delphic Battlement, watching the horde gathering, horizon to horizon. They were too far away to make out any details through the dust, but that didn’t stop him staring. A black smear of innumerable foes, coming together for the last battle. It wouldn’t be long now.
Several other officers came and went, bearing mute witness to the massing of impossible forces to the north, east and south. Amit acknowledged them with nods or grunts of greeting, but his focus was reserved for the horde out in the wastelands.
Out of his brethren, only Zephon lingered nearby. Either Zephon didn’t know him well enough to recognise when he wished to be left alone, or simply didn’t care. Either way, Amit kept staring at the horde, his eyes drifting in a slow and endless scan.
‘What do you seek out there?’ Zephon asked.
‘Nothing. I’m just looking.’
‘I think not.’ There was a cold serenity radiating from the other Blood Angel, one that Amit hadn’t noticed before. Zephon had been hot-blooded before his injuries years ago, and then miserable company indeed once he’d been crippled. Now, he emanated a chill that was more than simple stoicism. Some new resolve since he’d made his way out of Razavi Bastion and back to the surface. ‘You are plagued, Nassir. I can tell.’
‘Earlier, in the retreat.’ Amit kept staring, kept scanning with his unblinking gaze. ‘I saw Kargos out there. I cut his throat.’
Zephon rested a hand on his brother’s pauldron. The two of them had never been close, even before Zephon’s exile to Terra, but Amit’s time among the XII Legion pits was legendary among the Blood Angels. A dubious legend, admittedly, but a legend nonetheless.
‘I am sorry, Amit. Perhaps it is useless to say, but you did what you had to do.’
Amit finally spared him a glance. ‘I’m not sure I did,’ he admitted.
‘They are traitors,’ Zephon replied gently. ‘There’s no redemption for them. Not for any of them. Not after all this.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying,’ said Amit. He looked back out at the vile horizon. ‘I don’t think I killed him.’
Five kilometres to the east, with the sutures at his throat still leaking sluggish, clotting blood, a warrior held Khârn’s salvaged axe and leaned against the hull of a mangled, mutating Land Raider. He stared at the distant walls of the Delphic Battlement, and he radiated a wounded animal sense of hatred.
His breathing came in wheezing drags, with his physiology still adjusting to the battlefield tech flesh-fused into the hole where his vocal cords had been. There was hate in his eyes, which was no surprise to any of the warriors near him, but there were also tears. Some thought this was pathetic. Others understood implicitly.
Another warrior approached him. This one was clad in sacred, rune-marked black, and was responsible for the fact that the other still lived.
‘You should rest,’ said the Chaplain. ‘The battle begins at dawn.’
‘No.’ The World Eater shook his head. His voice was recognisably his own, but ragged with mechanical reconstruction. ‘Fine here.’
‘What are you gazing at, my friend?’ asked Inzar.
Kargos hacked a cough through his new throat. His voice emerged from his mouth as a buzz-saw rasp.
‘The enemy.’
PART FIVE
SANCTUM IMPERIALIS
The final council
Lotara
She woke when the ship called to her. It didn’t speak, exactly; it pleaded in a voice of metal under tension, waking her with the protest of tormented steel. Lotara sat up in bed, hearing something of her name in the groaning of the Conqueror’s bones.
‘Vox,’ she called. ‘Bridge, this is Sarrin, status report. Vox, damn it, establish bridge link. This is the captain. Status report.’
The ship shuddered again but the vox stayed dead. It wasn’t a gunnery shudder. It wasn’t an impact shake. She knew her ship’s tremors. It was yet more of the warp’s pressure out there, mangling the hull as it tried to get in.
‘Lights,’ she said into the darkness of her chamber. This achieved exactly as much as her attempts to activate the vox. ‘Lights. Lights. Illumination. Oh, bloody hell.’
Lotara didn’t have the energy for this. She didn’t have the energy for anything. She was skeletal with malnutrition and dehydration, and even this paltry anger threatened to leave her breathless. She hailed her attendant servitor with a weak wave of her hand.
‘Dress me,’ she commanded it. ‘Uniform.’
The servitor, who had once been Console Officer Fourth Class Elsabetta Rahem before her regrettable attempt at mutiny in the starvation riots last month, wasn’t standing in its usual place by the sealed window. It was slumped against the wall, demotivated to use Mechanicum terminology, and to use Sarrin terminology, dead as shit. Lotara peered at it through the darkness. Half of its shaved head had merged with the iron wall. The thing’s cranium was swollen, spread out, blood vessels threading into the dark metal. Judging by the expression on the servitor’s face, Lotara had slept through its screaming. The captain wasn’t sorry to have missed that, though she wondered just how long she’d been out, and how deeply she’d been asleep to miss such a thing in her own quarters.
