Sanguinary
Oh, how is it to die? How is it to die at the hands of one of your own kind, a warrior of the Legiones Astartes? Before the Civil War, it was not something Rann had ever considered. He was aware of the concept of transhuman dread, but had given little thought to the experience of those who found themselves facing his kind, the problematic xenos breeds and estranged cultures who chose to resist compliance.
Then Horus’ infamy began, and the notion became something that required to be contemplated, not just as a dread imagining, but as a tactical rehearsal. How does an Astartes combat the lethality of an Astartesian brother? He had visualised, as preparatory evolutions, the berserker assault of the World Eaters, the surgical annihilation of the Iron Warriors, the volatile zeal of the Word Bearers, the elite discipline of the Sons of Horus, the cut-throat cunning of the Alpha Legion, the terror-shock of the Night Lords…
He has visualised a hundred deaths. Not this. Never this. Not the Blood Angels.
Not Azkaellon. Not the Sanguinary Lord. He cannot–
He cannot bring himself to kill Azkaellon.
They crash together. They tumble in the mire, drowning and flailing. The impact of Azkaellon’s pounce has broken Rann’s cuirass and cracked his ossmodula-fused ribcage.
Not Azkaellon.
Azkaellon seems to possess – and be possessed by – the strength of a dozen Astartes. He shakes Rann like a wolfhound savaging its prey.
Not Azkaellon. He cannot–
Rann has nothing but love and respect for his brothers in the other loyal Legions. In the course of the siege, he has formed bonds of unbreakable kinship. War’s one great gift is to reveal true friends.
But there are some that even the Lord Seneschal, captain of the First Assault Cadre, holds in such esteem that he cannot think of them as friends or peers. They seem to him, for all his own deeds, like warriors of a different order altogether. Sigismund is one, aloof and uncompromising. Atok Abidemi of the Salamanders is another, implacable and dignified. The mighty Raldoron.
And perhaps more than any, Azkaellon.
Not Azkaellon. Not Azkaellon. He–
Though the captain of the Sanguinary Guard has shown Rann nothing but courtesy and kindness, he remains a golden demigod of such beauty and majesty that he seems unknowable. Such is Azkaellon’s fame, prowess and grace, Rann has always felt humbled in his presence. Rann had been flattered that Azkaellon seemed to treat Rann with respect, but he never expected to be counted as a friend.
Not by Azkaellon. Not by this Azkaellon.
The grace is gone. The regal beauty, beside which Rann has always felt ordinary and dull, remains, but it has tipped over into something unbearable, something too beautiful to behold. Azkaellon is the cruel face of Mortality unmasked.
He is the face that the Blood Angels only show to their enemies.
Liquid mud sprays up as they churn and grapple. Rann cannot fight him. He cannot kill him. Rann tries to fend him away with his axe-hafts, sparing the lethal blades. He–
But he cannot kill him. Within seconds, Rann realises that it is not a matter of reserve, or mercy, or of him pulling his blows and sparing his blades.
He could not kill Azkaellon if he wanted to.
What beast has consumed his soul? What wild rage? What atrocious madness? The Sanguinary’s beautiful eyes are black, his teeth are beautiful fangs, his fury a beautiful–
Rann goes down, struck hard. He wallows in the mud. Gasping, spitting, he manages to block a lunging blow that would have torn off his jaw, but he cannot stop Azkaellon’s thrusting bite. The Sanguinary gnaws at his throat. Rann clubs with Headsman’s haft, and Azkaellon lurches away with a torn chunk of Rann’s gorget speared between his canines.
It is the work of daemons, no doubt. A final insult, a final profanity, to seize those who have stood firm for seven long years and, in the final hour of their lives, rob them of their last remaining dignity. Their deaths were assured the moment the traitor wave broke around Hasgard Fort. But that’s not enough for Horus Lupercal. Nothing is ever enough for him. He is not content with taking their lives. He wants their defiance too. He wants them to slaughter each other, in a maddened disgrace, so that their glory, courage, brotherhood and honour are defiled before they perish.
He wants everyone to die a traitor.
Rann won’t do it. If he fights back, then he is doing the Warmaster’s work, and breaking the bond he has given his life to defend. And if he does not–
The Sanguinary Guard’s fist catches him hard, and he is thrown backwards. He slams into the side of a burned-out Rhino, and slides off it into the ooze. Blood drools from his lips. He tries to rise. An axe misses his face by inches and thuds into the Rhino’s hull. There’s a Word Bearer right on top of him, screaming at him. The focus of the Sanguinary’s attack has been so intense, Rann has almost forgotten that they are just two men in the very thick of a wild and grinding battle, with Astartes all around them, fighting and killing.
Rann knocks the raving Word Bearer backwards with the butt of an axe. The Word Bearer tries to come at him again, but he is immediately engaged by a White Scar. As the pair clash, Rann claws himself upright, in time to fend off two World Eaters who come plunging out of the billowing smoke. A third World Eater wheels past behind them, trading blows with an Imperial Fist. Rann thinks it’s Devarlin, the young initiate. It’s impossible to be sure, just a suffocating frenzy of milling, thrashing figures. Visibility in the spiralling smoke is virtually zero. Rann is drenched in noise. He sees the Imperial Fist fall, struck through the neck. He sees one of the Sons of Horus, just three or four metres to his left, hacking another Imperial Fist apart, despite the iron lance wedged entirely through his torso. He glimpses, for a second, some Neverborn horror trailing the head and ribcage of a White Scar from its paw. The slaughter is absolute. There are traitors everywhere, their blades wet from butchery, and the few loyal brothers he can see are dead or cornered.
He is one of them. The two World Eaters have him backed against the Rhino’s wreck. He tries to parry their whirring blades, blocking their raw fury and feral strength with his superior axe-craft. He finds a throat, and slashes it with a punch of Headsman’s beard. The World Eater falls sidelong, clutching at his fatal wound as though he doesn’t comprehend it. The other strikes Rann across the shoulder, spilling him into the muck. The traitor raises his blade.
And is jerked backwards violently. A White Scar has seized him from behind. It’s Kyzo, Namahi’s tenacious outrider. White Scar and World Eater grapple, plate grinding against plate. Rann surges to his battle-brother’s aid. Then all three of them are knocked down. The raging Sanguinary has found them again.
Azkaellon lifts Rann by the throat. Kyzo utters some incoherent cry of dismay. Like Rann, he is utterly confounded by the Blood Angel lord’s berserk onslaught. He tries to tear Rann free. In another moment, the World Eater is wrestling with Azkaellon too.
So here is the unfathomable madness of this heresy. A White Scar, a World Eater, an Imperial Fist and a Blood Angel locked in a mindlessly brutal fight, trying to save or kill each other in some parody of logic or reason.
Rann tears himself free, staggering backwards. The Sanguinary smashes Kyzo aside, breaking his visor. The World Eater tries to rip off Azkaellon’s face. Azkaellon bites off his fingers.
The World Eater recoils, blood blurting from his ruined hand. The Sanguinary shreds the traitor’s face and tears off his left arm. Azkaellon lets the corpse fall, turning on the White Scar Kyzo, who is trying to rise. His kill is denied by a chainaxe that slays Kyzo while he is still on his knees. Two more of Angron’s bastards have entered the melee. One charges Azkaellon while the other frees his revving chainaxe from the White Scar’s cadaver. A warrior of the Death Guard ploughs in from another angle. Azkaellon lunges at the World Eaters without hesitation. By the time he collides with them, the Death Guard is clinging to his back and clawing at his wings. The four huge figures wrestle in the mire, so coated with mud it is hard to see where one ends and another begins.
The Sanguinary’s bloodlust is directed at anybody, Rann realises. Friend or foe, anything living in range, anything moving within his tunnelled field of vision. And he carries no weapons. Where his sword and shield have gone, Rann has no idea. It is as though Azkaellon has abandoned them, regarding them as inferior to his teeth and claws.
Where did those teeth come from?
Rann struggles upright. He grips his mud-slick axes and tries to wade forward. He sees Azkaellon drag the Death Guard off his shoulder, and swing the traitor bodily into one of the World Eaters. The World Eater’s neck snaps, but the sound of that gunshot crack is lost in the howl of his chainaxe which, caught between the clashing bodies, is noisily disembowelling the Death Guard legionary. They fall together as one shuddering form.
The other son of Angron swings his axe sidelong with full force. Azkaellon doesn’t bother to duck or block, or even try to evade. He takes the blow square on the left pauldron, which splinters. The blade digs into the meat of Azkaellon’s shoulder beneath, discharging a spray of blood.
But now the World Eater’s guard is open. In another second, so is his throat. The Sanguinary’s teeth gouge away so much of the traitor’s neck and upper chest that his head is left barely attached.
Azkaellon drinks, his face smeared red like a carnodon at a kill.
Rann turns away and starts to move. If he can put some distance between himself and the Sanguinary, the impossible choice of a fight might be avoided.
But there is nowhere to move in a pitched battle of this density. Just beyond the cremated hull of the Rhino, Rann blunders into three Sons of Horus, who are wading out of the boiling smoke and drifting sparks. Knee-deep in the liquid churn, Rann swings Hunter into one, reeling him aside, and uses Headsman’s haft to catch the sword of the second. The third is trying to stick him with a short pig-spear. Rann strikes with both axes, severing the third traitor’s arm and spear with Hunter, and crushing his helm-beak with Headsman. The Son of Horus spins and topples into the mud, lifting a spray of it. Rann has time to turn and block the sword a second time, but the first traitor, his plate crumpled across the chest from Hunter’s impact, cracks him across the back with a maul.
Rann collapses, submerging in the mud briefly. It fills his mouth and nose. He is dragged out of it by the two traitors, who grip him tightly between them. The swordsman raises his blade to strike off Rann’s head.
The blade continues to rise, and rise. The traitor is lifting clear of the ooze, his grip on Rann broken, filth and mud streaming off his legs. Azkaellon has grabbed him, his talons puncturing his side and hip.
The Sanguinary dashes the traitor aside. The Son of Horus hits the carcass of the Rhino, then slips off into the mud, but the jutting spar of a broken axle has gored him.
The remaining Cthonian clubs the Sanguinary with his maul. The force of the blow makes Azkaellon recoil. Forgetting Rann completely, the Son of Horus increases his assault, raining strokes with his maul, as though he is aware that if he lets up for a second, the Sanguinary will destroy him.
Rann finds his feet. He wants to put an axe into the traitor’s back and end the merciless attack, but he knows that if he does, he will become the focus of Azkaellon’s bloodlust once more.
Rann does it anyway. The fire of his honour has not gone out. A man defends a comrade, no matter what that comrade has become.
Headsman splits the traitor’s spine.
Rann levers the blade out, letting his kill fall. He sees the Sanguinary fix him with his dead gaze again. The Sanguinary is awash with blood, wheezing and snorting, aspirating gore. The wings flex to spear him onto his prey.
Someone grabs Rann and wrenches him out of the path of the Sanguinary’s lunging attack. Azkaellon sprawls, hampered by the mire, splashing and floundering. Rann’s saviour drags him behind the Rhino’s shell. In a second, Rann can hear the growl and smash of the Sanguinary already tearing into other victims. Traitors or loyal sons, he has no idea.
Rann looks up. He sees Zephon Sorrow-Bringer. Zephon has dragged him clear.
He opens his mouth to speak. Zephon shakes his head fiercely. He is plastered in mud and gore. He seizes Rann by the forearm, and they stumble away from the wrecked vehicle into the smoke.
The ground is littered with the dead of both sides, wrapped together and half-submerged in the ooze. Twenty metres on, they come to the out-flank wall of the fort, a nub of broken rockcrete jutting from the morass like a rotten tooth from a diseased gum. The dead are plentiful here too, piled up either side of the wall’s remains, choking its archways and breach-points. There is no longer any sense of what was inside the wall or without, no evidence of which side of it was being defended and which attacked.
Rann slumps against the wall. He is numb, and injured more severely than he’s ever been. The din of mass conflict rolls around them. A moment’s respite, that’s all this is. They will have to throw themselves back into the battle. There is nowhere to go, and this is the fate they both chose.
The roar of battle is a demented percussion. A stale wind moans around the broken piece of fortress that shelters them, its breath filled with black smoke. There is no sky, no distance, just a glaring red haze.
‘Some madness took him,’ Rann whispers.
‘Took us all,’ Zephon replies. His voice is fragile, like ice.
‘All?’
Zephon tries to wipe mud and blood from his mouth. It is smeared too thickly.
‘I think my lord is dead,’ he says. ‘My father. I felt it. We all…’
‘Zephon–’
‘We felt the pain, Rann, and in that pain, a rage fell upon us all. Mindless and–’
‘You are not mindless,’ says Rann.
Zephon sighs.
‘I have been in pain too long,’ he replies. ‘I have known death or its likeness. The reconstruction of my body…’
His voice trails off. Rann can see the Blood Angel is struggling with a deep anguish.
‘Perhaps it has blunted me,’ says Zephon. ‘Dulled me. Perhaps I cannot feel the pain as sharply as my brothers. Perhaps… I have already been feeling it for far too long. A rage has taken the Blood Angels, Rann. It has taken their wits and their souls and their dignity.’
He looks at Rann. His fangs are bright and sharp.
‘All of them,’ he says.