Wolfsbane

by Guy Haley

  'Kva,' said Russ.

  Freki yawned widely. Fangs like combat knives glinted in the firelight. Geri stared at Kva, his feral intelligence shining from his yellow, black-pinned eyes. With no warriors in it the Wolfs Hall was sepulchrally dark and gloomy. Flames in bowls and atop candles cast wavering roads of fire onto the granite flooring. The occasional shudder running down the ship's length contorted the flames and broke the roads. Then, as the tremors passed, they rebuilt their routes to their unseen destinations.

  'I cannot give you the answers you need, Great Jarl,' said Kva. 'I say this for the fourth time. The wights are watching. They will come to the slightest summons, however unintentional.'

  'I know, I know.' Russ waved his free hand impatiently. 'It is too perilous to lay out the rituals of the Underverse while in the warp.

  'I recognise my failing and will be sure to correct it,' said the primarch, only half ironically.

  Kva tilted his head to the side and scrutinised Russ carefully. 'You are the primarch, you do not need to justify your actions to anyone. We will follow you anywhere.'

  Russ reached for his silver ewer of wine. 'If you let me believe I'm infallible, we could have all sorts of problems,' he said. 'I am arrogant enough as it is.'

  The Wolf leaned forwards in his throne and put his goblet down on a low table of thornwood, every inch of which was covered in carved, twisting beasts. A second goblet was there. Russ gestured for Kva to help himself then poured a huge measure into his own goblet, before passing him the ewer.

  'Drink with me,' he said. 'I am going to talk. You are going to listen.'

  Kva sniffed the air. 'Wine?'

  'Wine,' said Russ. 'From the Lion's vineyards. A gift of friendship.' He smiled. 'It is dark, bitter and complicated in flavour.'

  'That adequately describes your relationship with him.'

  Russ laughed, a solitary bark. 'Yes.' He stared off across the dark floor, as if he could see troubling portents beneath the stone's surface.

  There was a chair nearby the throne's dais. After pouring himself a measure, Kva sat down without waiting for permission, and leaned wearily on his staff. Many allowances were made for his condition.

  'If you want to talk, then talk, my jarl,' said Kva.

  Russ stirred himself. 'Talk,' he said. 'This spear,' he pointed his thumb over his shoulder without turning around, 'I have never liked it.'

  'The truth of this is known to all the Vlka,' said Kva.

  It was telling that the spear had never had another name than the 'Spear of the Emperor'. An outsider would think nothing of this, but one who knew the culture of Fenris well would see a superstitious dread at work. All weapons had names, true names like those of a man or a woman, names that not only described them, but set their wyrd in the metal of their making, foretold their use and hinted at their end. A weapon gave power to the warrior who named it. The Spear of the Emperor had adopted its name simply by being what it was.

  'You have never named your father's gift,' said Kva.

  Russ nodded and took a deliberate swallow of wine. 'I am going to tell you why. I have never told anybody why. You will hear, and you will judge, divided one.'

  'Then I am listening,' Kva said.

  'This is why Leman Russ does not like the Spear of the Emperor, his father,' said Russ. 'The Emperor gave me the weapon in the wake of the Wheel of Fire.'

  'Before my time, my jarl,' said Kva. 'Though I know the sagas well.'

  'It was a long time ago,' said Russ. 'The first Varagyr were with me then, men who had fought by my side before the Emperor came. The old Terran legionaries were still with us too. We were a mongrel Legion, two breeds of savage fighting together as one. We were at that time known as the Wolves that Stalked the Stars, for a speech I made before the campaign.' He laughed again. 'You spend so much time on crafting these damn addresses to impress the remembrancers and scholiasts, you miss the obvious thing everyone will remember. Wolves that Stalk the Stars. Space Wolves.' He shook his head. 'A child's name. To ourselves, we were always the Rout. Do you know where the term came from?' asked Russ.

  'An old insult taken to heart and turned back upon those who hurled it. The word-spear caught, reversed and buried in the heart of its owner.'

  'That it was,' said Russ with satisfaction. 'It is one of the last remaining legacies of the Terran Sixth. Anyway, I had not long been reunited with the Legion. Horus and the Emperor decided to test me with Eldkringla, the Wheel of Fire. It was a region of unstable nebulae and wandering stars. A hell-place, crammed with greenskins. We were asked to destroy them, and we did.'

  'That is our nature, my jarl.'

  'Aye, it is, but we wore down our teeth doing it. This mongrel Legion overthrew an ork empire that had resisted all earlier attacks. It took five years, and cost the Sixth a third of its strength.'

  Russ poured himself more wine.

  'For killing a billion orks and losing a third of the Rout, I was given two gifts. The greatest was the Aett, though not the name. Those bloody fools in the Chamber Castellanis probably thought they were being funny calling it the Fang. The other was that spear.

  'There was a ceremony. The Allfather is cunning in His use of those. For the seeming of it, I don't think He enjoys them, if He enjoys anything. Ferrus was there, and so was Horus. Ferrus had recently been found, and he was looking all stem like he did before Fulgrim cut his head off, though I think he was just bewildered by it all. The Allfather has that effect. That parade was so calculated. The Allfather's chance to show the world His third son, while He lauded His second. That was when He gave me the spear.' Russ growled. 'The spear was a spear - huge enough to be wielded by me, exceptionally well made, beautiful like all the Emperor's gifts are, but it only appeared to be nought but a spear, until I touched it.'

  Russ drank some more, poured some more, and continued.

  'The moment the Lord of Mankind handed me that weapon, I felt its ill-wyrd cross my soul. My smile near slipped off my face. I managed to keep it as I accepted the honour,' he stressed the word sarcastically. 'You cannot hide anything from my father. I expected Him to show some sign of noticing my apprehension, to be offended, or to hesitate, but if He did sense my faltering, He said nothing. That troubled me more than the spear itself. He must have sensed my misgivings, because that is who He is, and if He did, which He would have done, and did not say anything, then the spear was doing whatever the spear was supposed to do. So I went back to my place next to Ferrus with a troubled heart and a face as humourless as his.

  'When I returned to my pavilion, I could not wait to let go of the thing. As a gift of the Emperor it was hung in pride of place over my other weapons, but I am not ashamed to say I could not look at it, and nor would I touch it. I have never used it in battle.'

  What Russ said next was lost as the Hrafnkel encountered a hardened knot in the empyrean's weave and jumped. The ewer rocked on its base. Geri lifted his head and looked towards the ceiling. Coals jumped from a couple of the firebowls. They bounced across the floor, sending out parties of short-lived embers that glinted orange in the dark.

  The engines howled, rising several pitches, falling, rising again, a sound more eerie than any wolf's call. The ship quietened. Their passage levelled. Russ waited a moment while aftershocks trembled the vessel before continuing.

  'All this took place on Seraphina V. Have you ever been to the system?' asked Russ.

  'No, my jarl.'

  'If YOU do avoid the fifth planet. It's as hot as the Fimbolsommer, and less charming. The war was fought for Seraphina, the system and she stars around it. The Wheel of Fire remains empty. Nobody wanted it.

  'Later that day as I drank stale mjod alone in my sweltering tent I found myself falling asleep. I have learned a little of how we were made from the Allfather. He told me the prime functions of sleep in an unaltered human are the cleaning of the cerebiospiml fluids of damaging proteins and the consolidation of memoir. In His primarchs, these needs are serviced by other processes. Hus is
why I do not sleep often, once I had shed the habit. But that day I slept without meaning to. That was unusual. Of equal note, I dreamed.'

  He paused for a long time then, perhaps wavering on the cusp of revelation, weighing the worth of sharing against the danger of doing so. Kea waited patiently. Eventually, the primarch drained his wine cup again and continued.

  This is what I saw, Kva. You tell me what it means. I stood on a desolate plain recently cleansed by fire The reek of hyper-accelerant suggested promethium as the means of destruction. The heat radiating from the baked earth told me the barrage was finished only a few hours before The ground steamed. Heavy clouds of smoke bruised the sky in grey and purple. The world's sun was rising, and its light slanted beneath the smother of war. A molten glow poured over the aftermath, lighting the clouds from beneath, and dazzling me As I held up my left hand to shelter my eyes, I noted a brighter light shining above my head, and I turned and saw I held the Spear of the Emperor in my right hand. The world was black. My armour was dirtied by fumes and smuts. Everything was filthy, but not the spear. It was as clean as if it had been polished by the blademakers. It reflected the rays of the sun and returned them twofold, outshining it.

  The spear was the only beautiful thing in that place. There was nothing alive. Uniform soot furred every surface soaking up the golden light. A quality of this contrast was a hyper-reality. 'I felt that I really was there that the dream was real and that the waking world was not.'

  'It was real,' said Kva. 'A different level of being, but no less real than this hall we sit in now.'

  'I have told myself that cannot be that the Imperial Truth denies it.'

  'The Imperial Truth is a blunt tool,' said Kva. 'And sometimes it is not true.'

  Kva's heresy meant nothing to Russ. He had always forged his own path.

  'A landscape of blackened bones stretched in every direction from my feet,' said Russ. They were carbonised by whatever terrible weapon had atomised their cloak of flesh. The smell of burned meat choked me, wrapped itself about me, so thick I thought I might never be rid of it. It was worse than the smouldering pyre of Tizca after the Censure Host had done with it Trees made charcoal sketches of themselves clawed at the sky. This had been a living world, but all had burned to slag.

  And then I saw that fragments of armour lay amid the ash. The paint had burned away and the ceramite was discoloured purple by the heat of its unmaking. A pauldron lay close by my feet that retained some of its colour. I knew I was asleep and I knew what I would see if I were to pick it up, but the logic of dreams compelled me to bend over, and fish the guard from the filth. I was a spectator to actions undertaken by some other agency.

  The ceramite was crumbly in my hand, so I turned it over gingerly. On the other side, burned almost to invisibility, was a snarling wolf's head, as I expected.

  'I dropped the plate. It shattered into fragments upon the ground. Flakes of ceramite blew away on the wind. Again, as is the way with dreams, I noted only then that the bones were not those of ordinary men, but of the Legiones Astartes.

  'My warriors were dead around me by the hundreds, if not the thousands. The realisation of it pricked out more detail for me, and I saw many suits of broken armour, and wolf skulls atop men's bodies.' Russ was troubled. He no longer looked upon Kva, but stared off at sights lodged in his memory.

  'What battlefield it was, I do not know. The identity of the enemy was also hidden from me. As it turned out, the scene was only a stage for what was to come.

  'The sun rose past the level of the clouds, and the land was cast into darkness. I was seized by a terrible foreboding. A black wind blew, blasting up the ashes of the dead and whirling them into my face so that I tasted the burned meat of them. Within the wind a dire howling sounded.'

  'The sound of the wolf can be a good or bad omen in a dream like this,' said Kva.

  'It was a bad omen,' insisted Russ. 'Louder and more harrowing than the call of the greatest of the lone wolf kings. A second howl joined the first, twinned with it, singing in chorus. It was a challenge, and a portent of death.

  'From out of the black snow of ash stalked the greatest wolf I have ever seen. It was as large as an Imperial Knight, two-headed, with burning red eyes and a burning red mouth. It came towards me, and I knew it was there to kill me. Who else could it have been, but Morkai? The great wolf itself, the world ender. I set the spear and prepared to do battle. He did not disappoint me.

  'We fought, Morkai and I, for an age. His breath was the thunder, his teeth the lightning. I was the fury of the tempest. The ground shook at our battle, the sky boiled and fire stabbed down wherever I struck. His eyes blazed, his jaws snapped, but I was never where his blows landed. I moved with such speed, I danced, Kva. I danced with the spear and with death!'

  'Did you wound him, my lord?'

  Russ picked up the ewer, and made a face of annoyance when he found it empty. He put it down.

  'Many times I struck him. His body parted like smoke before the spear. I did not harm him. Once, I cleaved down between his heads with the blade.' He chopped the edge of his hand into his opposite palm. 'He reformed and renewed his attack. I could not wound him.'

  'He is not flesh. He is the essence of death. He cannot be killed,' said Kva. 'So how did you win?'

  'I did not say that I did,' said Russ.

  'There is only one way to face Morkai and survive,' said Kva, 'and that is to beat him.'

  'I did not beat him. We were still fighting when I awoke, covered in sweat, my hearts beating as loudly as the forges of the Hammerhold. I was not alone. Horus had come to speak with me about my next campaign. Perhaps his arrival had awoken me. Perhaps I would be dead now if he had not come when he did. He thought it amusing he had found me asleep. And then he said something that was entirely understandable, but in the wake of the dream it seemed a little strange.'

  'What did he say?' said Kva.

  'Horus looked at the Emperor's gift and said, 'That is a good spear''

  'I see,' said Kva.

  'I don't think he ever liked me, not like some of the others,' said Russ. 'He always respected me, he always knew how to get the best out of me, but he was jealous from the start. I was the second found, and when I returned I took the light of father from him. '

  'A problem all eldest sons experience.'

  'True,' said Russ. 'When we found our third brother—'

  The ship ran through another squall left over from the Ruinstorm's dissipation. The shaking it experienced sent the sparse furniture sliding across the stone. The ewer danced to the very edge of the table. Russ' words were drowned out. '—and we know how tragic that tale was. And then there was Perms, then the rest. I think Horus mastered his emotions after me. He never behaved with the others that same way he did in those first months after my return. It is strange. Horus and I had this connection that was unique to our relationship. I changed his world.' He shook his head. 'He always was too proud. I never cared. I am one of Twenty. The others were always going to come,' said Russ. 'Maybe if I had been the first, like him, then I would have known this jealousy. Perhaps not. I was never envious of his position as the most favoured son. When he was made Warmaster, I was not one of those who complained. I was made for a task. I perform it.

  'I found Horus' jealousy petty.'

  'You are not Horus,' said Kva.

  Russ smiled bitterly. The Hrafnkel grumbled in sympathy.

  'What does it mean, Kva? What does the dream mean?'

  'You shall die wielding the Spear of the Emperor,' said Kva without hesitation. There was no need to obfuscate the hard truth or flatter with a lie. That was not the way of the Vlka Fenryka.

  In the same spirit Russ accepted Kva's pronouncement. 'That was what I thought.' For the first time he turned around and looked at the spear directly. 'I should throw it out of an airlock,' he said. 'If I rid myself of it, I may change my wyrd.'

  'I do not think you will,' said Kva. 'No man can change their wyrd. Not even you.'


  'You are right,' said Russ, 'for as much as I hate it and what it showed me, somehow, it is important. I cannot get rid of it. I have tried, not very hard, but how hard could it be to lose a weapon? I have lost many! Every time I leave it somewhere, it is returned to me. I doubt hurling it into the heart of a star would yield a different result, I only do not try for fear that it will be lost. You see the contradiction.' He gave a wry smile. 'No, I am fated to keep it even if it cuts my thread itself.' He looked Kva in the eye. 'Maybe it is not an ill wyrd but a false wyrd.' He clenched his fist. 'I cannot be sure. The runes show me nothing. I set out to kill another of my brothers, and I do not know if it is the right course of action. Tell me, Kva, how is a man of two worlds who is yet of neither to know the truth of his wyrd?'

  'He never can,' said Kva. 'I know from experience.'

  Russ sank deeper into his throne. 'I was afraid you would say that.'

  Ten

  The Lord Of Mars

  The omnispex went green, and the adjudicator rang a tinny clarion.

  'Pass,' said Cawl. 'The Machine-God bless you in all your undertakings.'

  The thallax strode out of the screening bay on mechanical legs. Cawl left it in a dreamlike state, its higher functions deactivated as Domina Hester Aspertia Sigma-Sigma preferred. Cawl half-heartedly flicked scented oils over the thallax from an aspergillum and watched it go to join the silent ranks of its comrades. He would have liked to know what was going on in the man's brain, floating there in the metal casing, unable to influence his own actions. It was normal for the Mechanicum troops to undergo direct control from their clade masters from time to time. They expected it, even welcomed it as a chance to commune directly with the Machine-God. But the level of control Sigma-Sigma exerted over her minions was unusual, and probably unhealthy.

  And now, he thought, I am one of them.

  He called the next thallax forward to the status bay. Seven hundred and eighty-eight were left to inspect. At two minutes, three

  seconds an inspection on average, he was going to be on the thallax line for at least another twenty-six hours.