Blood on the Mountain

by Ben Counter

Ulli had been here as a youth. He remembered most the smell of it – even before the enhancement of his senses the stench of the burning offerings had been dizzyingly intense. Ulli was kneeling in the cave just as he had been when the elders of the Vulture Clan had hauled him in there and gripped his shoulders to hold him still.

  The elders were there now, shadowy figures half remembered. In the flames leaped a darkness – the darkness they had called forth with the ancient sorceries of his tribe. Even then, ignorant and afraid, Ulli had known the blasphemy of that sight, the long, spindly limbs forming from the air, the many eyes winking white in its substance, the spread of ragged wings behind it filling the cavern.

  ‘They brought me here,’ said Ulli, still tense with concentration. The memory was delicate and the machine-curse daemon was strong, and he could not let it unravel around him. ‘They conjured it forth. The Spirit of the Burning Stones. One of your own kind. The daemon that enslaved the Vulture Tribe.’

  Ulli stared into the eyes of the daemon forming in the fire. Drops of blackness spat and hissed in the fire. Trapped there in his memory was the machine-curse daemon, pinned in place by the force of Ulli’s mind. Ulli had trained for this, for endless hours in the scriptoria and breaking halls of the Fang.

  ‘No trick can stay me,’ spat the daemon. ‘This is my world, this place inside your head. I cannot be deceived, I who am deceit! I cannot be destroyed, I who am destruction!’

  ‘Every one of my people was given to the Spirit of the Burning Stones,’ continued Ulli. ‘Brought here and possessed by it, then spat back out again with their minds in ruins. But not me. I resisted it. I looked it in the eye and I cast it out of me. I was the strongest witch-child they had ever borne, and the Spirit could not take me.’ Ulli stood, his head reaching the ceiling of the cavern that had seemed so huge in his youth. ‘And they feared me! I was marked for death when the Wolf Priests came for them! Do you understand now what I can do, daemon? I can crush your kind with the power of my soul, and you are trapped in here with me! Do you despair? Do you know fear?’

  ‘Blasphemer!’ spat the daemon back at him. It writhed in the flame, trying to break free. Ulli felt it struggling in the back of his head, pounding the inside of his skull. ‘Wretch! Filth! The gods of the warp will tear–’

  ‘I am the god of this place!’ yelled Ulli, ‘You are the broken slave of a greenskin beast! And I command you to burn!’

  The flames leapt up. The chamber was full of fire. The obsidian walls and the Vulture Clan elders bled away and all that remained was the flame, raging white and blue-hot.

  The daemon screamed. The sound filled Ulli’s skull. It lost any shape, and with it any resemblance to the daemon Ulli Vulturekin had defied beneath the Valley of the Burning Stones. The machine-curse daemon broke apart into the information of which it was composed. Scraps of cogitator code fluttered in the fire like burning insects.

  Ulli took the whole world inside him, encompassed in the obsidian cavern, and crunched it into a single diamond-hard point of knowledge. In there was contained the daemon, compressed into white-hot agony. Aside from that there was a void inside him, a pure and endless space where the daemon would find no purchase.

  Ulli let his senses reel out. He had the scent of his prey already and it did not take him long to follow the trail up out of Sacred Mountain and onto the slope. He followed the stink of the corruption, the sweat and chainblade oil of a Space Wolf – Aesor Dragon’s Head, still fighting his duel with the greenskin lord.

  And Ulli could sense the greenskin itself, the reeking hulk of alien muscle, its machinery belching thick smoke. Ulli perceived the burning red anger of the ork’s mind and held on to it, drawing his consciousness closer, willing the connection to become stronger.

  Ulli took the prison in which he had trapped the daemon, clutching it in a psychic fist. He drew it back and willed all the strength of his arm into that mental grip.

  The strength Ulli called upon was what had caused Ulrik to spare his life. It was the same quality that had denied his possession by the Spirit of the Burning Stones – the raw strength that pooled in Ulli’s mind, a reservoir of power that he so rarely had the chance to tap. Most uses would destroy him, burning out his brain or tearing a hole through to the warp. But now, with the daemon in his grasp, he could use every drop of it.

  Ulli rammed the daemon into the ork’s mind. The daemon poured screaming into the ork, clashing with the furnace of hatred within the alien. The daemon took on its shape as the machine-curse and, without room in the ork’s skull, it was forced into the only place it could go: the machinery built into the ork’s body, the generators and weaponry grafted onto its spine and the back of its ribcage.

  Ulli did not see what happened, but he felt it. He felt the daemon, uncaged and furious, course through the ork’s half-mechanical body. He felt the ork’s body prised apart by the force of it, the bones splintering, the organs pulping, skin and muscle tearing. Ulli could feel its pain and he felt in himself that savage joy of battle again, that spark of hot Fenrisian fury.

  EPILOGUE

  Ulli heard later what happened outside on the mountain slope. The other Space Wolves battling there witnessed Aesor Dragon’s Head duck a swipe of the greenskin’s cleaver and charge shoulder-first into the alien’s midriff. The ork wrapped its massive arms around Aesor and the two wrestled, Aesor forcing its jaw open with one hand while the ork tried to crush the ceramite of Aesor’s damaged armour. None of those watching could guess who would win, and struggling with the mass of greenskins further down the slope there was nothing even Wolf Lord Blackmane could do to intervene.

  The machinery built in to the greenskin’s body glowed deep red, and the sizzling of its flesh added to the smoke. The ork howled, a terrible sound that shook the mountain’s peak, and flames licked from its body. Black corruption spurted from the joints of the machinery, spattering foulness across the icy rocks.

  Aesor fought back, but the death grip was around him. The ork didn’t have Aesor’s skill as a master swordsman, but it was stronger than any Space Marine. Aesor couldn’t break out of the hold and as the flames grew they caught on his hair and the wolf’s-tail talismans hanging from his armour.

  Then, with a sound like thunder breaking around the peak, the ork’s body exploded. The greenskin and Aesor Dragon’s Head vanished in a burst of flame and debris, and burning darkness that cast across the snow like a rain of black blood.

  The greenskin horde bellowed in rage and grief to see their lord, who to them must have seemed invincible, destroyed in an instant. The Space Wolves echoed the sound as they howled in anger to see the death of the young and noble Aesor Dragon’s Head.

  It was the Space Wolves who used that anger the best. Ragnar Blackmane, who was fighting alongside the Dreadnought Karulf the Wizened, vaulted up onto the shoulder of the war machine and howled out his fury. The Space Wolves took up the call and leapt into the orks with renewed anger, vengeance adding strength to their arms. The orks were shocked and shattered, and fell back in ill-ordered mobs as Blackmane dived from Karulf’s shoulder into the thick of them.

  It was a few moments later that Ulli, exhausted, stumbled from the entrance to Sacred Mountain. He saw the blackened circle where Aesor and the greenskin had fought, and smelled the last wisps of the machine-curse daemon dissipating on the mountain wind. Ahead of him, down the slopes, the orks were in rout, fleeing from the Space Wolves and being chased down by the Blood Claws. Ulli held his axe out in front of him and used the last reserves of power inside him to will onto its blade the runes of hatred and rage, the purity of war, revenge and contempt.

  The sun by then was low on the horizon, and the rocks around the peak cast long shadows. The burning runes made a pool of light around Ulli as he took up the hunter’s howl. He let himself forget what he had done there on Sacred Mountain, the things he had seen, the memories he had dredged up, and replaced them with the hatred of the greenskin and everything it represented.

  Ulli ran
down the slope at the orks. His mind was full of nothing but the desire to destroy them. The Fenrisian joy of battle was all that mattered now, and it was with a great relief that he felt nothing else as he plunged into the fray.

  An hour after the sun had set, the last ork was hunted down around the mountain peak and despatched by a Blood Claw’s chainsword. Ulli heard the sound of it dying as he cleaned the blood off his axe in the snow heaped up by one of the Stormwolf gunships. Ulli took a handful of the snow and rubbed it across his face to wash the worst of the ork blood out of his eyes. It was thick and gelid in his hair, smeared across his armour, and its taste was like a mouthful of metal.

  A shadow approached, cast by the moon hanging high in the clear sky. Wolf Lord Blackmane approached. He was no older than Ulli, for Ragnar Blackmane’s rise to Wolf Lord had been faster than any in memory and the men of Fenris called him the Young King. His face was tanned and noble, the hair pulled back in a topknot of braids, and in spite of his youth his canines were already as prominent as those of a Long Fang.

  ‘Brother Ulli Iceclaw,’ said Ragnar. ‘You fought well today. Before we reached you, and afterwards. The Knights of Alaric Prime and your brothers alike owe you much.’

  ‘What victories we won here were not without their price,’ replied Ulli. He scraped a gobbet of blood from his eye with his thumb. ‘I cannot take solace in a battle well fought when of my brothers who came to this mountain, only I lived. I do not know whether to rejoice that I live, or mourn those who did not.’

  ‘There will be a place for both,’ said Lord Blackmane.

  ‘How did you find us?’ asked Ulli.

  ‘I am not the one to answer that,’ replied Blackmane. He pointed to a band of Blood Claws returning from the hunt. ‘Brother! Come forth.’

  A familiar figure walked out of the Blood Claws – this one was not a Blood Claw, but wore the pack markings of a Grey Hunter, with the eagle’s wings badge of the sky hunter on one knee guard.

  ‘Sigrund!’ cried Ulli, and jumped to his feet to embrace the pilot of the Skjaldi’s Lament. ‘I thought you lost, my brother. I thought I saw you die.’

  ‘Indeed you did,’ said Sigrund. ‘But the Lament did not let death take me all the way. She lodged in a crevasse halfway down. Her vox-booster still worked and the last thing she did before she died was tell Lord Blackmane here that my brothers needed help.’ Sigrund had a broad face, always smiling, and hair shorn close to allow for the cranial jacks with which he interfaced with the controls of his gunship. His face fell a little as he looked up towards the peak. ‘Did they die well?’ he asked.

  ‘They did,’ said Ulli.

  ‘And is what they say true of Aesor? I did not see it myself, but you were closer.’

  ‘What do they say?’ asked Ulli.

  ‘That he died that glorious death we always fated for him.’

  Ulli’s eyes passed across the battlefield strewn with ork bodies, the dense drift of snow at the bottom of the slope where hundreds more were buried by the avalanche. It passed across Lord Blackmane – and behind him, watching from a distance, the black armour and skull-helm of Ulrik the Slayer.

  ‘It is true,’ he said. ‘The greenskin had harried us all the way up the mountain and slain Saehrimnar and Starkad, but in Aesor it met a foe it could not beat, and it knew it. It must have overloaded the machinery grafted to its body to destroy the both of them. An act of spite from the alien, but an act that proved Aesor was a greater warrior than any ork.’

  ‘Then that is what will be inscribed upon his cairn!’ said Blackmane, turning to the Blood Claws. ‘And sung of in the Great Hall when we come to tell the tale of Aesor Dragon’s Head! He struck fear into the alien too brutal to know fear!’

  The Blood Claws cheered at his words, one brandishing the greenskin head he had taken as a trophy of the hunt. They were the last party to return – the force was embarking onto the gunships that had swept in as the second wave, to carry them back down the mountain to the lower slopes where the battle for Alaric Prime was being fought.

  Ulli finished wiping the worst of the blood off his axe. The runes on it had grown dim now, but once he joined the main force below, they would have to glow bright again.

  It would be good to fight down there. It would be good to let himself forget.

  The battle lines had stayed fluid throughout the day. The orks had launched berserk charges from the landing sites of their crude landing craft, each time met by a counterattack from the squadrons of Imperial Knights who charged under the banners of Alaric Prime’s great houses. The Space Wolves had struck hard and fast into the flanks of the orks, deployed by gunship and drop pod and whisked away when the harvest of dead greenskins was reaped. But there were more orks with new landing sites established by the hour, and whole tribes were gathering ready to charge towards the Imperial lines. They were testing the Knights and the Space Wolves, spending greenskin lives to see the war machines in battle. The real fight for Alaric Prime would come later, after these opening moves had yielded no victor. The real battle would be close and vicious, a fight at which both greenskin and Space Wolf excelled.

  The battle lines shifted as Blackmane watched through the port of the gunship. A wedge of orks, led by salvaged Imperial tanks and orkish war machines, was grinding across the battlefield in a pall of filthy smoke. Facing them was a phalanx of Imperial Knights, holding their ground in close order as they waited for the command to charge.

  Watching the battle beside Ragnar was Ulrik the Slayer, wearing his wolf’s-skull helm as he always did. It was his mark as a Wolf Priest, the barrier between him and the rest of his Chapter, a symbol of how he must remain apart from them as the Rune Priests did, for it was his duty to judge them.

  ‘I had heard that Ulli Iceclaw was ill-starred,’ said Ragnar Blackmane as he watched the battle unfolding. ‘I do not listen to such rumours. They are foul and base things, not becoming of battle-brothers. But I am glad they will be dispelled now, when the rest of the Chapter learns of what he did on Sacred Mountain today.’

  ‘It was always his burden,’ replied Ulrik. He carried the only part of Aesor Dragon’s Head the Space Wolves had recovered from the battlefield – the hilt of his shattered frost blade, the fat uncut emerald gleaming in the centre. ‘And he was the only one who could throw it off.’

  ‘Would that Aesor had lived also,’ said Blackmane. ‘There was no limit to how high he could have risen. He could have succeeded any one of the Wolf Lords, save perhaps Grimnar. But even the Old Wolf will not last forever, and it is men like Aesor who will vie for his post when he is gone. We have lost more than a Space Wolf in him, keen though we feel that loss. We have lost the hero of the Imperium he could have become.’

  ‘He will serve on as an example of his heroism,’ said Ulrik. ‘Even in death, a Space Wolf fights on.’

  ‘To think that Ulli alone should survive of all that pack,’ continued Blackmane. ‘I was certain that if any one of them were to return to us, it would be Aesor.’

  The gemstone set into the broken frost blade’s hilt appeared cracked. On closer inspection, however, it was riddled with dark threads, slowly squirming their way through the emerald. On the hilt, the black marks where Aesor’s fingers had gripped the sword looked like scorches inflicted when the ork detonated itself – but they, too, were liquid darkness, as if something had left a stain of living corruption there.

  ‘I am not so surprised the Rune Priest is still among us,’ replied Ulrik, glancing down at the blade. ‘I know what Ulli Iceclaw can do.’

  About The Author

  Ben Counter is the author of the Imperial Fists sagas Malodrax, Seventh Retribution and Endeavour of Will. He has also written the Horus Heresy novels Galaxy in Flames and Battle for the Abyss, along with Warhammer 40,000 series featuring the Grey Knights and Soul Drinkers. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit which has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England.

  Mo
re Space Wolves action.

  Njal Stormcaller leads the savage warriors of Fenris to battle against the foul servants of the Plague God.

  A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

  First published in Great Britain in 2014.

  This eBook edition published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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