Curse of the Wulfen

by David Annandale

  Harald did not look towards an end of the campaign. He concerned himself with the victory of the moment, and of the steps necessary to reach the end. In seeking to counter his strategy, the daemons aided him. They brought more and more of their forces to bear against the Deathwolves, and so they hurried their extermination.

  Forty days after the siege of Predomitus, the Deathwolves crested a ridge and caught their first glimpse of the sea, still hundreds of kilo­metres away. Below, the land dropped away gradually into an arid, rolling plain. It was a cauldron of daemons. Harald paused. He looked upon a heaving mass of beings, a nightmare drawn for the darkest sagas.

  ‘A fine hunt,’ Canis said. His face and beard were matted with ichor, and his armour was scored with burns and the marks of otherworldly blades. ‘Glorious.’ He looked towards the daemonic legions, his hunger for battle as strong as ever.

  ‘Can a hunt be too glorious?’ Harald said.

  Canis turned to him in disbelief. After a long moment, he laughed, as if deciding Harald was joking. ‘Never,’ Canis said.

  At the moment the champion’s laughter ended, Harald thought he heard the echo of another, sibilant voice. Harald glanced around. Slithertwyst’s final mockery haunted him.

  Every day of the campaign, he watched for the daemon’s return. In the corner of his left eye, he saw a dark pink movement. He looked. There was nothing there.

  ‘What did you hear?’ Canis asked.

  ‘I thought I heard the daemon who taunted us in Predomitus.’

  Canis looked puzzled once more. ‘That cannot be. We banished it. Tore it apart.’

  Yet it laughed. ‘And why Nurades?’ he said, finally asking the question out loud. ‘What is the meaning of this incursion?’

  ‘Its meaning?’ Canis said. ‘What does it matter? The daemons’ purpose dies with them.’

  Does it? It must.

  Yet it laughed.

  He shook his head. ‘You’re right, Wolfborn,’ he said, trying to convince himself. ‘Deathwolves!’ he voxed to the company. ‘We push to the sea! Leave only death in our wake!’

  They poured down the slope. A storm of claws and guns descended on the daemons.

  Harald was unable to savour the taste of the victories as they came. The questions gave him no peace. Even in the thick of battle, as he roared and slew, they lingered, as insistent as they were half-formed.

  Onward. Forwards. Weeks of war. Weeks of slaughter. The beasts forever unleashed, claws and fangs ripping the unholy foe apart. The infinity of the enemy merely an infinity of prey.

  Canis exulted.

  Harald doubted.

  On and on. Endless.

  Until there was an end.

  The Lacertus Peninsula came to an abrupt halt. The restless sea hurled itself against sheer basalt cliffs hundreds of metres high. Caught in the tormented energy of the warpstorm, the waves rose to half that height, battering the cliffs with such force the spray drenched the land above. The wind howled with voices. It raged against the Space Wolves as they cornered the daemonic hordes. The abominations of the Ruinous Powers shrieked and gibbered, their voices entwining with the wind and waves.

  They fought in vain. The true tempest came from Fenris.

  Harald turned his doubts into rage as he and his brothers crashed into the final hordes. On all sides, the Deathwolves howled with triumph. After weeks of incessant battle, they attacked as if fresh to the battlefield. Their prey had nowhere to turn. They tore into the daemons with furious joy. Ichor and spray drenched Harald as he and Icetooth savaged them, and Glacius seemed to sing in his hand. He barely felt the impact of his blows. He cut through skulls and chopped torsos in half. He crushed spines with his storm shield. He fired into explosions of disintegrating wyrdflesh.

  Canis laughed with merciless ferocity. Harald joined him. So did the entire cavalry, and then the infantry. The cliffs resounded with the terrible laughter of alpha predators.

  Harald and Icetooth plunged forwards, and forwards again, until there was no forwards any longer.

  The shattered daemon army plunged over the edge of the cliffs. Monstrous forms struggled through the air. Waves like mountains rose to swallow them, Nurades in its anger taking its tormentors into the violent depths of the sea.

  The Deathwolves’ laughter rode the thunder of the surf.

  Lord Governor Elsener met with Harald Deathwolf and Canis Wolfborn in one of the defence spires of Hive Genos. Elsener’s quarters had been destroyed early in the incursion. He had barely escaped the tower’s fall. None of the astropaths lower down had been as fortunate. Their cry for help had been their last act, and it had opened them fatally to the power of the warp. Elsener had witnessed their daemonic transformation. He had witnessed much since the start of the war. He had seen thousands of hive militia and all but a handful of his Tempestus honour guard give their lives in the defence of a chapel redoubt in the centre of the hive. He caught sight of his reflection in a glassteel window as he approached the chamber. What he had seen was branded on his face. His eyes were sunken and his skin was grey and lined with the deep scars of a soul’s trauma. He saw the face of a man who would not live long past the end of the war.

  The Emperor grant I see the liberation of Nurades, he thought.

  He entered the room, leaning on a rough cane he had fashioned from the shaft of an ornamental pike. The chamber was a turret emplacement midway up the tower. It was large enough to serve as a command centre, and it was intact. Heavy bolters stood in the vaulted apertures facing north, south, east and west. They guarded the approaches over the rooftops of the lower hab complexes. Or the ruins of those complexes. Much of Genos was a smouldering ruin. But it had been cleansed.

  The sky was dark with the smoke from the fires. It was free of the lunatic brilliance of the warp storm. As the war swept upwards from the Lacertus Peninsula on the inhabited northern land mass of Nurades, the strength of the storm faded. It had been many days now since Genos and Predomitus had been free of the terrors of that light and its rains.

  Waiting for the lord governor was the liberation of Nurades. Elsener’s breath caught. Two colossal warriors faced him. Their armour carried the stench of war. There was the acrid sting of fyceline, and the disturbing trace of slaughtered abominations in the streaks of ichor. And the aura of dangerous animals. They were human, yet their features were so rough-hewn, their hair so wild, that Elsener felt he had stepped into the presence of massive beasts.

  He feared them almost as much as the things he had been fighting for weeks.

  Elsener bowed, eyes averted. ‘My lords,’ he said. ‘Nurades thanks you for the salvation you bring.’

  Deathwolf grunted. ‘Your survival does you credit, Lord Elsener.’ He turned to the hololith table that had been brought to the chamber. ‘We have some questions for you.’ The table displayed a map of Nurades’ polar regions. ‘The war grows fiercer the further north we go,’ Deathwolf said.

  With an effort, Elsener forced himself not to imagine a plague of horrors even worse than that which had attacked Genos.

  ‘The abominations are more numerous, and more resolved to prevent our advance,’ Deathwolf continued. He tapped the map where runes indicated some form of complex. ‘What is this? I have found no records about it.’

  ‘Borassus,’ Elsener said. He swallowed and leaned more heavily on his cane. ‘We expunged the records, but we have yet to erase its memory from our culture. It is a fortification. It is cursed.’

  Wolfborn snorted. ‘What on Nurades is not?’

  ‘Borassus has been a place of shadows for centuries. It has been shunned since long before the warp storm came.’

  ‘So it will be all the worse now, you believe,’ Deathwolf said.

  ‘How can it not be?’

  Deathwolf nodded. ‘We take note of your warning. No son of Fenris takes the word curse lightly. So Borassus is
where we must go. If the Ruinous Powers seek to prevent us from reaching it, its importance is clear.’ He spread his hand over the polar regions. ‘There are no settlements for over a thousand kilometres in any direction. No prey for the daemons. Borassus is their anchor point on this continent. From what you say, it may also be a gateway for them. We shall take it, and cleanse this world.’

  The skies were clear over Borassus as the Stormwolves arrived. There was no smog of heavy industry in this empty region, a land of barren rock and deep cold. Nor were there the unholy flames of the warp storm. Even as the Deathwolves had prepared their assault on the fortifications, the convulsion around Nurades had subsided. The storm had passed. The materium was reasserting itself. The night of the Nurades’ pole was a clean black and the stars were jagged silver. Twice the size of Luna, Nurades’ moon cast a light heavy with silence over Borassus.

  A hundred kilometres to the south, the heavy armour of the Deathwolves battled a massive surge of daemons in the mountain pass that was the primary access point to the Borassus region across land. With the attention of the forces of Chaos drawn to that struggle, Harald ordered an air insertion into the target zone. Now the Space Wolves came in waves of gunships, disembarking on a wide plain before the main gate of the fortifications.

  As his cavalry and infantry assembled, Harald eyed the battlements, outlined in black by the vast sphere of the moon. The complex of bunkers, towers and ramparts made him think of broken tusks and fangs. Borassus hulked, quiet and black, waiting. The main gate was a ruin. The way in was clear. He saw no movement.

  Standing beside him, Canis said, ‘This place is not dead.’ His fangs were bared. Icetooth and Fangir growled. Their hackles were raised.

  ‘It waits for us,’ Harald agreed.

  The cavalry of the Deathwolves advanced with caution. Harald could not lead a charge with no enemy in sight.

  The Space Wolves passed through the ruined gate. Beyond was a large staging ground. Some of the barracks surrounding it had fallen in on themselves. Rockcrete walls had tumbled as if smashed by a huge fist. Bunkers were squat shapes, at regular intervals in the space between the walls and the great hulk of the central keep. Cold light and deep shadow washed over them. Their doorways and turret apertures gaped, idiot mouths and blind glares. Harald sent squads ahead to check the nearest buildings. They found only darkness inside.

  The Deathwolves moved deeper into Borassus. Wind whispered over the ground, cold with loss. The tread of thunderwolf paws and ceramite boots echoed against the walls, and desolation embraced the company.

  The door to the keep had fallen too. Harald slowed when he saw the entrance was blocked with rubble. The interior of the keep appeared to have collapsed. He scanned the upper levels of squat towers. Rows of apertures stared back at him; more dark, empty eyes.

  The eyes blinked and snarling light burst from them. It lit the ramparts of the keep. On the roofs of the bunkers, as if a concealing curtain had been ripped away, flame daemons of Tzeentch now whirled their mad dance and hurled daemonic fire at the company. They’ve been there all along, Harald realised. Some great sorcery had kept them hidden.

  The blasts hit everywhere across the Deathwolves’ formation. A fireball of coruscating blue streaked past Harald’s shoulder. It hit Aluar, enveloping the Grey Hunter. Power armour, flesh, bone and muscle mutated and fused with such explosive energy that he passed from a thing of bleeding angles and howling mouths to ash in a fraction of a second.

  On all sides, reality cracked. An army appeared in mid-charge, tearing through the brittle veil of the real. The staging ground was empty and then it was full. A stampede of juggernauts barrelled into the Deathwolves’ flanks. They were massive beasts of crimson hide and crimson armour with horns that were as long as their jaws. Some horns were spikes, while some were in the shape of serrated axe blades, and behind each was the force of a speeding tank. They pierced ceramite. They chopped through ribs. They impaled thunder­wolves through the throat.

  Riding high on their monstrous steeds, Khornate swordlings swung their blades down onto damaged armour. They exulted with each skull they severed, holding high their crimson offerings to Khorne.

  Slower and more numerous than the behemoth cavalry, thousands of daemons of Nurgle closed in. They were a sea of droning, chanting pestilence. Weeping sores covered their bodies and maggots dropped, squirming, from their blades. They came to smother the Deathwolves in the embrace of the grandfather of disease.

  ‘Form up!’ Harald voxed. ‘Push them back!’ Icetooth and Fangir lunged towards the stampeding Khornate daemons.

  ‘Cowards, depending on surprise,’ Canis snarled.

  It worked, Harald thought. ‘Then we’ll render their tactic futile,’ he vowed. The trap had been sprung. He would take the Deathwolves out of it now. The beast in his heart swore this, though the cold tactician reckoned the odds and knew how this night would end.

  The scarlet behemoths attacked the Space Wolves flanks. There was no way forward. The ruined keep was a cliff wall. The only chance was to break the brunt of the assault and reclaim mobility.

  ‘We must push to the rear,’ Harald said to Canis. He poured bolt shells into the skull of a leviathan until its head burst. It fell heavily, carving a furrow in the stony ground, rolling over and crushing its rider.

  ‘A retreat?’ Canis asked. Fangir dodged a charge and dug his claws into the monster’s scales. Canis decapitated the swordling with a swipe of his right hand and impaled the behemoth’s neck with the wolf claws on his left.

  ‘A manoeuvre,’ Harald said. ‘With a change of prey.’

  ‘Brothers!’ he shouted into the vox. ‘Rend the daemons of plague apart!’ He began to turn Icetooth around. A juggernaut launched itself at the thunderwolf. Icetooth twisted around, brought his head down and latched his jaws onto the beast’s throat. He bit with steel-crunching force. Daemonic ichor poured to the ground as the juggernaut bellowed and tried to shake free. Harald batted aside the sword daemon’s weapon with his bolt pistol and slammed Glacius into the abomination’s midsection, cutting it in half. It dissolved into steaming, scarlet foulness. Icetooth tightened his grip on the juggernaut. His claws smashed through its armour. Harald turned his axe at the exposed flesh, hacking deep into the body of the monster. It reared backwards with a strength born of its impending doom. Icetooth rose on his hindquarters with it. The juggernaut tried to roll over and crush its tormentors, but it was evenly matched with the thunderwolf. As if he was as furious with the ambush as his master, Icetooth refused to release his prey. The juggernaut fell back on all fours and Icetooth tore its throat out. It slumped down, and Harald cut off its head.

  The huge daemon’s body collapsed in on itself. Its scales rusted, then flaked to dust, and its flesh melted into a foul muck. As its mass disappeared, Harald had the room to manoeuvre. Beside him, Canis and Fangir finished the other behemoth. Fangir clawed all the way through the flank, loosing a flood of snapping, shrieking, burning viscera. Canis cut deeper with his own blades until he severed the skull. The daemon’s roar of pain and rage choked off and the monster vanished in an explosion of ichor. Moving to the left and right flanks, Wolf Lord and champion barrelled down the line of the Deathwolves, adding their might to that of each brother locked in a struggle, blunting the assault of the daemon cavalry.

  ‘Back to the walls! Back to the plain!’ Harald ordered. ‘There we will run the abominations down!’

  The Great Company changed its direction. The Deathwolves fought through the jaws and crush of the Khornate monsters. They fought through the barrage of warp flame that fell in their midst, destroying their brothers through lethal metamorphosis. And they moved against the plaguebearers.

  Overhead, the Stormwolves strafed the ramparts with helfrost and las. Stormfang gunships punished the daemons on the ground. Great beams created swaths of absolute zero temperatures. Some of the daemons caught in the fire manage
d to move, their unnatural being performing the impossible, yet they crumbled apart as they advanced, reduced to dust before they could be free.

  The Tzeetchian flame daemons retaliated in force. Across the fortifications, half of them redirected their fire at the gunships and assault craft. Warpfire engulfed engines. It turned wings into fangs. Before Harald could reach the rear lines, multiple volleys of the unholy flame gripped the fuselage of a Stormfang, transforming it into something scaled and flexible. Engines screamed and the gunship whirled. Its sudden flesh changed again. It became glass. The forces of its violent movement shattered it. Ship and crew vanished in an explosion that lit the dark with light natural and unnatural.

  Harald and Canis rejoined each other as the Deathwolves struck hard against the plague daemons. The abominations at the front disappeared in mid chant, annihilated by the massed rage of the Space Wolves. The cold polar air became dank and humid with rot. Even as they disintegrated, the daemons fought back, releasing a wall of noxious vapour ahead of them.

  The Deathwolves advanced into the sea of disease. Though the behemoths continued their attack, they had lost the advantage of speed. They were bogged down as they waded through the plague daemons. The Great Company drew closer to the gate, and the freedom of movement beyond.

  Warpflame surrounded the Stormwolf Guard of Frostheim. A score of flame daemons hit it at the same time. Its frame subjected itself to conflicting forces of such power it froze in mid-flight. Madness held it suspended over the gateway. It bulged and contracted. It writhed. Eyes tore open and bled along the fuselage. The underbelly split wide. Its teeth gnashed, and then it screamed.

  ‘Back!’ Harald roared.

  The company’s movement stalled. A mass so great could not reverse course that suddenly. The Space Wolves reacted with perfect discipline, yet for fateful seconds they neither advanced nor retreated.

  Guard of Frostheim fell. A combusting assemblage of metal and flesh crashed into the ground before the gate. The incinerating blast washed over the Deathwolves. There could be no turning for Harald, and he leaned into the explosion, fastening his grip on his mantle as Icetooth crouched low, howling at the destruction. The cowling of an engine cartwheeled over Harald’s head. It came down in the Grey Hunters behind him, both blade and meteor. A wind of ignited plasma and burning immaterium raged around him. It sought to devour him. It failed, repelled by his cloak. Made from the hide of the ice troll king he had slain, it defied all flame.