Curse of the Wulfen

by David Annandale

  As if the World Wolf itself had seized the enemy host within its jaws, Whitestalker cut the daemon numbers in half in a matter of seconds. All the Deathwolves joined the Wulfen in howls of war and triumph.

  The daemons responded. While their ground forces fell and dwindled, the aerial assault intensified. The skies filled with burning chariots and a swarm of screamers. The chariots flew along the flanks of the Space Wolf phalanx, huge flame daemons unleashing streams of wyrdfire. The Deathwolf advance slowed as the warriors jinked from side to side, seeking to avoid the blasts. Some did not. As Harald and Icetooth raced between two parallel explosions of flesh-corrupting fire, he heard a shout of soul-torn rage, and was engulfed by a sudden cloud of grey ash. The particles that had once been brother warriors settled on his armour and in his beard. Icetooth howled in distress, shaking it off. Harald beat his fist once against the totems on his chest, willing the souls of his lost brothers a swift journey to the land of the dead, and promising them vengeance.

  The winged, screaming abominations cut back and forth across the Space Wolf lines. They flew low, hunting together. As if lured by the great spiritual strength of each warrior, they clustered their attacks around a single victim. Their shrieks pierced ears and souls, horns stabbed into the seams of armour and spiked tails whipped in with severing force. Arterial blood shot skyward, mixing with ash and corrupting flame. Heroic sagas snapped to an end as heads bounced off shoulders to be ignominiously trampled to mulch on the ground.

  ‘Now, Norvald!’ Harald voxed. ‘Tear this foulness from the air!’

  Runeclaw roared into the Shatterfields. It flew low, its engines shaking the battlefield. Lascannons and heavybolters streaked fire and destruction over the heads of the Space Wolves and a storm of energy and explosions shredded the flying daemons. The gunship’s embarkation ramp dropped open and the Deathhowls hurled themselves down into the battlefield. They bayed their eagerness to be at the enemy’s throat and hit the ground running, tearing along the flanks. Half the pack savaged the daemons on the ground while the other half turned their fire on the chariots and screamers. They were joined in the effort by the Icefangs. The Deathhowls’ skill with their bolt pistols was lethal, but the impact of the shells was dwarfed by the cataclysm of plasma and lascannons. The air over the Shatterfields burned. It hurled daemons to the ground, their bodies blown apart, their materiality evaporating.

  Harald was deep in a maelstrom of annihilation. He and his Deathwolves were the anger of the storm. Abominations swarmed over each other in the effort to halt the advance. They rushed to their extermination. The blue crystal of Glacius’ blade flashed through scale and flesh. Every swing was more savage than the last, and Harald poured his fury into the weapon. Every impact and slicing crunch was vengeance and justice. He destroyed with every blow. Whatever his doubts about the wisdom of the mission, his hunger to destroy the daemon was as furious as ever. His charge was destruction made absolute. As he witnessed the supernova rage of the Wulfen, he drew upon it, and his own ferocity climbed to new heights.

  The daemons fell, and fell, and fell. They were nothing but meat in the jaws of the wolves of war. Their numbers dwindled. The Deathwolves approached the base of the slagheap. The besieged Wulfen were still taking casualties, but they fought with the spirit of imminent victory. Many of the daemons attacking them turned back down the slope in an attempt to stop the crushing, devouring storm.

  They were trying to stop fate itself. They failed.

  A pair of flame daemons, caught up in a paired whirlwind dance, rose in a spinning leap from the rocky slabs below the Wulfen’s position. Their jump took them over Harald, and just below the lethal barrage of Runeclaw and the Icefangs. They came down on either side of Vygar Helmfang. He tried to retaliate, but as he lashed out with his wolf claws, bellowing defiance, his armour and his flesh deliquesced. They dripped from his bones together, a mass of pink and blue-grey and frothing blood.

  ‘Lord Deathwolf!’ he cried. ‘Preserve our Chapter!’ His voice disappeared into the gargling coughs of a drowning man. His beard and face flowed together and poured off his skull. His skeleton burst into terrible growth. Serpentine clusters of bone spurs struck out of his frame with the speed of a scorpion’s tail. They plunged their barbed ends into the neck and spine of his thunderwolf. The beast howled with its master. They collapsed to the ground, rolling and fusing into a mass of brittle, self-constricting tentacles and organic sludge. The cries of agony went on much longer than should have been possible.

  Vygar was avenged before he truly died. The other Riders of Morkai fell on the flamers, their blades hacking the daemons apart in seconds. Fury unslaked, the Deathwolves attacked the rest of the daemonic horde with grief transmuted to devastation.

  The daemonic army dwindled even further.

  A solitary screamer flew high above the fray, dodging the fire of Runeclaw, dropping lower only for brief moments. On it stood a herald of Tzeentch. Harald only had momentary glimpses of it. The daemon controlled the actions of the army below with gestures and calls whose syllables thundered and hissed at once. The words coiled at the edge of Harald’s consciousness, and he could not decide if they were familiar or not. He did not want to believe this was Slithertwyst again. The Deathwolves had destroyed the material form of that daemon fully. And yet… And yet…

  It did not matter, Harald thought. Not here and now. All that mattered was the destruction of the enemy.

  The air around the herald cleared again, and the daemon reached out to the east, its claws splayed. It pulled at the air as if hauling in chains. From the other side of the slagheaps came a huge clanking of gears, and the pounding of great masses. Over the peaks came four towering daemonic engines. Arachnid limbs of iron punched craters into the earth with each step. Their upper bodies were behemoths of twisted, bulging muscle, devastation made flesh; they were machines of war and they were beings of hatred. Their colossal limbs wielded claws that could crush a tank, and swords the height of a Space Marine. They stuck to the high ground, looping around to the south, then descended, spreading out to surround the Wulfen. The engines stepped over the broken monoliths without noticing their presence. Swords crackled eldritch energy as they came down, cutting through rock and flesh with equal ease. The daemons moved with the majesty of death. There was no rush to their attacks. They were ponderous but inevitable.

  The siege was over. The enemy was larger than the fortress. But the Wulfen were fast. They ran at the monsters, dodging the blows, although some were crushed to pulp between claws. One of the possessed walkers was armed with a monstrous cannon. It fired, and the concussion almost knocked Harald from Icetooth’s back. Huge shells thudded into the ground, erupting with fire that burned the materium and the wyrd. Wulfen and daemon alike vanished in the explosions.

  The devastation could not stop the Wulfen. Their brothers died, but as the daemon walkers focused on their victims, the rest of the pack shot between the legs and leapt up to slash the torsos and arms of the daemons.

  The cannon-wielding behemoth reared back. It clawed at the beings who dared attack it. It bellowed like a wounded bull pulling one of the Wulfen from its chest. Ichor poured to the ground in a flood. The possessed walker sank talons half a metre long into the torso of the warrior. It aimed its gun at the lupine blur on the ground, disdaining the two Wulfen stabbing punch daggers into the metal of the barrel.

  They jumped away the moment before it fired. Multiple shells surged through a barrel punctured and no longer true. The daemon stalker’s material reality turned against it. The shells exploded at once and the daemon’s arm and head vanished in the blast. The body weaved back and forth until it collapsed against the monoliths at the base of the heap.

  The Deathwolves broke through the last of the daemons between them and the Wulfen. Pink horrors and daemonettes and flamers were still on the attack, but there was little they could do now. The Space Wolves dominated the field, and now the
y roared over the wall of debris and joined the fight against the daemon engines.

  Harald and the Riders of Morkai attacked the legs of the nearest colossus. Thunderhammers chopped and battered the limbs while Harald and Icetooth smashed at a right foreleg. The limb rose high over Harald’s head then stabbed down. Icetooth leapt aside as the leg pulverized rock. Harald swung Glacius, and the force of the blow reverberated through his arm and down his spine. The frost axe bit deep. Metal buckled. The monster stamped and circled, sweeping its claws after the Wolf Guard. Iron shrieked, and one of the legs tore away. The daemon stumbled to the side and its aim went wide. Its head leaned forward, a huge, skinned beast shrieking its outrage. Harald met its eyes. He answered its roar and emptied his bolt ­pistol’s clip into the monstrous face.

  The shells punched through the daemon’s skull. Geysers of flesh shot out the back of its throat and neck. Its roars turned into gurgles of agony. The impacts jerked it backward.

  Battle on all sides of Harald exploded at once. The world was fractured by the pounding pillar-sized limbs and the booming of sorcerous cannons. Yngvir’s Wulfen swarmed over another daemonic engine with their relic weapons, overwhelming it with their fury and opening molten wounds in its body with their great blades. The largest of the new Wulfen pack, standing on the shoulders of a possessed walker, tore the daemon’s head from its body. Two of the great daemons fell. Anger, grief and baying triumph surged as one through Harald’s spirit. The events at the periphery of his awareness were sudden and vast enough to pull a small portion of his attention away from the leviathan he fought.

  Only a fraction. He never turned from the abomination’s wrathful eyes.

  It was enough. The claw came in from his left, a blur he turned too late to face. It closed around him and jerked him aloft, off the back of Icetooth. His arms were trapped in the daemon’s grip. He could not move. The daemon walker lifted him high. Now its eyes shone with malevolent triumph. Its shattered jaw streamed ichor and its mutilated visage contorted in a snarl as it rejoiced over the downfall of its tormentor. It began to squeeze.

  It spoke, somehow forming words despite the canyons of its injuries.

  ‘You will not behold the game’s end, Harald Deathwolf.’

  Mountains pressed in on Harald’s chest. His armour cracked. It split. Blades of broken ceramite cut though his carapace and into his flesh. His fused rib plates splintered. He could not breathe. Pain was a blackness spreading from his core, seizing his consciousness, splintering his thoughts.

  ‘You will never learn your purpose.’

  The full length of his frame cracked. He felt a more terrible crushing take place as his internal organs began to rupture. The blackness crept over his vision and the world receded behind a thickening veil. Only the terrible fire of the daemon walker’s gaze penetrated it.

  The slow, inexorable constriction paused. It relaxed by a fraction. With a supreme effort of will, Harald pushed the blindness away. One of the Wulfen had leapt up and seized the end of the daemon’s claw. Through sheer bodily strength and mass, he was holding the arm down and pulling the tips of the claw apart. The daemon walker growled in disbelief. The Wulfen’s ancient, ruined armour was little more than scraps now. The muscles of his arms bulged with strain and his fangs gnashed. He was beast far more than human, yet he acted with selfless heroism. Bit by bit, the halves of the claw began to part.

  Denial, anger and disbelief twisted through the hollow thunder of the daemon’s words.

  With a sudden jerk, the Wulfen opened the claws wide. Harald fell to the ground. On his knees, his vision streaking with red and grey, his breath whistling as he dragged oxygen in over floating ribs, he saw the Wulfen twist the claw clockwise. Metal groaned, then screamed, and so did the possessed walker. The Wulfen kept turning the claw. The daemon tried to pull away but sparks and ichor cascaded over the Wulfen and, with the grating of flesh and the ripping of metal, the entire forearm came away. The daemon stalker howled, its black essence jetting out of its stump. The Wulfen turned, spinning, gathered huge momentum, and flung the claw with the force of a meteor into the daemon’s head. The edge of the claws smashed the skull between the eyes. A mindless cry rose from the colossus. A sulphurous stench, the death rattle of a volcano, wafted across the battlefield. The daemon smashed the stones beneath it with the force of its fall.

  Harald struggled to his feet. He spat blood. His arms were numb, but he had not lost his grip on his bolt pistol and Glacius. He straightened, ignoring the flashing agony throughout his body. The Wulfen warrior howled over the body of his titanic foe. He turned to face Harald. He nodded, acknowledging his debt and his gratitude, and the Wulfen loped away in search of more prey.

  Harald followed. He could still raise his frost axe, and as Icetooth came to his side, he waded into the last of the battle. There was little prey now to find. With the great daemons destroyed, the remaining daemons were badly outnumbered, their struggle hopeless. They fought on, as if their purpose had been to die at the hands of the Space Wolves all along.

  Harald looked up. The air battle had ended. There were no more flying daemons and no sign of the herald. Harald listened intently, trying to hear past the clamour of final slaughter for the echo of dark laughter. He could not find it. Perhaps there was none to hear.

  He was not convinced.

  The silence of bloody peace at last came to the Shatterfields. Harald watched the Wulfen of Whitestalker reunited with their brothers. Twice now, he thought, the Wulfen have saved your life twice. The debt is a heavy one, and you thought about leaving them to the daemons.

  Yet he felt no shame. He mistrusted the impulse to gratitude.

  Twice. Such a great debt. Can this be fate? Coincidence?

  More and more traces of a pattern. He could see fragments, but he could not link them. The pattern refused to shape itself into meaning.

  Harald looked upon the scene of victory, feeling the cancer of unease gnaw at his soul.

  At war, beneath sleep, above death.

  I must wake.

  But no. The daemons climbing the wall. Leading them, a giant, a vastness of rage and wings. Landing blows in the psychic wall of the Fang.

  I must wake.

  But not now. Turn the fury against the daemons. The shadow of an assault cannon firing, firing, firing.

  The dream-echoes of daemons exploding to nothing under its power.

  The giant climbing against the hexagrammic shells.

  There is no waking yet.

  Only the battle beneath sleep, above death.

  The pict screen was black. Vox traffic had fallen into a silence deep as the void. It was as if Krom was trying to communicate with a tomb. He put the earpiece down and looked down at the huscarl.

  ‘How long?’ he asked. Around him, the activity of the Fang’s augur and vox complex had acquired a troubled intensity. Kaerls struggled in groups at their stations. While one fought with controls, others waved totems and made signs of warding, seeking to banish the disruptive spirits.

  ‘We lost contact with Frostheim ten minutes ago,’ said Albjorn Fogel. The overall supervision of the facility was his responsibility. He was an old man, and the skin of his face was like thick leather. It barely moved. But his forehead was creased now with concern. ‘Before that, it was Svellgard. It fluctuated in and out of contact for an hour.’

  ‘The problems have been system-wide?’

  ‘Yes, lord. They were so momentary and scattered at first we did not think this was anything more than aetheric flaws in the vox.’

  Krom pointed to the pict screen. ‘Not just the vox now,’ he said.

  ‘That is so. In the last hour, we have begun to experience outages of all auspex readings as well.’

  ‘Is there a pattern?’

  ‘None beyond increasing frequency and duration. When the blackouts end, the vox operators at the other end report no
malfunctions with their equipment. They believe we are the ones shut down.’

  ‘No reports of possible enemy activity?’

  ‘None at all, lord.’

  Krom worked to keep the frustration from his voice. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘You will update me every hour of the situation.’ He thought for a moment. ‘You say Frostheim’s silence has been the longest yet?’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘I wish to be informed the instant vox is restored.’

  ‘Yes, lord.’

  Krom left the chamber. He was near the peak of the Fang, and he followed a gallery that led to a turret platform. He pulled back the iron door, then stepped into the howling wind. He looked up through rarefied air into the night sky. The stars were dagger points of cold light.

  The cold numbed his exposed skin but could not numb his frustration. Duty held him on Fenris, and the links to the other worlds of the system were fraying. The rise in the incidents had the earmarks of an attack, but it was one he could not counter. There was no provenance and no enemy. As long as the worlds and moons of the Fenris system came back into contact, signalling nothing amiss, his hands were tied.

  Even if the news from the system was bad, his oath held him to the Fang. Should Frostheim or Midgardia or any other Fenrisian world go dark, should they fall to enemy hands, the attack would almost certainly be a diversion. Fenris would always be the real target. To break his oath and take the bait, leaving the Space Wolf home world defenceless, was a crime too monstrous to contemplate.

  And yet. He stared into the unforgiving black of the void above, and knew that something worse than his most dire speculations was approaching. His fists tightened in frustration. A low growl rumbled in his chest.

  He stood on the turret platform for a full hour. Then two.

  Frostheim remained silent.