Curse of the Wulfen

by David Annandale

  Mordokh.

  Arkh’gar.

  Tzen’char.

  Malyg’nyl.

  The names were attacks. Each syllable stabbed behind Ulrik’s eyes. And though he had escaped the meaning of the runes, their constant repetition had left its residue on him. When the names sounded like the tolling of granite bells, he knew what they were. He knew the daemons. They insisted upon it. They marched to collect their choice prey, and they would have their victims die in the knowledge of what great being had brought them low.

  Grimnar laughed. He raised the Axe Morkai with both hands. It flashed with its own wyrd energy, hungry to punish the daemons with the same force that embodied them.

  ‘Good sport at last, brothers!’ he roared. ‘For Russ! For Fenris!’

  ‘For the wolftime!’ came the answer. It turned into a howl that shook the cavern to its roots. From vox speaker and bestial throat, the howl went on and on.

  Rage and animal hunger were one.

  Ulrik rode the fury of the gift. Its fire consumed his thoughts. At the Great Wolf’s side, amidst brothers who had fought for ten thousand years, he charged towards the princes of damnation.

  Anger. Instinct. Reason.

  Harald acted on all three in the moments after Runeclaw’s crash. The gunship hit with brutal impact, but there was no time to recover. Anger gave him the impetus to leap to war. Most of his Wolf Guard had survived. So had their mounts. They battered their way out of the ruin.

  Instinct had him lead his brothers to the side of the gunship facing away from the fortress walls and gun emplacements.

  Runeclaw had landed on a ridge a short elevation above the battlefield. Harald followed reason and climbed onto the roof to see the extent of the disaster. Instinct again granted him speed. He was exposed for a few seconds only, and they were enough. What he saw made the anger burn ever higher.

  Reason held him back from pointless recklessness.

  Instead, he saw the need for the meaningful kind.

  The Deathwolves had lost the coherence of any formation. They were in scattered squads at best. Some fought on their own, the only survivors of the drop pods destroyed in mid-flight. He saw two other things, which his reason seized upon.

  He saw the enemy. There were Khornate daemons, but it was not those fiends who held the redoubts and turned their huge batteries on the Deathwolves. It was not daemons who had concealed the energy signatures of the defences. The enemy who used human weapons was on the field now, picking off the individual Space Wolves, eroding the strength of Whitestalker. Mobs of mortal cultists were loose upon the glacier, harassing Wulfen and Deathwolves. They were the thralls of vicious masters in horned, distorted power armour. The Traitors were clad in blue and green.

  Alpha Legion.

  Traitors and worse than traitors. Beings so consumed by deception there was nothing left. They defiled the honesty of war.

  He felt the revulsion, the hatred. Instinct and anger sought to hurl him roaring from the roof. Reason prevailed. And it was thanks to reason he understood the other crucial sight: another stricken Stormwolf streaking overhead, its engines burning. It left a contrail of black smoke as it came in at an angle over the battlefield, overshooting Morkai’s Keep. Harald made out its markings. It was Sigurd’s Might, carrying Feingar’s Coldeyes, one of the packs of Wolf Scouts.

  The gunship disappeared beyond the fortress. Harald dropped down from Runeclaw’s roof. As he leapt onto Icetooth’s back, he pictured the geography of the glacial mesa. The fortress did not rise from the centre of the plateau. It was built at the edge of the glacier’s flank. Where Sigurd’s Might had gone down, there was only the greater drop to the wastes below.

  Unless…

  There was an ice ledge that jutted out partway down the ice cliff. If fate had smiled and the gunship had come to rest there…

  Harald switched the vox to a private channel. ‘Feingar,’ he said.

  In the background, he heard groaning metal. Then Feingar said, ‘Yes, Lord Deathwolf.’ His voice was calm, assured. The voice of a warrior who knew exactly what his task was. ‘We have already begun.’

  ‘Good,’ Harald said and ended the communication.

  The Thunderwolves awaited his orders. He said nothing about Feingar. The Alpha Legion were masters of misdirection and deception. To deceive them, there could be no communication with the Coldeyes. He had to keep the knowledge of what might happen from all. Even from himself, if he could.

  Meaningful recklessness.

  ‘We storm the gates,’ he told the Thunderwolves. ‘Take the field, and call our brothers to us. We will gather our strength once more, and our hammer will batter the foe to extinction.’

  Do not think about Feingar, he told himself. Do not speculate. Ride to destroy the Traitors. Let it suffice, and it will do more than that.

  He turned Icetooth and charged down the slope from Runeclaw. Canis and the others followed. They joined in his war cry. The wolves bayed, as enraged as their riders.

  Harald rode hard for the centre of the plain. Turrets turned his way. Shells chewed up the glacier, stitching a line of craters as they sought the Thunderwolves. Ice exploded in dagger shards. But Harald’s pack was fast. It defied the gunners and barrelled towards the Traitors. The shelling veered away towards other targets, avoiding the new masters of Frostheim.

  The Thunderwolves fell upon a squad of Alpha Legion warriors who had surrounded a wrecked drop pod. They were pouring bolter fire into three Grey Hunters struggling from the ruin. The Space Wolves still fought, but their wounds were crippling. Two more of their brothers lay motionless beside them, their blood staining the ice crimson. The clamour of the shells covered the approach of the Thunderwolves. One of the Traitors turned at the last moment and received Glacius full in his helm’s grille. Harald’s strength and Icetooth’s speed drove the blade through the armour and out the back of the Traitor’s skull.

  The Thunderwolves cut through the squad’s line, killing three upon the instant. They turned and circled the others, strafing them with bolt pistols. The Alpha Legionnaires were caught between the fire of the riders and their former victims. They fought back with bolters millennia old. At the sight of the archaic models, Harald thought again of the Wulfen’s ancient weaponry. His mind saw dark connections to be made, but he rejected them for now. All that mattered was to kill and to fight on.

  As the Thunderwolves cut down the squad, the battlefield responded. Using his peripheral vision, Harald saw many brothers struggling to converge on his position. The Wulfen fought with blind rage. There was no order there.

  Not all Deathwolves were making for him. Lone figures loped across the ice, howling and changing, consumed by the curse.

  So many dead. So many transformed.

  He rounded on the Alpha Legion with renewed fury. He let his anger strike for him. He did not let it become him. His anger was human, and so it must remain.

  As the last of the Traitors went down, Harald turned to find the next kill. It found him instead. With autocannons blasting, a daemon engine emerged from behind the ruins of the drop pod. The round-bodied monster walked on two legs, had arms and a thing that might have been a head – Harald could not imagine what machine it might once have been before corruption and possession had transformed it. Now it was walking destruction, a thing with the drake’s maw and autocannon limbs. The head dug its teeth into the buckled hatch of the pod and tore off a chunk of metal as if it were flesh, before devouring it. At the same time, its arms opened fire. Shells of phosphor blazed across the ice and into the Thunderwolves. Brother Onarr and his wolf blew apart. The flaming remains pattered down to the glacier. Harald and Icetooth tore through the falling flames, heading down and left, towards the other side of the drop pod.

  The dire engine devoured more wreckage, then took a heavy step forward. Its feet punched deep holes into the ice and the surface mel
ted from the monster’s infernal heat. It did not let up in its fire, turning the area around the drop pod into a storm of phosphor and exploding ice. The Grey Hunters saw their rescue turn to their destruction. They turned their guns on the monster. It turned its attention to them. They disappeared in the hail of autocannon shells, their armour vaporised.

  Harald rounded the drop pod and came up behind the beast, leaping from Icetooth and landing on the engine’s back. The monster’s carapace was a heavily shielded sphere. The beast responded to his presence by turning sharply to the left and the right, trying to shake him off. Harald hung on, grasping the grille of one of the vents. A searing wind blew from the internal furnace, scorching his face. The monster’s arms and neck flailed, but Harald was out of their reach. He lunged forwards and grabbed hold of the edge of the carapace from where the plated, articulated neck emerged.

  The other Thunderwolves circled the engine. Two more packs had joined the fight and their bolt pistol fire hammered against the carapace. The explosive shells did no more than crack the surface. The fiend stamped and roared, firing in a circle. Incandescent death pursued the Thunderwolves. It found two more.

  Cursing, Harald held on to the carapace with his left hand and, with his right, he pulled krak grenades from his belt. He thrust them into the join between the neck and body, fixing four grenades to the beast, clustering them on the same point. Then he jumped away from it.

  He landed on his feet. He was inside the circle of the monster’s fire. Its blind maw craned down at him, inorganic teeth snapping.

  The grenades went off, one after the other, melting through the plates of the neck, tearing open the beast, reaching its burning core. A geyser of flames shot out from the base of the neck. The daemonic engine staggered. A machinic scream of pain tore itself from its throat. Its autocannons fell silent. Then it fired again, without a target now, blasting at the entire world in its agony. The shells were of its body, and it consumed itself in its pain. The fire jetted higher, pushing the wound wider, until the monster cracked in half. Harald shielded his gaze from the searing light. The beast disappeared into its own pyre.

  Icetooth bounded over the crevasses opened by the shells. Harald climbed onto his back once more. He led the charge anew. There could not be pause, no chance for the turrets to acquire the Thunderwolves as targets.

  Harald became the gravitational pull of the battlefield. Riding down the centre of the glacier towards the gates, he was visible to all, and he pulled his scattered brothers towards him. The enemy sought to block their gathering, the keep’s batteries and daemonic cannons smashing Deathwolves to pulp and ashes. Cultists swarmed over them. Traitors picked off lone figures with cold precision, but they too were caught by the gravity. They responded to the threat of the Thunderwolves, and closed in.

  The Wulfen and the Deathwolves who had fallen to the curse were nearer too. They followed the path of frenzy. It led them to the groupings of prey.

  Batteries on the left and right converged fire, two gatling cannons and a battle cannon creating an impassable curtain of shredding, pounding shells before the gates of Morkai’s Keep. There was the line, Harald knew. If the Thunderwolves reached that point, they would go no further. Even so, he urged Icetooth to run faster. Keep up the pressure, he thought. Keep the enemy’s focus.

  He had stolen the battle’s momentum from the Alpha Legion, despite their massive advantage in armament and position. The advantage was temporary. The Alpha Legion had time. Stalemate would result in the Traitors’ victory.

  Meaningful recklessness, he thought. And so he led the charge as if the artillery barrage meant nothing.

  There were enemies still to kill before the terminal point. Ahead of him was a band of elite Traitors butchering Long Fangs. Off to the right, a lone Alpha Legion warrior moved through the struggling Deathwolves like a serpent of lightning. He was a blur. In the rush of his own speed, Harald could not catch more than a brief glimpse of the warrior. He left a wake of blood, Grey Hunters and Blood Claws falling to his assault. A handful of Wulfen and Blood Claws, enraged by this viper of war, abandoned the effort to reach their Wolf Lord and turned on the nearer foe. Turret fire dogged their movements. They were wounded and slowing as they tried to surround the Traitor. He welcomed them to their end. Harald saw the circle tighten. He looked away at the nearer band of Traitors, coming into reach within seconds. When he checked again, severed heads lay on the glacier. Only two Wulfen still fought, and one had lost an arm.

  The sight of that single killer spiked Harald’s rage. There, he was certain, was the lord of the Traitors, and the cause of Frostheim’s suffering. Harald’s rage urged him to turn Icetooth from his path and hunt the warlord down.

  Reason held him back.

  His place was before the gates. There were more of his brothers fighting their last here. And these Traitors were closer.

  ‘Fenris!’ Harald roared as the Thunderwolves raced through explosions of ice shards. He pulled Glacius back, preparing to pay the Alpha Legionnaires in kind and decapitate the first warrior in his path.

  He swung. The axe blade whistled through empty air. His target had moved with sinuous grace. The entire band shifted their focus as if the Thunderwolves had been their goal all along, and the Long Fangs merely bait. Harald’s foe was suddenly at Icetooth’s left flank. His bolt pistol cracked. Shells slammed into Harald’s shoulder plate and ceramite splintered. The impact knocked him from Icetooth and onto his back. A Traitor aimed a power sword at his neck, the weapon flashing with wyrd energy, but Harald rolled to his right, firing his bolt pistol to the left. The glacier hissed where the sword struck. There was no sound of his shots finding their mark. He leapt to his feet and the sword was in front of him, plunging towards his chest. He knocked it aside and sidestepped, and a bolt shell exploded against his left shoulder.

  A sudden fog surrounded him. It was a smear of jagged black and white. He could not be sure how many Traitors he fought. They moved like a single being, one opponent always in his weak spot. From some unknowable distance, he heard Canis call his name, then snarl. Weapons clashed on all sides, invisible beyond the wall. The sword, one or many, stabbed and slashed. He blocked most of the strikes, but the Traitor, one or many, had the advantage of speed. Blows hit home, cutting through the seams of his armour. When he struck back with Glacius and bolt pistol, he attacked nothing but air.

  One or many, they were wearing him down.

  In the distance, a bellow of pain that descended to a gurgle.

  Feingar, make your move, he willed.

  A blinding flash of energy. Silver pain sinking between his ribs.

  Feingar, we are out of time.

  Chapter 8

  Ritual’s End

  Flies.

  Flies and blood.

  Blood and change.

  Change and pain.

  The daemons’ gifts to the mortal realm filled Deepspark. Four princes of Chaos marched to war, and there was no aspect of the cavern that was not one with their corruption. The floors of the walkways squirmed and bit. The rails rotted and burst with sprays of venomous spores. The walls of hab-huts ran with smoking blood. Death sang its music of seduction, inviting the mind to the contemplation of the sensuousness of blood, the decadence of severed limbs, the headiness of butchered meat.

  And in the midst of the manifold tortures of corruption, there was the gift. The purity of the hunting animal. The total abandon of bloodletting, yet bloodletting not without purpose. Threats must be extinguished. Prey must be run to ground. There was no corrupt pleasure in the kill. There was no shrieking, mindless vengeance. There was necessity. There was instinct.

  The arm of the warrior and the fury of the beast.

  Ulrik saw and understood all this. The war in Deepspark was an avalanche of sensation and revelation. He fought through walls of daemonic flesh. His body acted on instinct so rapid and urgent that his mind barel
y registered his actions. In his left hand, his plasma pistol fired and fired and fired, the rhythm of the bursts stopping just short of the critical overheating – blast after blast of destructive light, incinerating the skulls of abominations, melting their torsos. His crozius smashed form and devastated flesh. Plague daemons, Khornate swordlings, the clawed dancers of Slaanesh and the pink nightmares of Tzeentch pressed in on him, struggling against each other to strike the killing blow. He waded deeper and deeper, cursing them in the name of Fenris and its spirits. His voice was raw with the power of his anger.

  He bellowed, though he did not hear his own words. No speech could be heard over the fire of storm bolters and white-noise roar of flamers, echoing and building against the cavern walls. Ulrik reacted to the daemonic strikes, countering them and retaliating with killing force, yet the eyes of his spirit looked past the immediate foe. His struggle was to reach the daemon prince ahead of him. It was the one embraced by the runic, soundless cry of Tzen’char. It had a form. It was winged. It had limbs. It towered over the lesser daemons of its horde. But its form seemed contingent on the whims of its will and the moment. Its movements had a swift, stuttering quality, as if fragments of time kept falling away. Its arm was raised, and then its talons were impaling one of the Wulfen without it ever bringing the arm down. As Ulrik drew nearer to its position on the platform, he saw an impossible depth to the daemon’s shape. To stare into its being was to see an existence stretching far beyond this place and time. The depths twisted and coiled and branched. Each flicker of its being brought a different version of the daemon from elsewhere. The closer Ulrik came, the more he had a sense he was approaching an incarnated labyrinth.

  He had to reach the daemon. He had to fight alongside the Wulfen, who had surrounded the abomination. This struggle was a fulfilment of destiny. This was what the Wulfen had returned to fight. The gift of their bestial fury was the answer to the curse of the daemons. They had clawed their way through and over the lesser foes, straight to the creators of the madness.