by Gav Thorpe
+He freely boasts of wiping out my company! It was not I that trapped them, but their rock-brained Old Wolf.+
‘I have the means to get us all out of here, but we must be swift. Ten thousand years has not brought the defeat of Magnus, and he plots a new diabolic plan using the Portal Maze. We must warn the Imperium.’
‘Aye, Bjorn said as much. To think a whelp of the Blood Claws is now your most ancient and revered warrior. What will you make of the Old Wolf, eh?’
+Yes, what indeed will you make of the barbarous murderer that chose to doom his men to this rather than strike a bargain with me?+
They reached the gatehouse, picking their way through the rubble that was strewn across the entrance, droplets of metal from the destroyed gate spattered over the mounds of rockrete.
The bark of the Space Wolves’ weapons and hiss of sorcerous inferno bolts were closer. Turbojets thrummed overhead as gunships swept through the clouds. The screeching cries of daemon drakes answered the challenge. The mountain wind carried the scent of spilled blood and the tainted odour of sorcery.
‘You ride with me, wyrdskaldr.’ Halvar gestured to Rockfist’s Terminators and then to the Spartan. ‘You too. We have plenty of space inside.’
‘Stormcaller?’ Just the single word from Valgarthr conveyed his disappointment, a protest that he would be left behind.
‘I cannot divide my command, husjarl,’ Njal said.
‘Then I hope you don’t mind riding on top,’ the Old Guard leader said to Valgarthr, slapping his gauntlet against the armoured carrier. ‘I can’t spare you a Rhino.’
Valgarthr waved forward the surviving Stormriders of his pack and they clambered up the sides of the mechanical monster, seating themselves around the command cupola and clear of the exposed tracks. Halvar led the rest of them up the ramp and then turned and shouted something in Old Fenrisian to Bjorn, who acknowledged with a raised claw. The Dreadnoughts, taking Bjorn’s lead, lumbered away to the right, heading down the ramp of the causeway to the mountainside.
‘I told your aett-vater to meet us by that gully.’ The Terminator pointed to a welt in the side of the mountain about a kilometre away. ‘I’ll signal Bulveye when we are moving.’
They settled into their positions inside the compartment, about twice the size of a standard Land Raider. Njal ushered Majula aboard, guiding her to one of the seats close to the front. The battle harness was too big so he sat beside her, one hand held against her chest, the joints of his armour locking as surely as any restraint. Dorria and the handful of Navis guards hunkered down just inside the boarding ramp.
‘Shame none of these survived, they would be a big help,’ said Arjac appreciatively, stepping into one of the restraining alcoves. He laughed at the thought. ‘Fifteen Wolf Guard all deployed together! A fist the equal of the Wolf King’s!’
‘You are easily impressed,’ said Halvar, striding towards the command console behind the driving position. ‘We’d better not show you the Mastodon…’
The Spartan and its escorts powered up the slope, slewing around boulders and drifts of shale. The growl of the engines was a comfort to Njal, the steady throb of the power conduits like a heartbeat. The thrum of the lascannon discharge, the rustle of the ammunition feed belts as the combi-bolter on the roof chewed along its length, the creak and purr of battleplate were like a soothing verse.
It occurred to him that he had no idea how long it had been since they had passed through the portal in the Pyramid of Photep. His armour’s chronometer had clocked a little over seventeen hours, but due to the warp effect of the maze ten times as long might have passed in Tizca.
Thinking about the old capital, his sense of security evaporated as swiftly as it arrived. Nightwing hopped in agitation from his shoulder to his forearm, pecking at the armour. The forces left defending the pyramid might have been overrun. The Crimson King himself could have ascended through the Portal Maze and even now led a new invasion of the Imperium.
This last he dismissed. He was within the Portal Maze; he was sure he would feel anything so significant. And if not, then Izzakar would certainly remark on such an event. The former, however, was a much more likely threat. Thralls and veterans might become legends, but they could equally become unremembered sacrifices to vanity. The longer his force stayed inside the maze, the greater the chance that none of them would make it back to Fenris.
‘We will be at the gorge in a minute,’ Halvar called out, turning away from the command panel. He uncoupled his combi-bolter from where it had been mag-locked to his thigh. ‘This deployment zone is filthier than the Cyclops’ vapours. I hope the Sons of Russ have not forgotten how to fight.’
‘We will not be shamed, trust me,’ Arjac replied.
Shrapnel clanged off the armour of the Spartan and Njal remembered the Stormriders atop the mechanical beast.
‘Valgarthr, how do you fare?’
‘I’ve been better, Stormcaller.’ A terse reply that was more worrying for the fact that the pack leader had the experience of losing half his skull in battle. ‘It’s madness out here.’
‘Keep your heads down, we’ll be at the objective in thirty seconds,’ he told his pack leader. ‘Ready your squad for combat deployment.’
A harsh laugh rang back across the vox.
‘It must be nice to ride inside one of these things, Stormcaller. We’ve been firing at the enemy for several minutes!’
Njal felt a flush of shame and a suitable reply eluded him.
‘Old Guard first,’ said Halvar. The Terminators stepped out of their niches, forming a wedge of warriors at the assault ramp to the front. Arjac darted a look at Njal and the vox buzzed on a secure channel.
‘Are we to take orders from this lieutenant, Stormcaller?’
‘He knows more about what’s happening than either of us,’ replied Njal. ‘So, yes, we’ll follow the husjarl for now.’
‘Understood.’
‘Wait here,’ Njal said out loud, turning his head to Majula as he stood up. She pulled her knees up where his hand had been, looking like a child in the seat of an adult, arms wrapped around her robed legs, eyes stark against her dark flesh, tinted by the ruddy lighting of the combat compartment. She nodded meekly, her reserves of courage sapped by all that had happened since her bravado in entering the maze. ‘You are doing fine, Navigator. House Belisarius will laud your name on our return.’
She forced a grim smile, fooling neither of them.
‘Ramp open in five… four…’ declared Halvar. ‘Three…’
The words droned as Njal’s body and armour stepped up his stimulation levels in preparation. Boots clattered above as Valgarthr’s warriors readied to deploy from the slowing transport. The armour of the Wolf Guard pressed in tight behind him, closing about him like another layer of war-plate, sandwiching him against the Old Guard in front. Far from claustrophobic, the sensation was of togetherness. Brothers in front and behind. An inseparable bond of brotherhood across generations.
With a screech the assault ramps slammed open and light flooded the compartment.
Halvar stepped onto the metal slope, combi-bolter raised.
‘For the All-’
A blast of white-and-azure fire ripped into the interior through the open ramp. Halvar’s head exploded into ruddy mist and the Terminator behind him fell backwards, chest torn open by the blast.
Anarchy reigned.
Instinct threw Arjac aside as another scintillating blast burned into the open rampway. Behind him, amid much swearing, Old Guard and Wolf Guard alike activated the flank hatches, explosive bolts hurling out the plates onto a field of withered grass. From above, Valgarthr’s warriors spilled down, scattering from the enemy fire, thudding onto the hard dirt.
‘Turning!’ warned the Spartan’s driver. Tracks churned and the large transport wheeled on the spot, taking the next sorcerous burst on its upper armour. More power-armoured Space Wolves leapt over the whirring tracks, clattering onto their Terminator brethren emerging fr
om within. Arjac was caught between turning for the flank hatch and heading directly out of the ramp – the front was closer, but into the teeth of the enemy fire.
His decision was made an instant later as Njal pushed onto the assault ramp, a nimbus of psychic energy flowing through the gap like fog. Advancing, the Stormcaller thrust the shield outwards, covering the Spartan and its disordered cargo, leaving room for Arjac and Ingvarr, and a couple of Old Guard, to pound down the ramp.
The gunners had located the source of the ambush, a wealth of stunted trees two hundred metres further up the slope. Robed cultists manned a contraption of crystal and steel mounted upon four articulated legs. The bizarre cannon had a muzzle shaped like a flared crow’s mouth, a tongue of crystal glinting with warp energy. Coils of glassy tubing bathed the gunners’ masks as they sheltered behind a guard plate sculpted in the shape of outspread wings. Around them dozens more cultists raised lasguns and automatic weapons, targeting the Space Marines forced from their armoured vehicle. The crack of breaking bullets on ceramite rattled in Arjac’s ear while flecks of paint kicked from the Spartan’s thick hull drifted across his field of vision.
Arjac’s autosenses dimmed as triple-linked lascannons spat vengeance past him, slicing the arcane cannon and its crew with ruby beams. The Space Wolves took only seconds to organise themselves, splitting into fire teams to lay down suppressing bursts against the trees while the Old Guard lumbered forward, their combi-bolters raking death beneath the straggly grey leaves. The sensorium whirled for a moment, struggling to meld with the archaic augur units of the other Terminators, forcing Arjac and his pack to disable their links. Regular autosenses restored, his magnified view took in the battle across the slope.
Experience told him in a glance what had happened. The Old Guard had secured one end of the causeway in force, before sending Halvar’s packs through the gate. At some point the Thousand Sons and their allies had attacked between the two forces. Some form of wyrd power had perhaps allowed them to attack in strength at a single part of the line, possibly directly teleporting into the assault.
Arjac watched the gunships rove at will, their weapons scattering the cultists where they massed for attack, sending them scurrying into the shadows like vermin scattering in a stores hall. Half-machine drakes swept down from dark clouds to fall upon the gunships, chasing them back into the skies with belched blasts of lightning and bursts from rotary cannons in their maws.
Pockets of Space Wolves and Thousand Sons continued to skirmish around defensive features, caught in firefights along the folds of the ridges and around boulders where the terrain formed natural flanking channels or defilades. These skirmishes painted another picture, of an indistinct line stretching across and around the mountain, to where the slope met the shoulder of its neighbour.
A short distance further up the slope, Arjac noted the broken ground that formed the entrance to a steep-sided gorge. Magnifying his view, the hearthegn spied a sizable contingent of ancient-armoured Space Wolves guarding the approach, flanked by several tanks of both known and unknown pattern.
The only explanation for this disposition of forces was to protect the route from the causeway to the canyon. He assumed that the Space Wolves had launched their attack from out of the ravine.
Further thoughts were curtailed by the need for action. The Spartan had led the charge from the causeway but other Old Guard packs and war engines were following in its wake, gathering together into a coherent force as they withdrew up the mountain. Arjac could have been looking at his own battle-brothers, so familiar were the drills and formations of the Old Guard. Overlapping fire spread and covering support allowed each pack to join with its neighbour and then, in turn, they moved to their transports or mustered with another squad. All of this was done while targeted by a storm of inferno bolts and wyrd blasts, as well as heavy weapons and lighter fire from the cultists.
‘Quit being skald-wisht, lad,’ one of the Old Guard snapped at him. He jabbed a claw-tipped power glove up the mountain where others of his pack had set up two converging streams of combi-bolter fire on the enemies hiding in the trees. ‘Break a sweat, eh?’
Arjac knew the words were not meant harshly but his honour was pricked by them.
‘Skald-wisht is it, greyhair?’ Arjac turned and waved with his hammer, signalling his warriors to join him. He noted with a pang of loss that Ulfar had not emerged from the Spartan. ‘I am Arjac Rockfist, hammer of the wolf, hearthegn to Logan Grimnar. Some call me the Man-Mountain. Others know me as the Anvil of Fenris. In the aett I am Grimnar’s Champion. Wolf Guard of the Nightwolves, earn your honour marks this day!’
With the pack leader at their head, the Terminators forged up the hill, passing between the two Old Guard packs pinning down the cultists. The ancient Space Wolves pushed out from their positions alongside the Wolf Guard, their weapons joining the fusillade that hammered at the foes sheltering in the shadows of the trees. Inferno bolts screeched across Arjac’s armour, red warning icons flashing across the display of his helm. He felt blood trickling from a graze across his shoulder and something had punched into his right thigh. Plasma blasts flared down into the charging Terminators, hammering against the raised storm shield of Sven.
Arjac tossed Foehammer. Its blazing head crushed the chest of a cultist, sending the pulped corpse slamming into a tree. The hammer reappeared in his grasp and he threw it again as he ran, four more Tzeentchian devotees succumbing to its indelicate touch before he reached the treeline.
The Wolf Guard bellowed war cries of the Fenrisian tribes as they plunged into the woods. Arjac laid into the automaton-like legionaries of the Thousand Sons, cracking open helms and chest-plates, fracturing limbs with controlled, purposeful strikes. Bolts flared from the anvil shield and las-blasts scorched black across the grey of his war-plate, cutting scars across the crux Terminatus on his pauldron, scorching the pelts of his many wolf totems.
Beside him the others of his pack were no less relentless. With power fist and hammer they battered and crushed, the speartip of an attack that dragged the Old Guard into the melee with their rapid advance.
From the gloom beneath the trees loomed a shadow twice the height of the hearthegn. Arjac thought it a Dreadnought at first, but emerging into the sunlight it resolved into a creature, not a machine. The mutant ogryn was as broad as it was tall, two elaborately curling black horns swept from its head, its naked skin pitted with bony plates. Curls of fire licked from the clawed hands. It bared teeth fashioned from sharpened crystal, reflecting the flares of combi-bolter fire and the warpflame that burned in its veins.
‘This one’s mine,’ grunted a warrior behind Arjac.
Three bright flares of missile tails flashed past, detonating across the face and chest of the ogryn. Shrapnel tore open its ribs, razor-edged shards intended to pierce tank armour lacerated flesh and skull, ripping open its upper half. Spurts of actinic energy spewed from the wound as the headless beast reeled back, gouts of fire spewing randomly from outstretched hands. It crashed into a tree, immolated slowly by its own wyrdfyr, the flames catching on the dark brown bark.
Arjac turned in surprise, coming face to face with Ulfar, helm discarded. His armour was heavily cracked, the reinforced armature beneath buckled in several places. The Wolf Guard slapped a hand against the breastplate.
‘Best armour the forges can make!’ he declared with a grin.
‘I thought you were dead…’ exclaimed the hearthegn.
‘For once, I am happy to disappoint you, Man-Mountain,’ the other Wolf Guard said. He held up a fist, Arjac banging the haft of Foehammer against it in salute.
‘Sweating yet, hammer of the wolves?’ The warrior that had chastened Arjac earlier stomped through the trees, combi-bolter snarling rounds at foes fleeing into the deeper woods. ‘It’s a good name, well-earned.’
‘And your name, greyhair?’
‘Vigga Deathblow. And we are the Greybeards, not greyhairs.’
‘Vigga Deathblow…’ Arja
c barely breathed the name. ‘The first hearthegn? The warrior that stood at the Wolf King’s side on Marthrax, killing a hundred orks in a single night?’
‘Aye. One hundred-and-four, to be precise. It would have been more if Russ hadn’t kept finishing off the ones I wounded. Ask any of the other Brothers. Russ is a notorious kill-thief.’
Vigga managed to hold his laughter for about five seconds before he let loose with a mighty guffaw. Arjac had witnessed sights both horrific and awe-inspiring across his long life, but nothing left him as speechless as standing before the first warrior to have borne the title of champion. He flinched as Deathblow banged a fist against Arjac’s pauldron.
‘Stick with me, hammer of the wolves. Let’s kill more faithless dog-sons of Prospero.’
Battle-cries fading from their lips, Lukas and the Blood Claws stumbled to a halt, which was just as well because the outcrop on which they found themselves came to a precipitous end just in front of them, dropping down into… somewhere.
The scene beyond the portal put Lukas in mind of his worst moments experimenting with a cocktail of skaldroot and wyrshrum to overload his Space Marine physiology in an attempt to recreate the occasional psychotropic journeys of his youth. At first, it was impossible to process what his senses were trying to tell him and, judging by their gasps and expletives, the other Blood Claws experienced the same.
What he had taken to be an outcrop was in fact a landing made of pale stone, with a set of steps leading down steeply to the right. And another up to the left. Except that up and down didn’t quite work as directions. The chamber was immense – infinite, perhaps – suffused with a pale green and yellow glimmer. Everything was of the same stone that was underfoot. He could see countless other stairways, ramps, galleries and walkways at angles that would have been, in any sane place, on the walls and ceiling, and through the spaces between.