Then Magnus turned to take on the rest.
Still Wyrmblade couldn’t move. Some power compelled him to stay immobile.
‘Lord.’
His limbs were frozen, heavy and sluggish. His sword was rooted to the ground, a dead weight.
‘Lord.’
A black curtain of despair sunk behind his eyes.
Nothing can stop this. Even Bjorn could do nothing against this.
‘Lord!’
He snapped out of his visions, shaken free by the presence at his elbow. The few surviving Wolves clustered around him at the summit of the stairway. No more than a dozen had escaped the onslaught of the primarch. There were kaerls streaming to join them from the stairway, a couple of hundred perhaps. Below them, the Dreadnoughts fought on, dying one by one under the terrible attentions of Magnus, holding the line for just a few more moments before his relentless march resumed.
The one who spoke was a Blood Claw with blood-drenched armour and teeth studded under the jawline of his helm. Like all the Wolves, he’d seen heavy combat and his plate was dented, burned and blade-scored.
Wyrmblade should have sensed it sooner.
Maleficarum. He is contesting for my mind.
With a huge effort, Wyrmblade fought off the terrible feelings of despair. His troops were looking to him for guidance. The Blood Claw grabbed his arm, yearning for leadership.
‘What are your orders?’ he asked urgently.
Wyrmblade looked across the faces of those around him. Only hours ago, they had still dared to hope. The barricades had been held for so long. Now, in the space of a few terrible minutes, everything had been destroyed.
He didn’t know what to say to them. For the first time since taking the rites of priesthood, he didn’t know what to say.
‘We will hold him here,’ came a clear voice.
All eyes turned to the speaker. It was a mortal rivenmaster with an honest face. Alone among the kaerls, his eyes were not alive with fear. There was a hollowness there, as if the thought of living longer had become somehow abhorrent to him.
‘We mortals will hold him for as long as we can,’ he went on, speaking calmly despite the roiling explosions moving up the stairway below. ‘We are expendable, but you are not. You must go. Seek some way of resisting him in the Valgard. If you hesitate, you will die.’
Wyrmblade looked at the mortal. At last, the final shreds of Magnus’s psychic paralysis left him. The rivenmaster looked back, an expression of defiant insolence on his face.
Morek Karekborn. Ah, how I underestimated you.
‘The mortal is right,’ announced Wyrmblade, recovering his poise and sweeping his blade back into position. ‘We will fall back. Our stand will be at the Annulus.’
He gestured toward Morek.
‘Take command of what heavy weapon squads we still have. Hold him as long as you can in the Fangthane. The rest of you, come with me. The abomination shall not walk into our holiest chambers unopposed.’
Then he turned, his armoured boots scraping on the stone before breaking into the run that would carry him across the Fangthane and to the transit shafts beyond. The rest of the Wolves came with him, none of them questioning the order, though Wyrmblade could detect the stubborn reluctance to depart from combat. The surviving kaerls struggled to keep up behind them, all now racing freely from the horror in the stairwell. As they went, more crashes surged up from the stairs, punctuated with isolated barks of bolter-fire.
Wyrmblade only looked back once. Morek was already busy, organising the mortals who’d been able to stand alongside him, drawing up the final gun-lines and heavy weapons squads at the summit of the stairs, under the shadow of the snarling wolf-images. Beyond them, the bronze leviathan loomed, coming closer.
Brave. Horribly brave. Once the last of the Dreadnoughts was taken down, he’d be lucky if he lasted more than a few seconds.
The Wolf Priest turned back quickly, switching his mind to the present, to survival.
I cannot feel guilt for this. There is more at stake than the lives of mortals.
But as Wyrmblade raced across the empty Fangthane, leaving the rampaging primarch behind him, accompanied by the dregs of his command, retreating ignominiously upwards in the hope, the faint hope, that things would go differently at the Annulus, a single nagging thought wouldn’t leave him alone.
I have no idea how to fight that monster. No idea at all.
The Rubric Marines were on the rampage. With the departure of Bjorn, Greyloc and the Rune Priest, their powers had been greatly enhanced. Phalanxes of sapphire-clad warriors plunged into battle, surrounded by eldritch whips of energy and spitting cold fire from their gauntlets. Even the remaining Wolves on the barricades were no match for such powers, and fell back in a fighting retreat, pulling back across the rows of trenches to the refuges beyond.
They were covered by the continual fire of the fixed guns and protected by the indomitable presence of the five remaining Dreadnoughts. Hrothgar led them, a huge war machine scarcely less imposing than Bjorn. Under his command, Aldr and others stayed firm in retreat, keeping up constant volleys of fire against the oncoming tide, slowing it down though not halting it. The beasts still fought with undented savagery, launching themselves at the throats of the silent killers, tearing at armour and steel with their strange augmented claws.
Freija could see that it wasn’t enough. The departure of the bastion’s command squad had robbed the defenders of their most potent weapons. She had watched them fight their way free with growing disbelief, gaping openly as Bjorn had carved a path through the milling hordes and into the tunnels beyond. Russ only knew whether they’d made it to the far side, nor what terrible errand had called them away from their duty on the barricades.
To make things worse, the Thousand Sons seemed to have been filled with a new zeal for combat. They charged into contact faster, their reactions were sharper and their blows landed more heavily. Something had happened to give them new momentum, and the current of the battle had decisively swung their way.
Freija fell back, as ordered, retreating through the massive portals of Borek’s Seal and into the cavernous space beyond. Her squad remained in tight formation around her, all of them facing the enemy, all of them firing non-stop. Heavy impacts crashed all around them, many of them bolter-rounds loosed from the approaching Rubric Marines. As the defenders withdrew from their long-held positions at the portals, the guns within Borek’s Seal itself opened up, throwing new crashes and explosions into an already deafening storm of sound and light.
There were trenches dug further back, and more lines of barricades. They would fall back and regroup, then fall back again. This was all part of the plan. As long as the Dreadnoughts lasted and the Wolves stood up to fight, they still had a chance. She had faith. After so many years of cynicism, it was a nice feeling to have.
Then she staggered, crying out with pain.
One of her men reached for her, trying to haul her back to her feet. Stumbling again would be fatal – none of the squad could afford to wait for her to catch up if she fell behind.
Freija’s world tilted on its axis. For a moment, she thought a las-beam had hit her, but then realised the pain was internal. Like a spike through her heart, a sharp wave of agony swept through her.
‘Rise, huskaerl!’ urged her trooper, yanking hard at her armour.
Freija barely heard him. The only thing she saw was a fleeting vision of a bronze-armoured giant striding through curtains of flame, tearing down everything in range of its terrible grasp. Then there was a man in front of him, a mortal, standing defiant as the inferno came for him. On either side of him were wolves, massive and carved from granite. Though their muzzles were locked in snarls, they were static and impotent.
The vision faded, and the rush and fury of the fighting in Borek’s Seal returned.
‘Father!’ she cried, realising what she’d seen.
Her weapon clattered to the ground, dropped from shaking fingers. The troop
er made a final attempt to haul her along with him. The rest of the squad was now many metres away, falling back to their assigned muster-point under heavy fire.
‘We have to go!’ he snapped, urgency in his voice.
‘He is gone!’ gasped Freija, feeling grief like she’d never known before rise up to choke her. Tears spiked at her eyes, hot and acrid. ‘Mercy of the Allfather, he is gone!’
The kaerl gave up then, letting her fall to the stone and racing to join his comrades. Freija sank to the ground, careless of the carnage around her. Ahead of her, the Wolves fought a final, losing battle with the remorseless enemy. The line of battle was getting closer. Soon, it would sweep over her like the tide washing away sand.
She didn’t care. She didn’t even register. Her world had been ripped from under her feet, torn away by the death of the one man who’d given her everything. Days of exhaustion suddenly took their toll, crushing what spirit remained in her.
He is gone.
So it was that, as Borek’s Seal was finally breached, and as Traitor Marines stormed the great bastion at the base of Russ’s citadel at last, Freija Morekborn, savage warrior-daughter of Fenris, fell to the stone, heedless of everything but her vision of death.
There she remained until the shadow fell across her, the shadow of one of the many warriors who’d come into the Aett with no purpose but to kill. As he lowered his weapon, she didn’t even look up.
Magnus stood in the Fangthane. His mantle ran with flames, slowly dying out as the glory of his ascent receded. The vast space still echoed from the residual firestorm, but the flashing lights of the guns were long gone. The floor was littered with bodies and broken gun-cases, part-hidden by the ragged clouds of smoke drifting across it. Freki and Geri had been shattered, their limbs left among the strewn remnants of barricades like burnt offerings.
Across the wide expanse of the stone floor, rubricae moved in tightly-ordered squads, preparing for the push upwards. Spireguard were busy removing the residual defences and repairing the worst of the damage to the stairway. Now that the choke-point had been broken, the upper levels of the Fang lay open.
Magnus knew what he would do. He would crash through the shafts and tunnels, driving his way to the very summit, ripping a trail of flame through the reeling mountain. Then he would break out on to the pinnacle, taking the aspect of a lord of ruin, and watch as his sons tore the remainder of the citadel to pieces. The destruction would be complete and irrecoverable, a fitting riposte to the devastation wreaked on Tizca. By the time he left, the Fang would be an empty, uninhabitable corpse-house.
But he would not do that just yet. There was one task in the Fangthane that remained, one he had been looking forward to for many centuries.
He walked up to the giant statue of Russ.
It was, he had to admit, a good likeness. The ruthless energy of his gene-brother had been perfectly captured. As Magnus approached it, he grew in stature. By the time he drew up to the image, his head was at the same height. They stood facing each other, just as they had done on Prospero. Magnus looked into the unseeing eyes of his old enemy, and smiled.
‘Do you remember what you said to me, brother?’
Magnus spoke aloud, his voice pure and powerful. His fingers twitched at his sides, eager for what was to come.
‘Do you remember what you said to me as we fought before the pyramid of Photep? Do you remember the words you used? I do. As I recall, your face was tortured. Imagine that – the Master of Wolves, his ferocity twisted into grief. And yet you still carried out your duty. You always did what was asked of you. So loyal. So tenacious. Truly, you were the attack dog of the Emperor.’
Magnus lost his smile.
‘You took no pleasure in what you did. I knew that then, and I know it now. But all things change, my brother. I’m not the same as I was, and you’re... well, let us not mention where you are now.’
Magnus put his arms out, grasping the stone shoulders of the statue, pressing bronze fingers into the granite.
‘So do not imagine there is a symmetry to my emotions as I do this. I will take pleasure in it. And I will take pleasure in seeing your hearth destroyed and your sons scattered. In the centuries to come, this small act will make me smile, a minor consolation for the hurt you inflicted on my innocent people in the name of ignorance.’
Magnus heaved, and the gigantic statue came free from its base, breaking off at the ankles with a crack of tortured stone. Manipulating the colossal weight easily, Magnus swung the figure into a face-up horizontal position, and brought his knee up under the curved backbone.
‘I have waited long for this, Wolf King. And I find that, now the moment is here, it is as quite as precious as I hoped it would be.’
With a single, savage downward thrust, Magnus broke the back of Russ across his knee. The two halves of the statue thundered to the stone below, sending up a slow tidal wave of dust and rubble. The booming sound of the fall resounded from the high vaults of the Fangthane, ebbing like sobs. The head rolled free, still fixed in a grimace of static rage, rocking as it gently settled in the debris.
Magnus paused then, looking down at the ruin of his enemy’s image. For a long time, he didn’t move. There was a defiant pleasure on his face, the expression of a man who wishes to fully enjoy an experience long anticipated.
But behind it, as Ahriman would no doubt have recognised, was a deeper pain, the pain of remembrance. There would always be pain. That was the tragedy of the past, of the things done that could never be undone.
The introspection could not last. As the last of the dust settled in the cracks of the Fangthane walls, Magnus stirred himself once more. He knew his sons would be impatient for more conquest, and he had a duty to them still.
‘The final push,’ he murmured, speaking to himself. ‘The most grievous blow of all.’
He departed then, shrinking in stature back to his old size as he walked, though still towering over the tallest of his servants. Behind him came his rubricae and their surviving sorcerer-guides. Many had died, but several hundred warriors still remained, all as implacable and dedicated as ever. They marched with their usual eerie, diffident confidence, tramping up the slopes towards the transit shafts. They all followed their father, leaving none behind.
After they were gone, mortal Spireguard picked their way through the wreckage of the hall. They were strung-out after weeks of solid campaigning, but they carried themselves with heads held high. They were no longer scared. They had seen the majesty of the Wolves laid low, and it did wonders for their confidence. Many of them believed all of the defending Space Marines had been killed. It was a reasonable belief, given the recent evidence of their senses.
So it was that, a few hours later, none of the sentries noticed the pairs of glowing red eyes at the base of the stairway, moving fast and in pursuit formation. Only when the wolfclaws broke out from the darkness and the booming war-cry of the hulking war-engine triggered terror among them once again, did it become apparent they had relaxed too soon.
There were Wolves left alive, and they were hunting.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Redpelt didn’t have time to marvel at the ancient wonders of the Annulus Chamber. In another situation, he’d have lingered over the great stone circle, lost in contemplation of the devices inscribed there. In the current circumstances, that would have been an indulgence too far. He knew the enemy was hard on their heels, sweeping up the transit shafts and tunnels like a rising tide. They would be here soon, ready to finish what they’d started.
So he worked hard, digging in with the few remaining Wolves and the demoralised kaerls. They dragged what protection they could across the doorway to the chamber, piling heavy iron sheeting across the metres-wide portal. All of them knew such flimsy barriers wouldn’t last long, but at least it would give the kaerls some cover to fire from.
The mortals looked ready to collapse. They’d been fighting for days already, with only short sleep breaks to keep them from going m
ad or dying from fatigue. Even their Fenrisian constitutions, about as tough as any in the Imperium, were on the brink of implosion. It was a miracle any of them could still hold their rifles, let alone use them.
Helfist wouldn’t have appreciated such things. He’d always been impatient with mortal frailties.
‘Why do we still need them?’ he’d complained. ‘Just breed more Space Marines. Thousands of us. Don’t stop until we’re all that’s left, and forget about the weaklings.’
He’d been joking, but there’d always been an underlying seriousness there. He really didn’t see the point of unaugmented humans. Now he was gone, consumed by the very power that had elevated him into superhumanity.
That is the point, brother. We pay a price for our potency.
‘Blood Claw,’ came Wyrmblade’s dry old voice.
Helfist snapped round. The Wolf Priest stood there in his half-ruined armour, dark against the angry light of the hearth-fires.
‘You will have to hold the Annulus for a little while without me.’
For a moment, Redpelt couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
‘Forgive me, lord. I don’t under–’
‘There is something of the utmost importance I must attend to. Russ willing, I shall be back before the enemy reaches you. But if I am not, then hold the line until I return.’
Redpelt felt a roar of anger building up within him. He knew he was on the edge of his strength, and knew the penalty for defying a Wolf Priest, but what Wyrmblade intended was madness. There was nothing, nothing, more important than defending the last and holiest chamber of the Aett against assault.
‘You cannot,’ he said, keeping a lid on his temper with difficulty. ‘We need you here, lord.’
Wyrmblade shook his head.
‘Do not attempt to argue with me, Blood Claw,’ he said. ‘I know how you feel, and I will go as swiftly as I may.’
For a moment longer, Redpelt considered protesting. Hel, he even considered hammering the Wolf Priest to the floor and forcing him to stay.
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