Legacy of the Wulfen - David Annandale & Robbie MacNiven

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘We don’t need leadership as long as you or I live, Long-tooth,’ Sven joked, straight-faced. The flashing of an incoming transmission rune interrupted his observations. It belonged to Yngfor Stormsson, leader of the Firemaw Long Fangs, currently overseeing the last purging of the Lair from its central control keep.

  ‘Speak,’ Sven ordered.

  ‘My jarl, the Lair is under attack,’ Yngfor said. ‘More wyrdspawn are emerging from the seas all around. As many as before.’ The thudding of heavy bolters and the whine of recharging plasma cannons was audible in the transmission’s background. Sven cursed.

  ‘Assume defensive positions,’ he said. ‘Occupy as many of the bunkers as you can. We are returning immediately.’

  ‘Yes, my jarl.’ Sven cut the link.

  ‘Trouble?’ Olaf asked.

  ‘Just say it,’ Sven replied. ‘“I told you so.”’

  ‘They’re attacking the Lair again?’

  ‘Yes, again.’ Sven brought up the Drakebanes on the vox-net.

  ‘Your fun is over, pups. We’re returning to the Lair. It would seem this wyrdling filth doesn’t know when to give up.’

  Morkai’s Keep, Frostheim

  The wyrdling that came at Canis Wolfborn took the form of a woman. The similarities were only fleeting, for its hands ended in a pair of snapping, crab-like claws, and its flesh was mottled a dark purple. Worst was its face – a fanged, shrieking visage that twisted with hate as it flung itself at the Space Wolf.

  His instincts had been correct. While the rest of Harald Deathwolf’s Great Company had been busy collecting and burning heretic dead from the battle for Morkai’s Keep, he’d tracked more wyrdspawn into the depths of the ancient fortress. The place had not been fully purged after all.

  The thing was fast, but so was Canis. In the tight space of the munitions shaft the daemonette had little chance to use its unnatural agility. The Space Wolf plunged one set of wolf claws into the creature’s slender torso, while its own talons dragged jagged scars down his battleplate. The thing’s scream turned to a shuddering gasp as it came apart in a burst of sickly sweet smoke, its physical form unmade by the killing blow.

  It was not alone.

  More daemonettes darted from the shadows of the munitions bunker, the air now thick with the cloying reek of their vile perfume. Canis could only take a couple of steps back up the shaft before they were on him. He sliced off one slender arm where smooth warp-flesh met claw-bone, filling the tight space with a spray of purple ichor.

  ‘Fangir,’ he snarled. His thunderwolf was behind him, and in the sloping corridor there was no hope it could get its bulk past Canis, but there was room enough for its snapping maw. It plunged past the Wolfborn, fangs clamping around the daemonette’s head. The kill gave him the split-second he needed. He keyed his vox.

  ‘The vaults of the Keep are overrun. All packs, lock on my position.’ Further words were lost in the screaming of another lunging daemonette.

  Inch by inch, Canis fought his way backwards. The servants of the Dark Prince threw themselves on him in ones and twos, too fast and frenzied for him to properly disengage. Nor were they just Slaanesh’s breed now. Red-scaled swordlings, rancid plaguebearers, gibbering pink and blue horrors – by the time Canis and Fangir had backed their way to the top of the shaft, he knew he had not just stumbled across an isolated nest of daemonic infestation. There was still a warp rift open, deep in the vaults of Morkai’s Keep.

  He disembowelled a swordling as it lunged at him, its wicked black blade glancing off his breastplate. The daemon burst apart in a shower of stinking offal. Beside Canis, Fangir snapped off the head of another daemonette as they started to burst out of the shaft’s confines.

  As he reached the Keep’s armoury corridor, fresh howls filled his ears. These, however, were instantly familiar to him. Chainswords roaring, the Blood Claws of the Deathhowls rushed to his side, the scent of their pack musk instinctively reassuring. At their sides came the lesser wolves – Yorri, Vela, Scarr, three of the many Fenrisian beasts Canis counted as his pack-kin.

  ‘Stem this tide of filth,’ he barked at them. Neither the Deathhowls nor the wolves needed any further encouragement. They laid in with blade and fang, the confined space resounding with the crunch of torn flesh and bone, and roars from throats both daemonic and mortal.

  ‘Canis, what’s happening?’ Harald Deathwolf’s voice snapped in his ear. The Wolf Lord was still supervising the clean-up operation out on the Keep’s upper walls and surface bastions, ordering the burning of heretic dead and the honouring of the Great Company’s fallen. Canis used the space created by the arrival of the Blood Claws to step back out of the melee and answer him.

  ‘There are still wyrdlings in the vaults. Too many. If we do not purge them now they will resurface in even greater numbers than before.’

  ‘I am on my way. Hold firm.’

  The scrape and scrabble of more claws behind him made Canis spin, fangs bared, a single savage swipe of his claws shattering the hellsword stabbing at the small of his back. The Khornate daemon hissed, resorting to its talons as it went for his exposed face. Canis leaned back with an agility that belied his armour’s bulk, servos whirring. The daemon’s lunge carried it onto one set of wolf claws, and the strike of the second bisected its horned skull. As it burst apart more of its snarling kin pressed at him, flooding upwards from another munitions shaft opposite the first.

  ‘Deathhowls, to me!’ Canis roared.

  The Blood Claws answered, and Morkai’s Keep shook with the fury of battle. The vaults were crawling with terrors, savaging one another in their desperation to shed mortal blood. Inch by hacking, growling, grunting inch the Space Wolves managed to fight their way to a level higher, into a service corridor, before the press of wyrdflesh around them became too great. That was when Harald reached them.

  The Deathwolf’s arrival was announced by Ynvir’s howl. The great Wulfen led his Murderpack into the heart of the monstrosities attempting to overwhelm Canis and the Blood Claws, bursting with frenzied strength from the confines of a grav lift at the far end of the service corridor. Frost claws glittered in the blinking illumination of the plasteel tunnel as they carved a bloody arc through the nearest spawn.

  ‘Well met, Canis,’ said Harald’s voice over the vox. A moment later the Deathwolf jarl himself emerged from the lift in the wake of his Wulfen’s assault, flanked by his dismounted thunderwolf cavalry, the Riders of Morkai.

  ‘To the Deathwolf,’ Canis shouted. With Fangir, the Fenrisian wolves and the surviving Blood Claws by his side, he cut his way towards Harald. The Wolf Lord cleaved his own path with his frost axe, Glacius, chopping down one writhing horror after another or battering them aside with his storm shield. After a few moments of brutal killing, nothing stood between the two brothers.

  ‘The lower levels are infested,’ Canis panted, grasping Harald’s forearm. ‘They are becoming more numerous and powerful with every moment. We must seal them off. Otherwise the whole Keep will fall.’

  The Wolf Lord’s reply was lost amidst the crash of falling rockcrete and the shriek of rent plasteel. A dozen yards down the corridor, a section of the wall came slamming inwards beneath the impact of a Khornate murder-engine. The machine, part hell-forged metal, part wyrd-spawned flesh, forced itself through the gap and onto the nearest pack of Wolves, its cog-jaw grinding through power armour as though it were wet vellum.

  Canis muttered an oath and spat to ward off the thing’s evil, feeling his transhuman body flush with a fresh surge of adrenaline. At last, a beast worthy enough to be hunted.

  More daemons followed in the wake of the growling engine of destruction, capering pink and blue horrors that gibbered and brayed with insane glee.

  Canis hurled himself at the juggernaut before it could rampage any further, catching it in the flank as its teeth sawed through the midriff of a screaming Deathhowl. His wolf claws jarred off the machine’s red-plated side, leaving nothing but blackened scorch-marks. Reeking
of burning blood and molten metal, the thing emitted a howl like the scraping of steel on bone. Canis struck again, with all his might. With a crack of discharging energy, the claws extending over his left fist shattered against the juggernaut’s armour, their power shorting and sparking.

  The machine had difficulty turning itself in the packed corridor, but its sheer bulk forced the Space Wolf back. A snap of its jaws passed inches from his exposed face, the heat that radiated from the thing’s infernal maw singeing the blonde hairs of his beard.

  A familiar snarl sounded beside the Wolfborn, and he felt a weight push him aside. At full stretch, Yorri the wolf lunged down the corridor, leaping on top of the juggernaut’s spiked shoulders as it ground round to face Canis. Vela and Scarr were behind it, the packmates darting through the melee to savage the monstrosity threatening their brother. The machine beast roared again, trying to buck Yorri off its back, but with scrabbling claws the wolf held on. And bit down.

  The Fenrisian wolf’s iron-hard fangs locked around the juggernaut’s neck, just above its brass collar. Scarr darted beneath the creature, snapping its own jaws up around the underside of the juggernaut’s throat. Cables and tendons snapped, spraying oily ichor and the defiled blood of the thousands sacrificed to summon the daemon engine. The construct’s roar was cut off with a gristly snap. The wolves hung on.

  Behind Canis there was a howl as Fangir powered into a brace of swordlings, red flesh disintegrating beneath the savagery of the great thunderwolf’s assault. He half turned to assist his wolf-brother, but the juggernaut before him was not yet finished. It heaved its bulk forward with a choked snarl, slamming Scarr back against the wall. The wolf yelped as it was impaled by the great blade crowning the machine’s snout, leaving both it and the daemon pinned against the wall as they died. Yorri and Vela whined with sympathy, tearing open the remains of the juggernaut’s throat.

  That was when the horrors following it through the breach leapt for the two remaining wolves, boneless arms flailing wildly as the air ignited around them. A dazzling gout of multihued wyrdflame engulfed Yorri, and it howled as its ichor-matted pelt ignited.

  ‘Yorri!’ Canis roared, and threw himself towards his packmate. Laughing manically, the horrors leapt into his path, each one shattering into a million multi-coloured shards as Canis struck at them. Their flames curled and licked around his body like living tentacles, singeing his battleplate black. Mere feet ahead, Yorri writhed in agony, rolling off the top of the defeated juggernaut. Vela added its howl to that of its kinbeast as one of the swordlings battling Fangir slammed its hellsword through its throat, butchering the snarling animal.

  The sight of his wolves dying woke something primal inside the Feral Knight. He shuddered as he struck down more of the Tzeentch daemonspawn, a keening, inhuman noise rising in his throat. Agony spiked through his body, aching in his skull, clawing behind his eyes, biting at his fingertips. There was a crunch as he felt the fangs in his jaw distend, ripping his gums and choking his throat with the taste of his own blood. Sweat broke out across his body as his secondary heart kicked in, and his pupils dilated. The sounds of fighting faded into nothingness.

  Within him the curse of the Wulfen snarled and snapped, howling to be free.

  His fist shattered the last pink horror. He stumbled to Yorri’s side, the wolf now scrabbling blindly across the corridor’s floor. It was immediately clear that the creature Canis had once counted as a packmate was no more. The wyrdling flames had not burned its fur and flesh – they had wrought something far worse. Even as Canis watched, the wolf’s body split and broke, changing and mutating beneath the kaleidoscopic flames. A new snapping maw tore itself open in the beast’s underbelly, and fresh blue eyes stared wide with agony along its flank. Spines burst free along its back and one hind leg bristled with silvery scales. The sickening stench of the warp filled Canis’ hyper-sensitive nostrils.

  He howled and brought his boot down on what had once been Yorri’s skull, even as horns split and distended it. Still the beast twisted and yelped as the power of Chaos tore through its body. No longer thinking, Canis stamped down again and again, then started to tear into his former packmate with his lightning claws, rending open rippling flesh and cutting apart burst organs. He howled again, face and beard splattered with blood and spittle, fangs bared as he ripped asunder the creature he had once called his brother.

  Finally the flames died. Finally Yorri’s flesh stopped writhing and twisting. Finally the amorphous, bloody thing that had once been the proud Fenrisian wolf lay still, joining Vela and Scarr in silence. Their hunt was at an end. Canis slumped to his knees beside the deformed carcass, and howled his loss.

  The howl was answered. In unison the wyrdlings assaulting the Space Wolves from either end of the corridor shrieked, pausing to vent their praise even as they were slaughtered with blade, bolt and fang.

  And afterwards, for a few seconds, there was silence. Canis heard the long, slow scrape of claws in the breach behind him. Shivering with bloodlust and pain, he stood.

  A swordling, larger than any he had ever seen, picked its way through the rubble of the hole smashed in the corridor wall. Its scaly, gore-red hide was armoured with plates of beaten brass and steel, while around its throat a chain thick with shattered ribs dangled. Skulls hung from more chains hooked into the flesh of the monster’s unarmoured back, clattering against one another like some parody of a cloak. In one fist it gripped a jet-black, wickedly barbed hellsword, almost as long as Canis was tall. The rune of the Blood God burned white-hot in the centre of its horned, elongated skull.

  ‘Wolfborn,’ the thing hissed, a black, forked tongue darting from between razor-sharp teeth. ‘I am Korvak Bladelord, the Red Paladin, Herald of Khorne. I have been sent to claim your skull for the throne of my master.’ As it stepped into the corridor the Tzeentchian warpfire left by the banished horrors hissed and sputtered, cringing away from the bloody aura of another god’s champion.

  Canis had no words for the creature. All was blood and pain and snarling, unkempt rage. He howled and lunged.

  Korvak moved with the speed of a creature born from a killer’s nightmare. In a flash its great hellsword was locked with Canis’ right-hand wolf claw, energy snapping and crackling up the black blade’s length. Canis punched the shattered remains of his left-hand claw into the thing’s belly, a blow that had banished more of Korvak’s daemonkin today than he cared to count. But the Herald was suddenly no longer there. Its sword was flashing downwards in a great arc, wielded as easily by the red-skinned wyrdmaster as another man would swing a short sword.

  Canis dodged, but the blow still cracked off his left pauldron, splitting the ceramite. The Wolf attempted to push forward inside the daemon’s guard, shoulder-first, but again Korvak was not where he had been a heartbeat before.

  The air itself seemed to be vibrating, and the splitting ache in Canis’ skull was getting worse. For a moment reality seemed to shimmer and shift, like a heat haze trapped in the corridor’s confines.

  ‘The warp rift is widening,’ Harald’s voice crackled over the vox. He was back near the grav lift, the press so tight he’d been reduced to using his shield over Glacius to snap bones and break skulls. ‘They’re growing more powerful. We must withdraw.’

  The words didn’t register with Canis. He was hunched over, panting, face contorted by a snarl, glaring at the daemonic Herald which now stood a half-dozen paces back through the breach.

  ‘Surrender to the rage that beats through your veins, Wolf,’ Korvak hissed. ‘You are no less a beast than your fallen pets.’

  Canis lunged again, and again cut only air. The stomach-turning stink of the wyrdrealm was overwhelming now, like burning copper twined around rancid meat. The air undulated, and the realisation that the walls themselves had begun to bleed pierced the fug of savagery clouding his mind. It ran in thick, red rivulets, streaking the pale plasteel and pooling underfoot. Reality itself was unravelling around him.

  And suddenly Korvak w
as behind him. Canis tried to turn, tried to snarl his defiance and spit in the monster’s face, but it felt as though he was battling through tar. The hellblade found its mark with an ease that spoke of countless millennia of warfare – parting the armour plating below his backpack as though it wasn’t there at all. Searing through him like a bolt of fire, biting deep into his spine.

  The Feral Knight fell to his knees with a grunt, blood pouring from his mouth to stain his beard red. He choked. Korvak was suddenly before him again, skull trophies clattering. Duellist turned executioner, the Herald raised his sword with a small flourish, Canis’ blood steaming as it ran off its scorching black surface. He tried to bring his claws up one more time, fangs bared, spitting bloody defiance.

  The hellsword fell. And the wolves of Fenris howled.

  The Underworld, Midgardia

  The first thing Egil’s boot touched was bone. There was a snap as he dropped the last few feet down the mining shaft, servos humming. He realised as he landed that he’d splintered the ribcage of a desiccated cadaver, lying directly below the machine-ladder that had led them underground.

  How had it all come to this? From spearheading an armoured counter-attack out of Midgardia’s Magma Gates, to crawling into the planet’s underworld in search of Logan Grimnar and his Kingsguard. Egil spun, claws unsheathed, their actinic energy illuminating a small patch of blue light around him.

  Nothing. His bionic eye whirred as it sought to pierce the musty darkness, auto-senses straining. Skol’s inbuilt stab-lumen beamed ahead, picking out a low tunnel of heavy metal struts and hard-packed grey dirt. More fresh corpses, clad in the decaying remains of mining overalls, littered the plasboard flooring.

  ‘Clear,’ Egil breathed, stepping forward in time for Moln to drop down behind him. The big Wolf Guard landed heavily, grunting as his power armour’s servos absorbed the impact.

  ‘This looks like one of the Seven Hells,’ he growled as he took in their new surroundings, making way for the next packmate to drop down from the machine-ladder.