‘Everything I told you was true, Wolf,’ the Thousand Sons sorcerer said, voice dripping with disdain. ‘Why didn’t you listen? You could have saved Midgardia. You could have saved your Great Wolf. And now he’s gone. Logan Grimnar is dead.’
Ragnar took a pace towards the daemon, fangs bared. Azrael snatched him by the shoulder.
‘Rein in your savagery, Wolf. It’s trying to trick us.’
‘Is it, Lion?’
This time the voice was as cold and cutting as serrated steel. The corridor was abruptly plunged into darkness, the actinic lightning of Stern’s, Azrael’s and Asmodai’s weapons the only illumination. When the dull lumen orbs flickered on a second later, the thing had changed once again.
Now it was clothed in a manner not dissimilar to the Dark Angels, white robes hanging over ancient, black power armour. The thing’s hood threw its features into deep shadow. An ornate, heavy-looking blade hung from a scabbard, draped from chains behind twin pistol holsters.
‘I am here to make you answer for your crimes, Keeper of the False Truth,’ the figure said. ‘I am here to make you repent. In the name of the Lion–’
Azrael’s roar drowned out the daemon’s words. The Master of the Unforgiven thrust violently past Stern, obsidian blade lunging for the hooded figure. It darted back, the crackling light of Azrael’s sword illuminating a vicious grin beneath the cowl.
‘Stop!’ Stern bellowed. ‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with!’
Ragnar felt his hairs prick as the Grey Knight thrust a fragment of his will into the command, charging it with psychic energy. Azrael shuddered to a halt, face contorted with fury. Stern pushed him aside.
‘I know what you are,’ the Grey Knight said, addressing the daemon. ‘Even in the realms of the warp it would be impossible for anything else to do what you have done here, Changeling.’
‘Don’t be so sure, corpse-worshipper,’ the hooded Space Marine said. Then, still grinning, he exploded. Bloody meat and shards of ceramite scythed towards Stern, Azrael and Ragnar, evaporating as the illusion came undone. Something unfurled itself from the space where the Adeptus Astartes had been, spreading feathered pinions, its beaked head stooped against the corridor’s low arches. It screeched, the sound piercing Ragnar’s ears and shaking the rock around him. For a moment even Stern stood transfixed, staring up at the crouching, blue-feathered Lord of Change.
‘M’Kachen,’ the Grey Knight breathed.
+Who else?+ The greater daemon’s words thrust directly into their minds, accompanied by a peal of mocking, avian laughter.
‘No,’ Stern said through gritted teeth. ‘Your lies are at an end, Changeling.’
‘We are buried in lies here,’ the daemon taunted. ‘They’re all around us.’
It made a series of arcane gestures with its claws. There was an ear-splitting crack, and a sudden fissure appeared in the stonework to the right of the greater daemon. Sickly, diffracted light blazed from it, followed by a phantom gale that tugged at the habits and cowls of the Dark Angels. The M’Kachen-thing croaked a series of unutterable syllables and the cracks split wider, bursting apart in a hail of shattered stone. The portal blazed with eldritch energy, the howling of a realm of pure madness grating from the jagged, broken stone like a million razor blades.
Horrors bounded from the infernal light. The dank air filled with their mad gibbering, and warpfire sparked and ignited in the corridor around them.
‘Stop them,’ Stern shouted. ‘I will banish the trickster.’
Asmodai struck first, roused to righteous wrath by the presence of warp filth in the Rock’s most sacred depths. The ghost-wind snapped at his white-and-green habit, making it billow around his black armoured form. He swung his crozius arcanum in a crackling arc, the wings of the holy weapon wreathed in white energy. Daemons disintegrated before him, their unnatural flames breaking and spluttering harmlessly around the Interrogator-Chaplain. The rosarius hanging from an adamantium chain around his neck, crafted in the likeness of the hooded Angel of Protection, blazed with golden energy as it shielded him from the dark warp magics.
Ragnar and then de Mornay fought to join him, pressed against the corridor wall. The Wolf Lord carved through one pink horror after another, Frostfang reducing them to writhing ectoplasmic blobs. Even as he killed them their swirling remains reformed into smaller blue horrors, sneering and snapping at him as they tried to claw through his power armour.
De Mornay fired his plasma pistol into the twisted mass coming from the portal at point-blank range, a prayer on his lips. The incandescent bolts of blue energy vaporised the leading clutch of daemons, but still they came. Soon the pistol was burning in the grip of the inquisitor’s exo-gauntlet, steam venting from the carbon-adamant ventilation casing and the magnetic accelerator coils ribbing its spine glowing blue with overuse.
Down the corridor, Azrael and Stern fought the Changeling. It was a blur, toying with reality as it battled the two Space Marines, the borrowed flesh of the greater daemon seeming to shift and twitch like a faulty viewfeed as it phased away from its attackers. The Angel and the Knight rained blows on it, their weapons wreathed with power, but the daemon matched each and every one with a long silver staff. A riposte dented Stern’s pauldron and scarred Azrael’s breastplate, ripping his habit.
The thing was fast. Azrael recklessly lunged into its guard, the black obsidian of the Heavenfall Blade punching like a lance towards the thing’s shifting core. It moved again, but this time too slow to properly avoid the sudden strike. The Sword of Secrets caught the Changeling in the flank, the ancient weapon searing through feathers and flesh alike. The M’Kachen-thing let out a screech and snatched at the Supreme Grand Master. Left exposed by the lunge, he found his arm gripped in the greater daemon’s avian claws. It twisted viciously, and there was an audible snap before it flung the Dark Angel bodily back against the chamber’s far wall.
Stern thrust forward, force sword blazing with white light. The winged greater daemon parried the blow with its staff, deceptively spindly arms bolstered by the strength of the warp. Stern locked in place, servos groaning as the two strained.
Azrael found his feet. He took the Sword of Secrets in his left arm, his right broken by the daemon’s claws. As Stern pinned the creature’s guard the Dark Angel seized the opportunity to lunge in beneath the Grey Knight’s raised weapon, but his thrust never connected with the daemon’s lower limbs. It spat a string of twisting syllables, and the Dark Angel was forced to his knees by a sudden flood of pain. His secondary heart kicking in with a jolt, he snarled with agony as he tried to force his burning limbs to obey his commands. The Sword of Secrets slipped from his grasp, the obsidian blade clattering and shorting as it struck the dusty stone floor.
Ragnar saw the Supreme Grand Master battling to rise and Stern held in place. He dragged himself free from the press of horrors, gouging a path through their flailing bodies. Asmodai fought on, feet planted before the portal, the Angel of Vengeance that tipped his crozius arcanum dealing death from its deadly wingtips with each stroke. The press of daemons had forced de Mornay up against the wall, his overheated pistol abandoned, servos straining as he sought to grapple with two horrors forcing themselves upon him with their snapping, drooling maws.
‘I abjure thee,’ Stern was snarling, wreathed in white fire as he pitted his psychic strength against that of the Changeling. ‘I banish thee. I cast thee out of His Holy Realm.’
The daemon echoed his words with its own dark litany, the titanic energies building between them threatening to shake apart the whole tunnel. Azrael managed to force his way back onto his feet once more, teeth gritted against the pain suffusing his body. He clutched the Sword of Secrets in one shaking gauntlet.
Ragnar smashed apart the last horror between him and the Changeling. Stern was still pinning its staff with his own blade. He saw his opening. A prayer to Russ on his lips, the Young King swung Frostfang for one of the daemon’s straining limbs.
The ancien
t chainsword bit true. The daemon’s shriek matched the weapon’s roar as it juddered through warp-woven feathers and flesh. Light blazed once again. The phantom wind redoubled in strength, accompanied by the crash of more splitting rock. His auto-stabilisers activated as he fought to stay upright, a gauntlet going up to shield his eyes.
Through the blaze he saw silhouettes. Stern was standing tall, his sword held high. The greater daemon was gone, replaced by a hunched, multi-limbed figure. Behind it reality had further come apart, the stone of the tunnel wall now disintegrating into nothingness. Beyond it Ragnar caught an impression of tall, broken turrets and snapping pennants. The view seemed to plummet, morphing and changing into a bare stone chamber occupied by armoured figures – unmistakably Adeptus Astartes. They stood waiting on the other side of the rift, their features indiscernible in the blazing light that ringed it.
The lesser daemons howled and shrieked. The invisible wind ripped at them, tearing their coruscating flesh away in great globules, sucking them back into the portal that had birthed them. De Mornay managed to tear himself from them as they were whipped away into oblivion. Asmodai crushed the morphing skull of one more with his fist before it was dragged back into the immaterium.
The figure stepped through after its disintegrating minions, as though struggling in a gale. The portal shimmered. Ragnar managed to take a pace towards it, his howl torn away by the wyrdwind. Stern was at his side, the daemonhunter still bellowing his sacred oaths. Azrael managed to reach out too. The Sword of Secrets lunged, almost piercing the veil of reality as the hunched creature slipped away.
And then it was over. Like wakefulness asserting itself after a vivid dream, both the light and the gale vanished. The momentum of the Space Marines carried them forward, but rather than plunge through the rift and into the mysterious chamber, their gauntlets struck scorched stone. The warp portals were gone, the only evidence of their existence the burn markings on the tunnel wall. And the faintest sound of giggling laughter, echoing away into nothingness.
Stern slumped against the wall, even his prodigious mental strength spent. Azrael grimaced, extending his broken arm until bones cracked and snapped back into alignment.
‘I was blind,’ the Dark Angel said bitterly as the stimms kicked in, as though speaking to the Rock itself. ‘I was fixed so firmly on Fenris I could not see the snares set about my feet.’
‘About our feet,’ Ragnar said, gazing at the burn marks on the wall. ‘We have all suffered from this wyrdspawn’s trickery.’
‘It will pay,’ Azrael said. ‘For such mockery, I will hunt it to the edges of realspace and beyond.’
‘Before you do that, I think we would all benefit if you withdrew your ships from here,’ de Mornay said. The inquisitor was shaking and pale with pain and exhaustion, only held upright by the scarred frame of his armour. ‘There has been enough misplaced bloodshed already.’
Azrael looked at the inquisitor and then at Ragnar, his dark eyes holding the Wolf’s bestial gaze.
‘The Imperium will not allow you to harbour mutants. If we do not call you to task, another will. Then our actions here may seem lenient.’
‘There are proper channels,’ said Stern, sheathing his force sword. ‘A conclave of the ordos should be called and the matter debated openly. I have witnessed the wolf-beasts with my own eyes. Without them, this system would have fallen to daemonic infestation. I can find no trace of warp taint upon them, only grievous genetic anomalies.’
‘I agree,’ said de Mornay. ‘As terrible as they seem, I would be dead without them. They must be judged openly, and with due process.’
Azrael was silent for a moment more. When he spoke again it was with brusque finality.
‘The crusade fleet will withdraw to the system’s edge while the situation is assessed. I will have my Librarians scour this place. If they can pick up the daemon’s spoor, they may be able to track it to wherever it went. I believe it is still within the material plane. We cannot permit its continued existence, and I won’t allow its acts here to go unpunished.’
‘It will lead you on a pointless dance of destruction,’ Stern warned. ‘It is known in our grimoires as one of the most devious of all the Trickster God’s servants.’
‘All the more reason to destroy it,’ Azrael said. ‘Until we can, though, and until the time is right to sit in judgement, I shall order my fleet assets to disengage from Fenris.’
Iron Requiem, in low orbit above Svellgard
The dark bridge of the Iron Hands battle-barge hummed with power, the atmosphere crackling with pent-up energy. The lance batteries were almost fully charged.
Terrek watched the Space Wolves on the moon below, picking out their positional markers with the machine-mind of his hardwired auto-senses. He sat once again in Iron Requiem’s command throne, linked directly to the ancient warship, his cold steel body inert as his thoughts communed with Requiem’s spirit. It was tired but exhilarated, the air of the bridge heavy with the smell of discharge and las after-burn, the battle-barge’s great guns still glowing hot in their open ports. It had been a righteous hammer today, a purger of the unclean, a destroyer of the impure.
Its holy work was not yet done.
The Wolves below were beginning to evacuate, perhaps sensing what was to come. They were too slow. Terrek had returned to his flagship almost an hour earlier, as soon as his objective on the surface had been completed. There was no time to be lost. While the Wolves were still clustered in battle array, they presented an optimal target.
Epathus had refused to join him in the strike, and there was no word from the Shadow Haunter Scouts still on the surface. It did not matter. Where others flinched, the Iron Hands remained unbending. Requiem’s firepower would be more than enough, and with their surface assets destroyed the Space Wolves fleets would be left open to his squads’ boarding pods and teleport strikes. By the time dawn touched the dark side of Frostheim, Terrek would have reclaimed both the world and its moon for the Imperium.
The iron was hot. It was time to strike.
Terrek realised the bridge serfs were pleading for his attention. He understood why a moment later, as a priority vox signal beamed into his consciousness, flowing directly from the Requiem’s communications banks into his mind via his cortical plug. He blink-scanned the message.
+ + inter-fleet transmission ref. 97/19/RDM + +
+ + sender: Gloriana-class battleship Invincible Reason + +
+ + ident-code 7697: callsign Lionsword + +
+ + This is Supreme Grand Master Azrael to all crusade fleet elements. All ships are to disengage with immediate effect. New heading coordinates are being transmitted. There are to be no hostilities conducted against the Space Wolves from this moment onwards. Repeat, all ships are to disengage immediately. Stand by for further orders. + +
+ + message ends + +
Terrek felt a rush of anger even his detached thoughts struggled to suppress. Iron Requiem responded in sympathy around him, the engines flaring fractionally as the ancient vessel shared its brother’s dismay. The moment was now. The iron burned. The renegades were exposed, their mutants at the crusade fleet’s mercy.
More data streamed through his thoughts. The Ultramarines ships were breaking from orbit. Even as he assessed their likely heading, the rest of the crusade fleet began to depart. Terrek buried another surge of anger.
Without the rest of the fleet to support them once hostilities resumed, the statistical likelihood of a decisive victory over the Wolves began to drop. The urge to strike, to purge the foul taint of the unclean, still burned bright, warming his cold augmetics and throbbing through his synth-organs. His own internal logic systems, however, would not permit him to override a direct order from Crusade Command. The judgement of the Wolves would have to wait.
With a thought, Terrek began to power down the lances.
The Fang, Fenris
There had not been so many Wolves on Fenris since the great hunt for the Wulfen had begun. Six Great Compa
nies – even ones as bloodied as the Firehowlers or the Deathwolves – made the halls blaze with life. The warriors feasted and boasted and drank, and tried to forget that Midgardia was ash, and Longhowl an abattoir, and Svellgard a wilderness of rock and mud pools, and Morkai’s Keep a ruin.
Their lords could not so easily ignore what had happened in the war zone that the Fenris System had become. They gathered in the Hall of the Great Wolf, in the heart of the Fang. The vast chamber was cold, its craggy, pelt-draped walls only half lit by a few lumen braziers. At its centre lay the great stone slabs of the Grand Annulus, the flickering light picking out the wolf crests of the Great Companies inscribed upon the twelve blocks, and the scorched, unmarked darkness of the thirteenth.
Sven, Harald, Krom, Egil, Bran and Ragnar stood upon their respective slabs. They all still wore their battleplate, the ceramite scarred and pitted. Each tried not to glance at the empty stone bearing the carving of the Night Runner – Logan Grimnar’s crest.
‘I request I be allowed to return to Midgardia immediately,’ said Egil Iron Wolf, shattering the chill silence. He held the battered, gilded skull of Fellclaw, the Great Wolf’s crown, in his hands. Skol hummed around his shoulders, the servo-skull’s pict recorder blinking.
The other Wolf Lords were silent. ‘I made an oath,’ Egil went on. ‘To return. The fires set by the Angels did not reach into the subterranean levels. The Great Wolf is still down there.’
‘And we will find him,’ Krom said quietly.
‘So let me go.’
‘We all wish to go,’ Krom said. ‘But we cannot abandon the rest of the system. The crusade fleet remains active on its edges. They are simply waiting for official sanction before returning.’
‘Kjarl Grimblood’s Great Company is projected to arrive in-system soon,’ Ragnar said. ‘Let him go to Midgardia. We cannot forsake it.’
‘I will join Grimblood alone if need be,’ Egil said. ‘My Great Company can remain here in defence of the Fang, if that is what you all wish.’
Legacy of the Wulfen - David Annandale & Robbie MacNiven Page 40