‘We must secure Svellgard as well,’ Sven said. ‘The Claws of the World Wolf may be needed if the crusade fleet returns. And the vaults of Morkai’s Keep should be scoured.’
‘And what of the doppegangrel-spawned wyrdling trickster that caused all this?’ Krom asked. ‘And the inquisitor you claimed would assist us, Ragnar?’
‘De Mornay departed after the Lions,’ Ragnar said. ‘I do not believe he will ever stop chasing them. As for the wyrdspawn, I saw it with my own eyes. I suspect it was the Changeling, the same filth that infiltrated the Fang after the Great Wolf first disappeared, and impersonated him on Dargur. Russ only knows how long it had secreted itself aboard the Rock. Even the daemonhunter, Captain Stern, could not fully banish it.’
‘The Lions will hunt it,’ Krom said. ‘We have more pressing concerns.’ None needed to say what those concerns were. The Wolf Lords’ eyes were drawn to the single, scarred black slab of the Annulus, the one unmarked by any sigil. That of the Thirteenth Company. The Lost. The Wulfen.
‘Let us not think ourselves so superior to our kin,’ Bran said, looking at each of his fellow lords in turn. He had donned his armour once more, though a wildness still glinted in his eyes, burning yellow in the half dark. ‘Let us not imagine this curse – if we must call it that – is an affliction visited upon our Thirteenth Company alone. Can any of us here deny that we have felt its pull long before the reappearance of our brothers? Would any here face me and claim that this deficiency has not been with them every day since they first bore our primarch’s gene-seed? We do not understand the Thirteenth, so we fear them. But at the same time, we know them, for who among us has not seen our closest brothers join them? Who among us cannot see ourselves mirrored in them?’
‘The right and the wrong of it all can be debated with more time than any of us currently possess,’ said Harald. They were the first words he had spoken, and all eyes turned to him.
‘It is clear we must work to discover a means of artificially restraining the influence of the Canis Helix,’ he continued. ‘But one thing is certain. We stand at one of the darkest points in our Chapter’s history. The greatest powers of the warp have conspired to destroy us. Not only the Imperium at large, but us specifically. A tide of filth fouler than any I have ever seen has engulfed our worlds. We have resisted, as is our way, yet I believe this saga has only just begun. I cannot say whether the Wulfen are our salvation or our doom. Before Svellgard I believed the latter. But since then my mind has been clear. Cursed or not, I would rather die beside my pack brothers – all thirteen companies – than ever raise Glacius against even a single one of them.’
There were growls of approval from the other Wolf Lords. Harald went on.
‘Our Chapter has suffered many losses, and those not yet fallen stand on the brink of madness. Morkai’s Keep is a shattered ruin, and the surface of Midgardia an ashen wasteland, its population – our own subjects – wiped out. The Great Wolf is gone. Many of our allies believe we are both lost and damned. Treachery stares us in the face, while defeat snaps at our heels. Other warriors would despair. But not us. We are greater than any wyrd-spawned plot or jealous mortal’s lies. We are the Allfather’s chosen, his rough-pelted warhounds, the scourge of the heretic and the bane of all traitors. Our sagas sing of ten millennia of triumph, and we will be sure to add to them yet. For Russ, and for the Wolftime.’
He looked at the heart of the Annulus, at the spherical stone inscribed with the crest of the Space Wolves Chapter itself.
‘Fenris endures.’
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
David Annandale is the author of the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos and the Primarchs novel Roboute Guilliman: Lord of Ultramar. He has also written the Yarrick series, several stories involving the Grey Knights, and The Last Wall, The Hunt for Vulkan and Watchers in Death for The Beast Arises. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy, Warhammer 40,000 and Age of Sigmar universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.
Robbie MacNiven is a highland-born History graduate from the University of Edinburgh. He has written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Carcharodons: Red Tithe and Legacy of Russ as well as the short stories ‘Redblade’, ‘A Song for the Lost’ and ‘Blood and Iron’ for Black Library. His hobbies include re-enacting, football and obsessing over Warhammer 40,000.
An extract from Leman Russ: The Great Wolf.
The night was clear of cloud, lit only by a scatter of blue-white stars above the towering flanks of Krakgard. Fenris could be starkly beautiful when the mood took it, perhaps as beautiful as any world in the Imperium.
But Ove-Thost did not know of any other worlds. All he had known from birth was the bone-cracking cold, the sudden fire of the world’s erupting heart, the surge and crash of ice-studded oceans, and until three days ago he had forgotten even that.
Three days ago he had been a beast, his jawline frothy with saliva. He had loped on all fours, slouching amid the grey drifts, howling his agony out into the empty skies. He had fought other beasts in that time – huge, fur-clad monsters of cave and gorge. They had ripped at his back with their claws, and he had torn at their throats with his teeth.
Ove-Thost had only blurred memories of those fights now, but retained the wounds to show for them. Bloodstains lay, speckled and frozen, across his naked muscle-mass. When he looked at those muscles now with his returning human senses, he saw hair, thick-rooted, red-crowned, thrusting out across the backs of his arms, his chest, his legs. He ran his hands, now long-nailed, over the russet mane of his neck and felt the coarse strands fight back against his fingers’ tug.
Now he ran again like a man should run – two-legged, though hunched and panting. He waded in the snow, sinking knee deep, kicking it up in flurries. His breath came in wet gasps, dragged up from lungs swollen with blood, and it felt to him like burning oil.
Ove-Thost half stood. Krakgard’s eastern shoulder loomed up into the night, glowing pale blue under Valdrmani’s light. The mountain edge was spiky with the black outlines of pine woods, each one thick, clinging and home to a thousand more ways to die. He peered ahead into the murk, using eyes that now saw more sharply than he could had dreamed of before taking the draught from the chalice. He sniffed, dragging air up into his nasal cavity, and identified the many separate strands of danger clustering on a raging wind.
Beyond the tree line and the pass’ crown was the greatest peak of all, the Mountain, the place where he had been taken, tested and changed. All he clearly remembered of that place was the Gate, licked by fire, and then the dreams, the ones that had made him scream into the dark, all the while watched by faces, hidden faces, swathed in leather masks, their golden eyes pinning him.
He had to get back there now, out of the eternal cold, back to the fires that burned under the earth. Even in the midst of his bestial madness he had known that.
Get back.
He moved again, ignoring the jabs of pain in his calves, keeping low to the crusted snow. The pass was up above him, a soaring mass of cliffs and defiles, latticed with false trails and crevasses. The fatigue was crushing now, but he kept going, forcing cramp-tight sinews to function.
It took hours to reach the first ridge, after which he picked up speed, pushing the drifts apart with chapped hands. Valdrmani had almost set by the time he reached the apex of the pass and clapped weary eyes on the Mountain itself.
Amid the night-shadows it seemed vaster than before – an engorged outcropping of the planet’s core, thrusting up, higher and higher, cloaked in ever-steepening terraces of dirty snow. The summit glowed, set against the star-flung sky with distant points of red, and the earth beneath shuddered faintly from the deep-bored action of its immense under-engines.
The causeways were below him, driving up from th
e base of the valleys ahead, straight and wide. At the end of them were the Gates, crowned with stone and barred with weather-blackened iron.
But first he had to get to them. He broke into a run again, sliding and skidding amid the rime and slush. His breath came faster, his heartbeat heavy.
He smelt the pungent note of predator a microsecond too late, hidden by the gale at his face. He veered suddenly, dropping to his knees, but not fast enough, and a living wall of fur and sinew hit him from the side.
Ove-Thost crashed through the snow, tumbling. Claws raked across his back, digging in deep, and he roared with pain. He pushed back, trying to hurl the creature from him, but it was on top now, heavier than him, shaggy with a grey-flecked pelt as stiff as iron.
It went for him, opening jaws as wide as his chest. Ove-Thost caught a glimpse of three rows of teeth, then a blast of foul breath and a splatter of yellow saliva. He jerked his head to one side, heaving with his arms to push the creature off balance.
It was just enough, and the jaws snapped closed over his shoulder, not his neck. Blood fountained, gushing over both of them, drenching Ove-Thost’s cheeks and mouth.
The copper stink wakened the animal rage within him again, the one that had kept him alive in the deep waste, and he roared with fury. He shoved harder, pushing the creature away and into a roll. He pushed with his cramped legs, straightening them and hauling himself over on top of the hunter.
His hands were still locked in the clawed grasp of the beast’s, his body sunk into its furs, so all he had were his teeth, longer and sharper since taking the draught.
He bit down, ripping through flesh and hair, shaking his head from side to side, bathing in the hot black rivers of blood. The thing beneath him howled, arched its back and tried to pull clear, but Ove-Thost was no longer the hunted.
The kill was made. He pulled himself up from the carcass, threw his bloody head back and howled into the night. He threw out his triumph, arms back, chest shaking from exertion, his naked flesh streaked with long lines of steaming liquid.
For a moment, he almost lost himself. Visions flashed across his fevered mind – he saw himself loping back into the woods, hunting more of the creatures that lurked there. He could join the chase forever, running under moonlight-barred snow, letting the amber-eyed presence now locked in his breast go free.
Then his kill-howl guttered out, and he toppled, dizzy from blood loss. On his knees now, he felt the animal retreat and the man return. His shoulder was a raw mass of chewed tissue – a wound he would have died from before his body had been changed, and which even now threatened to end him.
He reached out, back into the hot maw of the dead beast, and wrenched out two of its fangs, each as long as his hand, slender and wickedly curved. Grunting, he pushed them both through the lips of his wound, pinning the edges closer.
Then he stood and staggered away, leaving pooling footprints behind. His vision was edged with blurs now, shaking even as he moved. He shuddered from the cold, enduring the come-down from his animal frenzy, impelled only by the mantra he had repeated over and over in the bleak hours.
Get back.
As more hours passed, he lost the ability to guide himself. His feet dragged, his head hung low. At some point the thick carpet of snow began to feel firmer underfoot, as if stone lay beneath it, but he did not stop to check.
He fell to his knees again, shivering, and crawled. It felt like he was going up, climbing steeply, pulling himself into the heavens themselves, where the stars wheeled and the Allfather welcomed the best fighters to His halls.
He only stopped when the night melted away before him, broken by a thin line of pearl-grey in the east, and the blue shadows shrank back. The wind fell, and the hard light of Fenris’ sun bled like water into an empty sky.
He looked up and saw the Mountain before him, rising into the frigid air, immense beyond reckoning. The Gate stood just a few hundred metres distant, itself vast, many-storeyed, flanked by columns of hewn rock and surmounted by a mighty stone wolf’s-head that snarled out across the causeway’s approaches. Tiny-looking figures clustered at its base, each clad in battle-armour and wearing metal masks.
Ove-Thost crawled towards them, his left leg now numb and dragging, his shoulder leaking blood. They made no move to come to his aid, but watched as the distance closed. As they neared, Ove-Thost saw their pitiless faces gaze at him, their metal hands resting on the hilts of great swords and axes. Some were clad in blue-grey, others the dull sheen of bare iron, some in blackest pitch.
Each exertion was more painful than the last. The blurring of his vision grew more severe, and soon all he saw was a fog of grey. When he reached the threshold, his fingers closed over it, weakly gripping at wind-scoured stone. Only then did the giants move, reaching down to drag him to his feet, to pour hot liquid down his throat, to rip the fangs from his wound, preparing to throw them back into the wilderness.
‘No,’ blurted Ove-Thost, reaching out for the teeth of the beast he had slain.
He heard laughter, coarse, deeper than a man’s. One of the figures, black-armoured, his eyes glowing a dull red like heart’s-blood, took the two fangs back and pressed them into Ove-Thost’s calloused palms.
‘Fair enough,’ he said. ‘You earned them.’
That was the beginning.
Years passed, and his body underwent further changes. The draught he had taken out on the eternal ice, the Canis Helix, proved to be the first of many trials. Each one that came afterwards brought fresh agony as his limbs flexed and his blood thickened, but it also made him stronger, faster, deadlier. He learned to fight in new ways, and with new weapons. Before, he might have been proud to boast of killing a man; now, he was being taught to kill hundreds, thousands, whole worlds.
He was no longer Ove-Thost, but Haldor Twinfang, and he took to the name as he took to everything in that place. He was a Blooded Claw, the rawest of the Rout, and he trained and sparred with others like him, all pulled from the tribes of the frozen seas and wrought into gods.
He saw no difference between himself and the others. He laughed with them and brawled with them, and learned which of the great weapons – axe, blade, boltgun, claws – would be his favoured. His pack formed up around him as more survived the trials: Valgarn, Eiryk, Yellowtooth, Sventr and others, all young, their skin smooth and their eyes shining. They looked up into the storm-wracked skies of the death world and saw the ships power from the landing stages at the Mountain’s summit; they knew that they would be on those ships when all was done, and they yearned for it.
Brannak was Wolf Priest of Brokenlip’s Great Company, and drove them all hard. At every test, at every hurdle, he was watching, arms folded, his long-handled axe, Frost, balanced under the weight of his wrists. It was he who had given Haldor the fangs back, and they now hung on cured leather strips from the Blooded Claw’s neck, jangling against the smooth grey of his armour’s breastplate.
Haldor believed that Brannak paid him special attention. In times of fatigue, when he had been driven almost beyond endurance, he resented that. In other times, it fuelled a deep-set confidence, bordering on arrogance. That brought retribution from his pack-mates, who fought as hard among one another as they did with any sent against them. After the long spars, their flesh bloody, their bones cracked, they would slump around the firepits, hair lank with sweat, and forget what had started it.
‘He watches everyone,’ said Eiryk, grinning through a bruised mouth.
‘Me more than you,’ Haldor muttered. ‘Me more than anyone.’
So the days passed, a procession of ice and fire, out under the sky, down in the caverns, and they grew, and they earned their scars, and the bond of the pack formed tighter.
Sventr was the first to die. Three others followed him, destroyed by the agonies of implantation failure or death in trial-combat. When the final day came, the pack was nine strong, all with the carapace in place and the link with power armour established. They were complete then, in body if no
t yet fully in mind. They donned helms and saw the world dissolve into runic overlays of electronic targets. They were taken to the forges of the Iron Priests and given their blades – chainswords, mostly.
When Haldor stood to receive his, Brannak handed him an axe, shorter of haft than Frost, twin-bladed and forged from a dark metal. It had no runes on the face, but two austere lines of tracery cut along the outer edges.
Haldor hefted it, finding the weight unfamiliar but agreeable. He would use it, he thought, to carve the galaxy apart.
‘You know what this is named?’ Brannak asked him.
Haldor looked up at him. ‘Should I?’
Brannak cuffed him across the jawline, the hard crack of a warrior’s fist, and Haldor’s neck snapped back. ‘Learn it.’
Then he moved down the line. Haldor rubbed his already-swelling cheek and looked down at the metal. It had no name that he knew of. Perhaps he would have to steal one for it.
He snatched a look at Eiryk, who was already studying his chainsword with relish.
‘What now?’ Haldor whispered.
Eiryk did not look at him, but ran a finger, clattering, over the honed teeth. ‘We are Sky Warriors, brother,’ he replied absently. ‘We do what they do. We drink.’
The hall rang with voices. Some were human, though those voices were pale and thin beside the guttural roars of the transhumans, the Ascended, the demigods. Braziers glowed with coals, flaring up into blazes as the alcohol-rich mjod was flung across them. The air was rich, a stink of sweat and cooked meats and trodden straw.
This was deep in the Fang, enveloped within its iron-dark innards, lit from within by writhing flame, a place of snaking shadows and blood-red hearth-heat. The entire brotherhood was there, brawling and gorging under the sight of their jarl, Aeska Brokenlip, once warrior of Tra of the VI Legion, now Wolf Lord of the Third Great Company of the Space Wolves Chapter. The galaxy had changed since the breaking of the Siege, even in the halls of Fenris, but much remained the same.
Legacy of the Wulfen - David Annandale & Robbie MacNiven Page 41