Aeska’s Wolf Guard sat with him at the stone-hewn high table, scrabbling across food boards for fat-rich intestines. They raised gold-chased drinking horns, chucking oily liquid down hoarse throats. They chanted the old songs of the Legion, the ones that had been sung on the ice world since before the Allfather had come, and which would be sung there after the last star was extinguished.
They wore armour, for this was a day of marking, of celebrating the raw strength of what had been dragged out of the galactic cataclysm and which now had borne fresh shoots, green like spear-thorns after the winter. They also wore furs, sticky with spillage, the trophies of the slain taken out in the wilderlands.
Haldor sat with his pack of Blooded Claws, the neophytes of the company, though on this day they had been given the place of honour below the high table. Eiryk was on his left, his face flushed, Valgarn on his right. It might have been any feast on any wood-built jarl’s-hall in the midst of the high summer, with horns raised to honour the slain and goad the living.
Only after many hours did Brokenlip at last rise from his throne, shaking rust-brown hides from his shoulders, and the tide of noise shuddered into silence.
Aeska’s face was scarred down the right-hand side, making the skin pale and puckered. One eye was augmetic, a ring of scratched metal bolted onto his skull; one hand was bionic. There were rumours that he had been taken from Yarant barely alive, his thread a second from being cut clean. He was one of the few, the ones who had stood beside Russ in the Age of Wonder, when all was new and the towers of the Imperium were first raised, and so when he spoke, even the Claws listened.
The Wolf Lord lifted a drinking-horn clutched in a gnarled, ring-studded fist.
‘Heilir, Fenryka,’ he growled, and his voice ran across the stone flags like wildfire kindling. ‘Come in peace to this hearth.’
The greeting was as old as the bones of the world, and all raised their own drinks in response, saluting their warlord.
‘We have come here under stone since Ogvai was jarl,’ Aeska said, ‘to mark victory, to mark defeat, to blood the newcomers, to let our long-fangs beckon death a little closer.’
Coarse chuckles ran around the room.
‘Yet this is the first night of a new age. These Claws who take their step into the Rout are the first to know nothing but new ways. All others here joined a Legion. They join a Chapter. They are our future.’ Brokenlip switched his heavy gaze to Haldor’s table, where it alighted on him above all. ‘Allfather preserve us.’
Haldor held that gaze, not even acknowledging to himself how hard it was to meet the eyes of one who had fought for so long, so hard, against an enemy that even all these years after his final defeat still seemed as present as the dark on a fire’s edge.
Brokenlip drew his blade – a great broadsword with a dragon’s neck snaking along the serrated edge. He angled it towards the Claws, dipping it in salute.
‘The enemy will return,’ he said, his voice a low snarl that snagged like claws across hide. ‘Fight it. Throttle it. Cast it down, just like we made you to do.’
The company clambered to their feet, shoving aside heavy wooden boards and reaching for chainswords, axes, longswords, mauls. All were held aloft, casting shadows of murder across the faces of the new recruits.
‘When you came here, this was my hearth,’ said Aeska, his pitted lips cracking into a fang-bared grimace, or perhaps a smile. ‘Now it is yours. Defend it with your lives.’
They all cried aloud then, a fierce wall of sound that made the stone shiver and the flames shake.
‘Vlka Fenryka!’
Before he knew what he was doing, Haldor had seized his axe. His pack had taken their own weapons, and they slid from battle-worn scabbards in a ripple of dry hisses.
‘Fenrys!’
All of them were shouting now, summoning up spirits of war and rage, fuelled by the punishing quantities of mjod coursing around their genhanced systems. The fires seemed to rear up, swelling within iron cages, pushing back the Mountain’s eternal gloom.
Haldor was no different.
‘Fenrys hjolda!’
The massed roars echoed back from the high chamber roof. Long Fang and Blooded Claw, Grey Hunter and Wolf Guard, the old names and the new, all became one voice amid the flames and the war-cries, bonded by the shared howl like the wolf packs of the outer wilds.
And then the thunder broke, replaced by the hard-edged, deep-timbre laughter of warriors. The weapons were stowed, the drinking-horns reached for. Brannak swaggered over to the Claws’ table, his thick voice blurred by mjod, starting to tell the tales that would carry on far into the night. They would recite sagas now, all the grizzled warlords, reciting old records of old wars scattered far across the sea of stars. Every feast ended with this, the skjalds and the jarls remembering, for this was how annals were made on Fenris.
Throughout it all, Aeska kept his eyes fixed on Haldor. Once the last of the war-cries had faded, the Blooded Claw looked away from the high table, suddenly uncomfortable. He pushed his way from the bench, sending boards laden with raw meat thudding to the floor.
Eiryk looked back at him, his face mottled, eyes narrow with mirth. ‘Too rich for you, brother?’ he asked.
Haldor spat on the floor. He was fine. He was more than fine – he was bursting with life, his every muscle burning for the coming test of true combat.
Aeska’s words echoed in his mind, though. They are our future.
‘Listen to the old man’s stories,’ Haldor told him, holding up his empty drinking-horn. ‘I thirst.’
He strode off, hearing Brannak’s voice raised in declamation behind him.
‘And the sky cracked, and the ice broke, and the Allfather came to Fenris, and Russ, war-girt, went to meet Him, and they fought, and the earth was lain waste, and the stars shivered out...’
Haldor shoved through the press of bodies, making his way towards the far gates of the hall. As he neared the great vats of heated mjod, as thick and viscous as unrefined promethium, a chill wind sighed through the open arches. Beyond those arches, empty corridors snaked away into the heart of the Mountain, unlit and cold, burrowing ever deeper. He looked at them, and they looked back at him.
Haldor turned on the threshold and saw his battle-brothers celebrating. Thralls scuttled across the floor, veering around the giants with silent skill, carrying more fuel for the revels.
This was his world now, his hearth to guard.
He slipped out under the nearest arch. The air temperature soon dropped away to the hellish default, and the last of the firelight flickered into nothing.
Haldor pressed himself against frigid stone, rough-cut and slick with ice. He took in a deep breath, enjoying the searing cold in his lungs. The dark pressed around him, just as it had in the forests of Asaheim, blue-black, vengeful.
Then he was moving again, loping like he had done before, deeper down. He did not know all the ways of the Mountain yet. Perhaps no Sky Warrior did, for the fortress was never more than a fraction full. The great bulk of the Chapter was forever at war, coming back to the home world only for feasts or councils, and in any case the place had been intended for a Legion.
He went on, further away, deeper down. The echoes of mortal voices died away entirely, replaced by the almost imperceptible rhythm of the deep earth. Ice cracked endlessly, ticking like a chrono in the dark. Meltwater, formed over buried power lines, trickled across broken stone before freezing again in swirling patterns below. From the great shafts came the half-audible growls of the massive reactors tended by the Iron Priests, and the eternal forges that created the Chapter’s weapons of war, and, so he had heard tell, the forgotten halls where the eldest of all dwelt, their hearts locked in ice and their minds kept in a stasis of dreams.
By then he had no idea where he was going, nor why, only that the shadows were welcome, and for the moment he had no need of fire to warm his hearts nor more flesh to fill his innards. He had been changed, and his body embraced the crippling cold w
here once it would have killed him, and he welcomed it.
Then he froze, and the hairs on the back of his arms lifted. Soundlessly, swift as a thought, he reached for the haft of the axe bound at his belt.
The corridor ahead was as dark and empty as all the others, rising slightly and curving to the left. Haldor narrowed his gaze, but the shadow lay heavy, and nothing broke the gloom.
Something was there, up ahead, out of visual range but detectable all the same. A pheromone, perhaps, or the ghost of a scent. Haldor dropped low and crept forwards, keeping the haft gripped loose. The tunnels of the Fang were full of dangers, all knew that. He became painfully aware of how noisy his armour was, and how much stealthier he could be without it.
He reached the curve ahead and passed around it. The change in the air told him the corridor had opened out, but the dark was now unbroken. He could hear something out there – breathing, like an animal’s, soft and low – but could not pin it down. He crouched, shifting the weight of the axe, readying to move.
Before he could do anything more, a voice came out of the darkness, deeper than any animal’s, rimed with age.
‘Put the axe down, lad.’
Haldor had obeyed before he even knew it, bound by a gene-heritage that was older than he was. Suddenly, the pall seemed to shift, and a figure loomed up through the Fang’s under-murk. For a moment, all Haldor saw was a figment of old race-nightmares – a daemon of the darkling woods, crowned with branches, eyes as blue as sea-ice and hands like the gnarled roots of trees.
But then he was looking into features he knew as well as his own, despite never having seen them in flesh and blood. The face was smeared with ashes, a daub-pattern of black on pale skin. A heavy mantle of furs hung over hunched shoulders, and a gunmetal-grey gauntlet clutched at the hilt of a heavy, rune-encrusted longsword.
Instantly, without being bidden, Haldor dropped to one knee.
‘Enough of that,’ said his primarch, testily. ‘Why are you here?’
Haldor didn’t know. Aeska’s words had driven him out, and the cold had sucked him in, but that was all he understood. Perhaps it had been the drink, or perhaps the last chance to walk the silent depths before war called, or maybe the tug of fate.
Now he stood, alone, in the presence of the Lord of Winter and War.
‘One of Aeska’s whelps,’ said Leman Russ, drawing closer, his strange eyes shining in the dark. ‘No wonder you left the hall. Bloody sagas. I’ve heard them all.’
Haldor couldn’t tell if he was jesting. ‘They told of the Allfather,’ he said, hesitantly, wary of the danger in the primarch’s every move. Russ was like a blackmane, huge, unpredictable, bleeding with danger. ‘They said you fought Him. The only time you lost.’
Russ barked out a laugh, and the fur mantle shook. ‘Not the only time.’ He shrank back into the shadows then, seeming to diminish a fraction, but the danger remained.
Haldor caught snatched glimpses of his master’s garb. Not the heavy armour plate of the warrior-king, but layers of hard-spun wool, streaked with the charcoal of spent embers. They were the clothes of death rites, of mourning. Some warrior of the Aett, perhaps even the Einherjar, must have been slain, though it was unusual for the Wolf Priests not to have called out the names of the dead through the Chapter.
Russ noticed the weapon Haldor had placed back at his belt, and looked at it strangely. ‘You know what blade that is?’ he asked.
Haldor shook his head, and Russ snorted in disgust.
‘The gaps grow, holes in the ice, greater with every summer-melt,’ the primarch said. ‘You know nothing. They remember nothing.’
Russ trailed off, half turning back towards the dark. Haldor said nothing. His hearts were both beating, a low thud, an instinctive threat-response even when no blades were raised.
‘I know not whether you were sent to mock me or bring me comfort,’ Russ said at last, ‘but sent you were. So listen. Listen and remember.’
Haldor stayed where he was, not daring to move, watching the huge, fur-clad outline under the Mountain’s heart. Russ was speaking like a skjald.
‘I fought the Allfather, that is true, and He bested me, for the gods themselves fear Him, mightiest of men. But that was not the only time.’
The eyes shone, points of sapphire, lost in the grip of ice-shadow.
‘There was another.’
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Curse of the Wulfen first published in 2016.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Backlist
Title Page
Warhammer 40,000
Curse of the Wulfen
Prologue
Part 1: The Return
Chapter 1
Legacy of the Wulfen - David Annandale & Robbie MacNiven Page 42