Leman Russ: The Great Wolf

by Chris Wraight

  The primarch did not look at Haldor. He slumped in the caverns of the Fang, racked by its eternal cold.

  'I curse that I know not when the Lion truly died,' he murmured. 'The tidings reach me now, but I do not believe them. He was never at the council when Guilliman and Dorn argued over the shape of the Imperium. We were told he was fighting in the Scouring, and why should we not have trusted that? If he had been there, perhaps he would have resisted the change, for he was ever proud of his Legion, as he had every right to be.' Russ shook his head, and the shaggy locks, once blond, now grey, fell about him. 'He returned to Caliban after the siege, and that was the last anyone heard of him. All is secrecy now, and we are kept from the truth by this endless war, year after year. They say he died fighting the Great Enemy. Maybe that is so. I cannot believe it, myself.' He grinned. 'I know how hard he was to bring down. He was an arrogant bastard, but he had reason for it A knight indeed.'

  So that was it. The primarch of the First was lost, and news had only now reached Fenris. Russ mourned for his brother, not for any warrior of his own hearth.

  'And Bloodhowl?' Haldor asked.

  The question seemed like impertinence, but Russ merely laughed. His shoulders quaked and some of the torpor seemed to lift.

  'Jorin?' Russ asked, and his smiling fangs glinted in the dark. 'Ah, Jorin. And the rest of them that came after - the wolf-brothers, the Thirteenth. You won't hear their sagas when you come to the long table. That is another tale, for another time, and you are too young for any of it, whelp.'

  He turned to look at Haldor, his expression shrewd, half masked by the deep shadow.

  'The Lion never spoke of it,' Russ said. 'Never. He could have told the Imperium of our sickness and made it worse for me, but even in his anger he said nothing.' The primarch mused on it. 'He could keep a secret. He saw our imperfection, and he suffered it to remain, and that was the heart of his nobility. In the end, then, he truly was better than us. The archetype of Legions, the First of all. If I owe him anything, it was for that.'

  Russ sat back against the rock wall.

  'But he's gone, and so the Age of the Primarchs takes another stagger towards its ending. But I'm left, eh?' He grinned again. 'Still clinging on, like a raven hanging over carrion. I won't go yet I will, one day, and I'll know when the time comes, but for now I'll linger here, and watch over you awhile longer, for you're a band of savages and need a firm hand.' He laughed again. 'What do they call you?'

  'Haldor Twinfang.'

  'You have a deed name? Already?'

  Haldor held up the length of twine about his neck, cradling the bound fangs. 'I took it from the beast while out in the wilds.'

  Russ grunted appreciatively. 'Good. Though you'll need to swap it for the enemy's bones when you can.'

  'I will,' Haldor said, hotly. 'The day is coming - we head for the void at dawn.'

  'Ah,' said Russ, understanding. 'Of course, you're Aeska's pack. The new blood.'

  He shuffled to his feet, pulling the furs around him. Though still colossal, his movements had the tenor of an old man's, weary of the cold and of the dark. Haldor sprang to his feet, hurrying to get out of the way.

  'So I know why you found your way here, then,' Russ said, dapping his rough hand on Haider's shoulder. 'Did they tell you what you are?'

  Haldor knew all of this. He'd been told again and again, drummed into him from the very first days of training. The repetition had made the knowledge stale, and he had grown bored of hearing it.

  'The first warrior to never know the Legion,' he replied, almost by rote. 'The first warrior to only know the Chapter.'

  Russ nodded. 'Good. Then they're teaching you something.'

  He started to move down the tunnel, heading deeper into the mountain. Haldor hesitated, not sure if he should follow. 'Lord, do you wish me to—'

  'No, stay,' said Russ, halting for a moment. 'Go back to the fire. Eat, enjoy yourself.' He half turned. 'But I'll tell you what I told Jorin, though it did him no good. It must remain. The way of the old world. I don't want it forgotten, washed away by these new wars. If you survive to see your pelt go grey, remember that. Everything we did has an echo.'

  He turned to leave, then hesitated again, eyes narrowing.

  'That axe,' he said. 'You know its name yet?'

  Dawn came, grey over the Hunter's Pass. The forges were stoked in the deep halls, the hangars were opened and the great void shields withdrawn from the Valgard heights.

  Thunderhawks came down from the orbital relay craft, accompanying the crew lifters. They scored the skies white with contrails as they circled the stages, hovering watchfully as the lifters were loaded with their cargo.

  The Claws headed to their transport, all nine of them, each one carrying a sharp pain behind his temples and rings of red around his eyes. None had slept, for the night before had been carried on and on, with more tales and more boasts, then more meat and more to drink. Fighting had broken out between Grey Hunters under Aeska's high table, and Brannak had waded in at the end, his voice echoing from the cavern's roof in incandescence.

  'So where did you go?' asked Eiryk, rubbing his hand through his shock of red hair.

  The air in the open hangar was punishing, and a hard gale was already blowing from the east. The lifter waited for them, gouting with steam and frost from the orbital passage, its doors standing open. Servitors were clustered around it, attaching refueling cables, hauling away supply crates and dragging fresh units to the storage holds.

  Haldor didn't feel like talking about it. Either he would say nothing, or he would say too much, and in any case the events felt as much like a dream as anything else The mjod still coursed in his bloodstream, making him feel nauseous.

  'Just needed some air,' he said, tramping up the long ramp and looking for his place in the pack's order.

  Once installed, the thrusters boomed, and they were aloft, powering smoothly out of the hangar's portal and up into Fenris' atmosphere. For the first time, Haldor saw the Fang from above. He saw the mountains fall away, diminishing into a jumble of broken white ridges. The expanse of it was immense - the whole of Asaheim, dropping away from him until the jagged coasts came into view, gnawed at by the world's ocean. Somewhere out on that ever-changing expanse was his old tribe, still fighting their endless wars of survival.

  They docked with the attack frigate Kva, and were soon in the practice cages, circling one another just as they had done in the Fang's halls for so many years. The Grey Hunter Varak Stonejaw had gone with them as sergeant and mentor on this first mission, a dour veteran of the company who would no doubt rather have been fighting with his own comrades and pressing the case for elevation to the Wolf Guard. He drove them hard, making the long conditioning sessions as gruelling as anything undertaken under the Mountain. In the six weeks of warp travel, every one of the Blooded Claws picked up scars, and the rawest of the insolence was beaten out of them, and they slowly began to resemble a true pack.

  They reached their destination earlier than scheduled - the giant agri world of Pholeses X, and were drilled into their armour and took up their blades. All the pack carried their chainswords save for Varak, who took a straight-bladed power sword, and Haldor, who bore his axe.

  The frigate anchored over the northern continent, and the hangar bays slammed open. The pack's Thunderhawks burned out into the void, the warriors within gripping the restraint cages as the dizzying descent began.

  Momentum built around them, shaking the metal panels. As the floor juddered and clanged, Haldor felt the first stirrings of the kill-urge, and he began to whoop with the start of the frenzy. The rest of the pack joined in, building themselves into a pitch of raw excitement. This was the moment, the first test of the faith placed in them.

  The gunship burned down into the atmosphere; its nose rising and its turbofans whining into life. The crew-bay doors crunched back, and the smell and noise of the first alien world rushed in.

  The sky was green, more green than anything Hal
dor had ever seen on Fenris. Everything stank - of foliage, of dark earth, of the nitro-fertilisers, of the colossal hoppers rammed with grain, of the spores floating through the hot air. The landscape ahead of them was thick with crops, stretching away to an empty horizon and marked only by the sentinel watch towers placed kilometres apart.

  But they were not alone. The fields before them had been trampled down by a huge mass of bellowing, snorting greenskins, rampaging through the mud and destroying all before them. There must have been thousands of them, a living wave of virulent, mindless fury, swarming from horizon to horizon, their stench pungent and their noise incredible. Imperial troops, mortals in dirt-brown uniforms, were trying to hold them, and doing badly. Las-fire zipped across the scene of carnage, answered by a deafening barrage of heavy projectile fire and the spittle-laced bellows of counter-challenge.

  It was overwhelming. It was a sensory overload.

  It was fantastic.

  Haldor leapt from the hovering Thunderhawk with his pack-mates, screaming out in both rage and joy, swinging his axe in his right hand while firing his bolter from the left. They crunched down to earth, their boots sinking deep into the thick soil, and charged into the heart of the fighting, Varak leading them with mighty sword-swipes, the Blooded Claws sprinting to keep pace, to engage the enemy, to bring the wrath of Fenris to the xenos, and to fight with all the fury and the brilliance that their gene-heritage had given them.

  That was only another beginning.

  Valgarn did not return from that battle; his back broken by the greenskins as he attempted to bring down their champion, but the slaughter was great, and when the blood was sinking into the earth they were still singing of it, laughing from exhaustion and from exhilaration. The fighting was all good on Pholeses, and against an enemy that was more beast than any other.

  From there, the Kva took them to other worlds. In those days the battles were against the xenos, for the Great Enemy had been hounded back into the Eye of Terror and the marks of the Warmaster scraped from the records of the Imperium. The pack hunted hard, never resting, always seeking the next combat It became like a drug, a need, buried deep in their marrow and never letting them rest. When they were not fighting they were training. Varak kept them in line, breaking heads when he needed to, and despite it all they learned from him, adding guile to their energy and tactics to their headlong charges.

  After that first campaign tour, they returned to Fenris, now two down from their original complement, and their armour was re-conditioned and their weapons sharpened in the forges. The Fang was, as ever, largely empty, its tunnels echoing and lined with frost, though more aspirants had been taken in, and Brannak kept as close a watch over them as before. The pack did not linger, and nor did they wish to, for once the wider sea of stars had been opened up to them, then their wanderlust became powerful. They were given more tasks, and drawn more closely into the company, and the battles became longer and more bloody.

  The weeks turned to months, and the months turned to years, only marked by the endless procession of wars. Though the Imperium itself had never been stronger and the glory of the first days of the Great Crusade was in part reignited by the Astra Militarum and its teeming trillions, the enemies never went away. The Claws' pelts began to lose their vivid red, bleaching out to grey. Varak left them, claiming solemnly that they would all be dead within the year; and those who remained took the mantle of Hunters, and reached for new weapons and gained new kill-marks for their armour.

  Eventually even old Aeska died, his end coming in the depths of the hulk Cataclysm of Faith, fighting an enemy that they had thought gone forever. The pyres burned long for him on Fenris, but there was little time to mourn, for punitive strikes were ordered to bring vengeance for the desecration. Haldor, now the master of his pack of six, answered the call, and the Kva burned out into the void again, this time in the vanguard of a combined fleet from answering Chapters.

  In later years Imperial savants would see such battles as the revived stirrings of the Archenemy, slowly gathering strength as the wounds of the Scouring were healed. At the time, this was not known, and the hope still lingered that the taint of Horus could be extinguished entirely.

  At the battlefront, for those facing the horrors brought to humanity by the Cataclysm of Faith, that hope soon withered. Among the twisted and the degenerate creatures that spilled out of the hulk's shadow were fighters of the old III Legion, still wearing the purple-and-gold, though even more mutated and debased than that armour had been at the close of the Great Heresy. There was no joy in fighting such foes. At the end of every encounter the Grey Hunters would count the cost, their pleasure in the kill replaced with implacable fury. When the sagas were sung around the fires, it was done to remember, not to celebrate.

  More long years dragged past, and the campaign ground towards its conclusion. Other Chapters joined the struggle, adding their blades and their doctrines to those who had been first to heed the call. Ultramarines came, and White Scars, and then their successors, all with different liveries, their Gothic spoken in a score of accents.

  The final encounter came on the desert world of Iela, when the enemy had at last been broken and harried back into the void. Haldor made planetfall on the plains before the great hab-spires, rising up through the sand-haze and into a twin-sunned sky. Soon those spires would be burning again as the Imperium took back what had been despoiled, but before the assault could begin, one task remained. It was not something he had done before, and the prospect gave him a mix of feelings, none straightforward.

  So he stood amid the swirling dust his pearl-grey armour already stained matte. His pack-mates stood some way back, a loose ring, far enough away not to intervene but close enough to jeer if he shamed them.

  Ahead of him were ten Dark Angels. Nine stood back, mirroring his own battle-brothers, leaving one to face him.

  The squad sergeant called himself Otho. His forest-green battleplate was finely wrought, and he carried a long-bladed zweihander. He had, so he claimed, bested sons of Russ in two previous honour-duels, and looked forward to making the tally three.

  Haldor stood loosely, his axe in his right hand. He knew he should be concentrating, studying the way that his opponent carried himself to look for the advantage, but his mind kept roving back to the night, years ago now, under the Mountain. He could still hear the voice of his primarch, hoarse with grief, relating the tale of the first and greatest duel. Had Russ even known that the practice had kept going? Is that what he had wanted?

  'You look untested,' said Otho, breaking into Haider's thoughts.

  There it was, just as Russ had described it - the arrogance, the assumption of superiority. Otho's words immediately riled him, and he found his blood rising to it.

  'This axe has cut plenty.'

  Otho looked at it. 'That is a Legion blade,' he said, and a faint whirr gave away that his lenses had zoomed in close. 'How do you come to bear it? You do not deserve the weapon, and you cannot know its heritage.'

  At that, Haldor laughed out loud. For all his life he had suffered people telling him that, treating him like some ignorant baresark from the ice.

  And yet, he knew all about it. He had heard the tale verbatim from the mouth of a living god, one who had walked the ramparts of the Imperial Palace with the Allfather, who had broken the traitor Magnus and who had driven the Warmaster's rabble screaming back to the Eye. Even now he could still see that scarred face, streaked with ash, softly telling the saga of the Lion and Wolf under the Fang's shadow, ensuring that it would never be lost in the only way the skjalds of the Rout ever did.

  I don't want it forgotten, Leman Russ had told him.

  Haldor hunkered down for the first strike, finally gaining the concentration he needed. He would win this one. He would see the Dark Angel broken on the dust before the sunset, for now he understood the ritual, and what it meant, and why it had to continue.

  'This?' Haldor asked. 'This is the blade of Captain Alajos of the Ninth
Order of the First Legion. Then it was named Urthand, the hate-forged, and your champion had carried it for half a century of war. In the Crimson Fortress of Dulan it was taken from him, seized by the mightiest warrior to ever walk under sun and star, and he took it up, and its name was changed to Wyrdfast, the fate-caught. And in time it came to me, given freely to mark the new blood of a new age, and I have carried it across worlds to slay in the name of the Wolf King.'

  Haldor was grinning now, his every muscle singing, and Otho could sense it, for he had taken his guard.

  'For it was always his,' said Haldor, advancing, choosing the moment. 'Even now, it still remains his. He raised it against the Lord of Angels, and it broke his spirit just as it broke his battle-plate.' He couldn't stop smiling.

  'So ready yourself, son of the Lion,' he said, poised to begin the cycle again. 'This thing knows how to break you too.'

  About the Author

  Chris Wraight is the author of the Horus Heresy novels The Path of Heaven and Scars, the novella Brotherhood of the Storm and the audio drama The Sigillite. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written the Space Wolves novels Blood of Asaheim and Stormcaller, and the short story collection Wolves of Fenris, as well as the Space Marine Battles novels Wrath of Iron and Battle of the Fang. Additionally, he has many Warhammer novels to his name, including the Time of Legends novel Master of Dragons, which forms part of the War of Vengeance series. Chris lives and works near Bristol, in south-west England.

  To Hannah, with love.

  A Black Library Publication

  First published in Great Britain in 2016

  This eBook edition published in 2016 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd,

  Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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  Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.

  Cover illustration by Mikhail Savier.

  Leman Russ: The Great Wolf © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2016. Leman Russ: The Great Wolf , The Horus Heresy Primarchs, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.