by Ben Counter, Guy Haley, Joshua Reynolds, Cavan Scott (epub)
Everyone the young Ulli had ever known was in that ball of flame. The other youths spared by the Wolf Priests were ones he did not know, for the strongest of the valley’s young were kept separate lest they join their powers and try to break from the clan’s authority. Even here Ulli had been feared, because he had the strength to one day overthrow the Vulture elders and take the Valley of the Burning Stones for himself.
Ulli realised his arms were bound behind his back. He had been thrown into the remains of a burned hut, among the blackened bones of the valley’s defenders, who had fallen to the Wolf Priests in a few exchanges of gunfire and force blades. Strung along the valley walls above him were more scorched bones – not the recent battle-dead but the sacrifices the Vulture Clan had made to their gods, chained to the rocks and burned in a ritual that gave this valley its name.
The memories hurt. Ulli the Space Wolf’s memory was crammed into the young Ulli Vulturekin’s skull, sharing a space too small for it with the youth’s terrified, angry, confused mind.
Two of the Wolf Priests approached Ulli, their armoured feet crunching through the bones. Though the youth did not understand their Fenrisian dialect, the Space Wolf did.
‘We should take this one back to the Rune Priests,’ said one. He had a long and battered face, like a length of driftwood.
‘No,’ said the other. He had a black beard streaked with grey. Ulli recognised the face of Vortigan Breakbone, a senior Wolf Priest who had often presided over the feasting in the Great Hall. ‘This one will never be clean.’
Breakbone levelled a bolt pistol at Ulli’s chest.
Cold hands grabbed the back of his neck.
‘Rune Priest!’ shouted Tanngjost. ‘Brother Ulli!’
Ulli was shoved against a chill stone wall. His head bounced against the hard surface. The crystal chamber swam back into view and Vortigan Breakbone’s gun barrel was replaced with Tanngjost’s face, eyes intense, jaw set.
‘I slipped,’ gasped Ulli. ‘I was weak, just for a moment. Forgive me, brother.’
‘Your eyes rolled back and you staggered about. You were speaking a language I did not know.’
‘The corruption here is strong. It can entangle more than machines.’ Ulli put a hand to his chest unconsciously.
‘What did you see?’ asked Tanngjost.
‘The past. Do you still have Aesor’s trail?’
‘Yes. He headed further in. There are many paths ahead but I think I can follow him. I would not do it alone.’
‘Then we must move on. The greenskins outside will not wait for me to pull myself together. On, brother, on.’
SIX
The datamedium was the information core for an enormous factory, cramped and folded as if ready to unfurl into a vast foundry. Machinery of brass and stone rose in bewildering configurations, with the only light from trickles of glowing data that wound around their crystal pillars. Ulli could make out a huge brass oculus that might grind open for an army of war machines to march out of, huge turbine blades arranged in a spiral that speared down into the darkness, generators and forges that smelled as if they had lain cold for thousands of years.
Aesor’s trail was barely perceptible, but drops of corruption led further into the tangle.
‘What will this be when it awakens?’ said Tanngjost as he trained Frejya’s barrel across the shadows.
‘The only ones who know that are those who built it,’ replied Ulli. ‘If it is a weapon and the greenskin corruption takes this place, we could lose this whole world.’
Ulli’s vox chirped. ‘They are at the threshold,’ came Fejor’s voice through a crackling vox-channel. ‘I can stand my ground a moment but I must fall back.’
‘Damnation,’ said Tanngjost. ‘They don’t waste time.’
‘We will be with you soon,’ voxed Ulli. ‘Faith, brother.’
‘Take your time, Rune Priest,’ came the reply. ‘I can kill awhile at my leisure.’
Tanngjost turned to head back the way they had come, through the data cave and across the bridge.
A shifting darkness darted from nearby and hit Ulli hard in the side, knocking him off his feet. He threw out a hand to brace his fall but he found nothing and slithered off the edge of an engine block, clattering down through layers of machinery.
Ulli knew Aesor Dragon’s Head by the smell of him, tainted now with a metallic impurity something like old blood.
Aesor landed on top of Ulli, hands around Ulli’s throat. Ulli caught a glimpse of Aesor’s teeth bared, discoloured black, the whites of the pack leader’s eyes stained with dark threads like spilt ink. Ulli lifted a knee and levered Aesor off him, throwing him aside.
Ulli took stock of his environment. There was enough room to fight, but obstacles and impediments jutted out from every angle. The two Space Wolves had landed on an assembly line, with jointed brass arms and blocks of stone poised to stamp and press. Underfoot was a conveyor belt of steel segments.
‘Brother Aesor, you have taken leave of your reason!’ called Ulli. He tried to spot Aesor among the machinery but everything was tangled and confused, his mind ringing, the opaque blanket of corruption lying over his senses. ‘I am a Space Wolf, a brother of the Fang, as you are! We have found corruption here and it is your enemy. We can fight it together.’
‘Ulli Vulturekin dares speak of corruption?’ came the reply. Ulli was only vaguely aware of its direction. ‘You were steeped in it! You were born to it!’
Aesor stalked out of the shadows. He had his frost blade drawn, a trickle of blackness running down the kraken-tooth blade. Ulli got his first good look at what had happened to Aesor. The warp-born virus had found purchase in him, latching on to some impurity just as it had tried to latch on to Ulli’s memories. Aesor’s cheeks and eyes were sunken as if in death. The oily darkness oozed from the corner of his mouth and the joints of his armour. The stink on him was overpowering.
‘This is not you,’ said Ulli. ‘Aesor is in there, fighting to be free. I can exorcise this from you, my brother. I can…’
‘They killed you!’ roared Aesor.
And though he tried to will it down, the old pain flared in Ulli’s chest. The pain of those scars that had never completely healed, where the Wolf Priest’s bolt pistol had blasted a burning hole in rib and lung.
They had executed him. They had shot Ulli Vulturekin dead and thrown his body on the back of a pack animal, to be dissected at the Fang so they could understand the debasement of the Vulture Clan.
But he had not been dead. Not quite. And the strength that kept him alive had marked him as strong enough to become a Space Wolf.
‘Speak not of me,’ said Ulli. ‘The warp-virus clouds your mind. Think on yourself. Think on becoming pure. You are imprisoned, but you can be free. Aesor Dragon’s Head is no enemy of the Fang! He is a hero who will tear apart the filth that infects him!’
‘And I suppose,’ replied Aesor, ‘that if I do not, you will put down this diseased runt for the good of all?’
Ulli took out his rune axe. While a bolt pistol could kill with a good shot to the head, the rune axe gave him a better chance of an incapacitating or killing blow – but against a master swordsman like Aesor, it still wasn’t a very good chance. ‘I have my duty,’ he said.
‘You still do not understand, Vulture’s cur,’ said Aesor with a smile. ‘I cannot die.’
Ulli had studied the ways of combat enough to know the lunge was coming. It was a thrust to the upper chest, a killer if it hit true. Aesor’s frost blade lanced up at Ulli through the darkness. Ulli knocked it to the side and Aesor stepped inside his guard, driving a knee up into Ulli’s side to knock him off guard, then hooking Ulli’s left arm and throwing him over his shoulder. Ulli rolled as he hit the steel of the conveyor and Aesor followed with a downward thrust intended to skewer Ulli through the back. Ulli spun on his stomach, kicked Aesor’s front leg out from under him
and felt the frost blade shearing off a chunk of his shoulder guard as it missed by a hand’s breadth.
The two were a pace apart again as they sprang to their feet, each shuddering with the tension as they guessed and second-guessed the move the other would make.
‘I will not grow old and crippled like Tanngjost,’ said Aesor, more corruption slithering from his mouth. A tear of it ran down the side of his neck and Ulli realised it must be running from the scar where Aesor’s ear had been. ‘I will not become bitter and unheard. This flesh cannot rot. There is nothing in my future save glory and a glorious death. This is what a Space Wolf is supposed to be.’
‘You have fallen,’ said Ulli. ‘The true Aesor can rise again.’
‘I am perfect,’ came the reply. ‘None can rise any higher.’
Ulli let his psychic sense probe the edges of Aesor’s mind. It was like touching a live electrical wire. Dangerous spurts of pain sought to drive him away as the jealous corruption built its mantle around Aesor’s soul. It was pride that had let it in – a Space Marine’s sin, pride and the anger at that pride being wounded. Aesor had been at his most vulnerable when he had come across the greenskin’s machine-virus, and it had used that moment of weakness to infect him as it had infected the Aquila Ferox and the Dominus Vult. As it had so nearly infected Ulli himself.
Aesor made the first strike again, a slashing arc at waist height. Ulli drove the frost blade off with the head of his axe but that was not the real kill-stroke. Aesor spun and brought the blade around in a figure of eight, the edge slicing down at Ulli’s shoulder. Ulli ducked to one side and Aesor closed, headbutting him in the bridge of the nose.
Ulli fell back a step. His psychic sense shattered and a thousand flecks of perception flickered in his mind’s eye. For a split second, he was insensible.
Ulli brought his free hand up to grab the frost blade he knew, by some hindbrain instinct, was aimed at his chest. He caught the blade as it slid in and felt the cold line of pain across his palm as the edge sliced through the ceramite of his gauntlet.
The blade was turned aside just enough to miss his primary heart and the real target, his spine, which if severed would leave him paralysed. The point nicked his heart and punctured one lung, passing out through the backpack of his armour.
Ulli gasped. The breath opened the wound up more and heat flooded into the void the cold had left, as blood filled the ruptured lung.
‘That is for the insult, Ulli Vulturekin,’ said Aesor. ‘For the glorious death you stole from me. But the Wolf Priests did not take the time to make sure you were dead. And they failed again when you awoke and they let you live. They should have cut your throat and burned your corpse. The task they failed on that day, I will finish on this.’
‘Only if you die afterwards,’ gasped Ulli. He was still on his feet but the cold numbness was spreading through him where his armour dispensed painkillers into his bloodstream. ‘Aesor Dragon’s Head will only do to a brother what he will inflict on himself.’
Aesor paused. His hand went to the place where his ear had been.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You are no brother. You are…’
The moment of indecision had been just long enough for Ulli to draw his bolt pistol. Before Aesor could react the barrel was up and Ulli blasted three rounds into Aesor’s chest.
Aesor fell back. The breastplate of ceramite, buckled as it was, was more than enough to keep the shot from penetrating flesh and bone. But the impact threw Aesor off balance and the shock would addle even a Space Wolf’s senses for several seconds.
Ulli threw himself shoulder-first into the tangle of machinery beside him. His weight snapped robotic arms and sent components pinging in all directions. He forged through, seeking a way off the conveyor and out of Aesor’s reach. His upper body was numb and his arm would be slowed – he would be second best against Aesor in hand-to-hand combat at the best of times, but wounded he might as well lie down and die if he stayed to face him. He had to get away, to regroup, and seek out his brothers.
He forced his way through the knife-sharp edges of broken machinery, and felt his footing fall away. He pitched forward into darkness, his armoured body clattering off cogs and pistons as he fell. His head spun and he could not tell up from down until he landed, hard, on the pitted steel surface of a giant cold furnace.
Ulli Vulturekin wanted to lie there and wait for the pain to wash away. But Ulli Iceclaw was more than that witch-boy had been. He was a Space Wolf. Pain meant nothing save for the chance to overcome it. And both Aesor and the greenskins still threatened his brothers. He got to his feet, feeling the wound in his chest flare up with the movement.
Ulli had come to rest a long way down, with the thin light of the datamedium barely reaching his surroundings. His superior vision could just pick out the outlines of the huge cylindrical forge beneath him, its door yawning wide enough to admit a tank, with gigantic steel pipes and cables leading up into blackness.
Ulli willed a fragment of his psychic power into the rune axe he still clutched. The runes on its blade glowed blue-white and cast deep, long shadows around him. He could make out more of his surroundings, including one fuel pipe that led upwards in the direction of the datamedium cave and the chasm. From that direction he could hear muted gunfire and yelling greenskins, as Fejor and Tanngjost fought their battle against the attacking orks. There was no sight or sound of Aesor.
Ulli ran through the patterns of pain across his body. He was battered and bruised from the day’s fighting even without the wound Aesor had dealt him. His nose felt broken and he had to breathe through his mouth. The sword wound was deep enough not to hurt in the right way – not sharply, like torn skin and muscle should, but with the dull, cold throb of shock and severed nerves. His stomachs turned with it. Every augmentation and sleep-taught survival instinct fought to keep him functioning as a warrior.
He walked along the pipe, then climbed as it got steeper. He could feel the humming of Sacred Mountain running through the steel, rising and falling in a long, slow pattern like an immense heartbeat. And in the dark cold smell of stone and steel, he could detect the note of corruption that had come to this place with the Dominus Vult, seeping and growing.
Perhaps Sacred Mountain was strong enough, and would expel it like a body expelled sickness. Ulli hoped so. There was majesty to this place, even dormant. He understood, cradled in the mechanical darkness, why the Knightly Houses of Alaric Prime had looked on it with such awe. The first of them to explore Sacred Mountain, hundreds of generations ago, had looked on it and realised they were not yet ready to understand what it held, and ever since had stopped just short of the summit in recognition of something greater than themselves.
Huge stalactites of datamedium hung down, columns of jagged crystal fluttering with millions of lights. Even dormant, Sacred Mountain’s machine-spirit was alive, running through billions of calculations every second. Perhaps it knew it was invaded, by greenskins without and the machine-virus within. Ulli clambered onto an adjacent bundle of wires to get a closer look, for the scent of the corruption was stronger here, but with a hint of ash and burned skin.
Fingers of blackness ran down the column, but instead of reaching further down, with every moment they split up and turned into dark blotches, indistinct and fading. Lights gathered there, flaring like distant fireworks, and the tendrils of the virus were turned back or dissolved into nothing.
‘You fight back,’ said Ulli as he watched. ‘The Knights are not strong enough, but you are.’
He could feel the anguish of the virus as it was held back from the deepest cores of Sacred Mountain’s data systems. It was a fury and a frustration, skittering at the back of his mind, the sound of a prisoner screaming dulled by the walls of his cell. It was not just a collection of machine-code and warp incantations – it was a living thing, drawn from the warp and mutilated by the greenskin mech until it served as a slave wea
pon. Ulli could taste the concoction of anger and pain, frustration and hatred, all boiling through every dark tendril.
It had almost got him. It had found a way in, and had it not been for Tanngjost, perhaps it would have taken Ulli’s reason as it had Aesor’s. The wound in his chest throbbed in response to the thought. He clambered upwards, towards where a glimmer of light punctured the shadows and the sounds of battle grew louder.
Ulli had reached the entrance to the datamedium cavern, leaving a trail of coagulated blood behind him as if he had dropped handfuls of rubies to mark his path. He hauled himself up onto level ground and leaned against the cave wall. The face of the Dominus Vult stared up at him. The fire behind its eyepieces was extinguished. Black rivulets bubbled over the edge of the open cockpit, and liquid corruption had almost immersed the scorched body welded inside.
‘Fejor, Tanngjost,’ said Ulli into the vox, aware that his voice was croaking and weak. ‘Report, my brothers.’
‘They attack!’ came Tanngjost’s voice in reply. ‘Wave after wave! We have fallen back to the chasm. I thought you lost, Rune Priest, but we could use your axe with us!’
Ulli hurried through the cavern and across the bridge. At the far side, gunfire hammered and echoed across the mountain’s interior. He could make out the distinct cough of Fejor’s suppressed bolter rounds, and the chatter of Frejya fired at full-auto. And he knew well the sound of bolter shells hitting greenskin bodies.
Across the bridge, Fejor and Tanngjost had drawn wreckage of ruined ork bikes and fallen debris into a barricade. Both Space Wolves crouched there now, reloading their weapons between waves of orks. The corridor ahead of them, leading back up to the mountainside entrance, was so choked with ork bodies the floor was completely hidden and they lay three deep against the walls.
‘Brother Ulli!’ cried Tanngjost as Ulli approached. ‘Alas, you have missed the first of the killing. But there will be more than enough to make up for it. The greenskin must honour us greatly to give us so many targets for our firing range!’ His face fell. ‘You are wounded.’