by Ben Counter, Guy Haley, Joshua Reynolds, Cavan Scott (epub)
‘You are not parade-ground-ready yourself,’ replied Ulli. Both Tanngjost and Fejor were covered in ork blood, and their armour was dented and scored from a dozen close calls. Their faces were bloody, some of it their own. ‘I have two working hands, both with trigger fingers. I can fight.’
‘It is your mind we need as much as your hands,’ replied Tanngjost.
‘What of the Pack Leader?’ asked Ulli. ‘He has lost his mind. He dealt me this blow and I could not pursue him.’
‘He vaulted our barricade and ran on,’ said Tanngjost. ‘There was darkness on him, and not just the corruption. What has happened to him?’
‘The same that happened to the Dominus Vult and the Aquila Ferox. It almost happened to me, brother.’
‘I always thought,’ said Fejor, ‘that if one of us was to fall, it would be me. No right mind takes such pleasure in killing as mine. Of all of our pack, it was Aesor I would have trusted to stay righteous, and to be the one to put me down when I fell.’ He broke a smile, the first time Ulli had seen him do it, and a very different man showed through for a moment. ‘But I do not think I have long to wait before the greenskin does that job for him.’
‘If Aesor brings this disease back to the Chapter,’ said Ulli, ‘we could lose much more than Alaric Prime.’
Greenskin war-cries echoed down from the mountainside, rising and falling rhythmically. Steel clashed on steel. Engines revved.
‘They’re coming again,’ said Tanngjost. He checked the load in his weapon. ‘Frejya is thirsty,’ he said. ‘We are running low on ammunition. This one will be settled with teeth and knives.’ He drew his pair of combat knives and held them out to Ulli. ‘My two little girls,’ he said. ‘When their mother tires of the fight, they will finish it.’
Ulli let the old runes form in his mind. A Fenrisian prince, a famed hunter and horseman, had been buried in a tomb inscribed with sigils of swiftness, prescience of combat, and the knowledge to strike once and for the kill. These runes appeared on the blade of one knife and glowed deep red. The other received the symbols of spite and revenge, for they came from the monument to a queen of Fenris who, in ages past, had been quick to anger and to seek vengeance, and whose rule lasted a hundred years as a result.
Tanngjost’s old face, with old spiral scars and fresh battle-wounds, was lit up by the light of the runes. They glittered in his eyes. ‘Just what they needed,’ he said.
Fejor rarely fought with his chainsword, always killing at long range when he had the option. But he had only a few stalker shells left, and so he handed his chainsword to Ulli for rune-striking. It was a compact marque, used on boarding missions and other occasions where close confines made a longer weapon a liability. It resembled a workman’s tool more than a Space Marine’s weapon of choice. Ulli gave it runes of raw power and strength, steadfastness and the ignorance of weakness, taken from the great necropolis of Fenrisian fortress-builders.
The roaring of engines signalled the approach of the greenskins. The din grew louder and mingled with the screaming of the orks, whipped up into a killing frenzy.
A single ork was a stupid and ill-disciplined creature. But orks, a tribe or army of them, when directed by one with willpower and cunning became a green tide that no defence could stand against. That was how they fought, wave after relentless wave of them, brutality incarnate. That was how their leader intended to grind down the last Space Wolves who stood against him on Sacred Mountain.
They did not care how many of their own they lost. There were always more orks.
The orks must have fought among themselves for the right to be the first in this wave. The winner was a scarred veteran, its lower jaw replaced with a slab of jagged metal, clinging to the handlebars of the smoke-belching bike beneath it. It had a massive industrial claw clamped over its left arm and waved it like a banner as it hurtled towards the barricade.
Two of Fejor’s last few stalker shells knocked the greenskin off its bike, sending it somersaulting backwards off the saddle. The bike careened off the wall and skidded on its side into the barricade, throwing wreckage everywhere. The bike screeched past Ulli in a spray of sparks. A dozen orks charged in the biker’s wake, wielding cleavers and hammers. Ulli blasted at them, unable to miss the wall of green flesh with a volley of bolter shots. They fell and tumbled, but more followed, yelping with joy that they were the new front line.
Tanngjost jumped up onto the remains of the barricade. ‘My blades are far too sharp!’ he yelled. ‘Which of you will help dull their edge?’
And then the orks were on them. A howling press of bodies, of cleavers rising and falling, of teeth and claws raking at power armour. Ulli lashed out with his axe, feeling the shudder up his arm as a head came free of its shoulders. His backstroke cut through an arm.
Ulli had always been apart from his fellow Space Wolves. He was a Rune Priest, and they all held their own counsel, but even among them Ulli was the one who had been marked for extermination and had survived. It was the word of Ulrik the Slayer, the most respected Wolf Priest in the Chapter, that had saved him from being clubbed to death and thrown into the Fang’s incinerator. Though none of them spoke it out loud, many in the Chapter thought Ulrik had taken too great a risk and should have completed Ulli’s execution himself. And so Ulli had never been close to the heart of his Chapter, never the foremost reveller at the feasting, never held up as the image of a Space Wolf.
But he was still a Space Wolf, and deep within there was the spark of Leman Russ’s own fury that Ulli could not deny. It rarely came to the surface but it was there, scratching at the back of Ulli’s mind. It was the savage-born warrior, the berserker, the sheer joy of battle that had driven the Primarch to so many victories. It was at odds with the studious mind of the Rune Priest, and so Ulli had caged it, but it had never left him. And in the scrum of greenskin fury, he set it free.
He let the joy of battle kindle inside him as he brought his axe down on the head of the ork that lunged at him, splitting its skull down to the jawbone. It caught fire as he rammed his bolter into the mouth of another ork and blew out its throat. By the time two greenskins leapt onto him and tried to pin him to the ground, he was aflame with it.
Ulli howled with joy. It overcame the pain of the wound running through him. He reared up to his full height, throwing off the orks, letting his bolter fall on its strap and catching one by the neck. He dashed the ork’s brains out against the engine block of the fallen bike beside him. Hot blood spattered over his face and he revelled in the feeling like the most vicious Blood Claw, letting himself forget the iron discipline of his calling and allowing the rage of a Fenrisian son to boil over.
Another ork fell to an elbow shattering the side of its face and the rune axe’s blade carving up through its sternum. Ulli kicked down on another and stamped on its chest, grabbing the grip of his bolter and hammering three shots into it point blank.
Blood was thick and sticky underfoot. It misted in the air and ran down Ulli’s face. It pooled in his eyes and he saw through it as if through a pane of red glass. In the back of his mind a wolf howled, exulting in the freedom it finally had to drive Ulli’s fist and blade into the body of any ork that got within arm’s length.
Through the melee, he glimpsed Tanngjost’s twin blades puncturing torsos and eye sockets. He could hear, amid the orkish bellowing and snapping bones, the screeching of Fejor’s chainblade against bone. But they felt far away, the combatants in three battles separated by an ocean of greenskin flesh. Ulli’s battle was a cauldron of fury and blood, seething with broken bodies falling away from his axe.
The symbols on the blade glowed deep red now, drinking the fury in the air without Ulli having to will it. The weapon hungered in the hand of the wolf, coming alive with every spray of blood across its runes. Ulli rode the wave of it, and let the axe swing as if it were leading his hand and not the other way around.
He shouldered an
ork against the fallen bike, and gloried in the breaking of its ribs. He kneed another in the jaw and whooped with joy as its fangs were driven up into the base of its brain.
The tide hammered home, body after body, corpse after corpse. Ulli lost sight of his packmates in the throng. There was nothing but the stink of torn bodies and the din of dying greenskins.
Ulli felt space open around him. He drew in a panting breath. His body finally told him how far he had pushed it. His throat was bubbling with blood from his torn lung, and the fires of pain ran up and down the channel punched through his chest. Every joint was wrenched and every muscle was pulled. The pain combined into a red veil that hung over his body, dulled by his augmentations and painkillers, heavy as stone.
The greenskins had stopped pressing forward. Their dead were waist-high around Ulli, and bodies tumbled off one another as he kicked himself free of them. He was slick with blood from head to toe.
The barricade and the wreck of the first ork’s bike were buried in bodies. Blood was sprayed up the walls and dripped from the ceiling. Ulli looked around to see the passageway choked with greenskin corpses in both directions. A few groans and dying whimpers came from the bodies.
He could not see his battle-brothers. He called out their names, and his own voice was dull in his ears. There was no reply.
Ulli hauled greenskin bodies away, digging in the places he had seen his fellow Space Wolves last. He spotted a chainblade sticking up from the mass and hauled corpses aside to reveal Fejor Redblade, lying face down. Ulli turned him over and saw his breastplate had been carved open by an orkish cleaver or power claw, and the red ruin within had been torn by teeth and claws. Fejor’s jaw was still clenched and set, for he had died denying the pain, fighting on without showing the enemy they had hurt him. His eyes were open. Ulli lifted Fejor off the ground and propped the body against the wall.
A sudden desperation seized Ulli. He dived into the bodies where Tanngjost had fought, where they were piled high and sliced apart by his twin blades. The wounds on the orkish bodies were still smouldering with the power of the runes Ulli had etched on Tanngjost’s knives. Ulli’s body complained as he dug in a frenzy, like a starving animal clawing through frozen earth.
Ulli’s hand closed on ceramite – a gauntlet. He grabbed and pulled, and Tanngjost’s body came free, heaved up through the broken limbs and sundered bodies. It was slick and dripping with ork blood.
Unlike Fejor, Tanngjost had died with his fury written across his face. His lips were drawn back, showing the elongated canines grown by every ageing Space Wolf. It could have been any one of a score of wounds that had finally killed him – cleaver wounds into his chest, one leg shattered and bent unnaturally, a deep cut to his scalp, punctures through his back and abdomen. Dried blood beaded, jewel-like, where he had bled and fought on.
Ulli held Tanngjost’s body and shuddered. All the pain caught up to him at once. The red veil dissolved into a million points of pain spreading through his body, pooling in his joints and the wound in his chest, sparking through the back of his mind. For a moment it was overwhelming and Ulli felt he would pitch over into the mass of bodies, his augmented organs finally failing and his mind shutting down, and that he would die alongside his brothers there in Sacred Mountain.
But the Fenrisian cold would not melt away. It demanded Ulli rise and stay alive, just as it had done during his Blooding, just as when his heart had refused to stop beating when he was executed with the rest of the Vulture Tribe. Ulli did not die but threw back his head and howled, and the sound echoed down to the heart of Sacred Mountain and back again.
The sound of mourning scoured away the red veil. When Ulli opened his eyes the pain was gone, replaced with a deep chill that filled him. His skin prickled with sensitivity and his throat was raw with the cold air.
He laid Tanngjost Seven Fingers alongside Fejor Redblade. The gene-seed organs of both Space Wolves were still intact. Ulli let himself take solace in that. Whatever happened, the flesh of Russ would be taken from their throats and implanted into a new Space Wolf. Their spirits would never truly die.
The orks had stopped. Though the three Space Wolves had killed many indeed, it was just a fraction of the army that had remained after the avalanche. But they had stopped, and it was not at all like the greenskin to hold off in their assault when an enemy still lived. They should still be pouring in to defile the bodies of the Space Wolves, and charge on into Sacred Mountain to loot and destroy.
The dullness of Ulli’s senses was gone, and his ears pricked when he heard a familiar sound. It was the roar of engines, the engines of a Stormwolf gunship that could carry a squad of Space Wolves into the heart of battle.
He heard bolter fire and the howling of Fenrisian wolves loosed at the prey. He heard a hunting horn sounded.
Ulli clambered free of the bodies and ran for the entrance to Sacred Mountain. The air was heavy with the stench of newly shed blood, and the rankness of greenskin flesh. The floor was slick with blood and frost. The bodies ran right up to the entrance where Fejor and Tanngjost had begun the fight before falling back. Framed against the stark blue sky, Ulli saw another drop pod falling towards the mountain slope, in the grey livery of the Space Wolves, with its landing jets firing.
The pod bore the markings of Ragnar Blackmane, the Wolf Lord of his Great Company. Reinforcements from below had arrived, in force, eager for revenge.
Ulli reached the entrance, and below him unfolded the whole scene.
The Space Wolves had landed scattered around the lower slopes, their drop pods deployed from a modified Thunderhawk gunship that circled above. They were fighting as they unbuckled their grav-harnesses and leapt from the pods. Grey Hunters formed firing lines mowing down the orks that had broken off their attack on the mountain to storm down the slopes towards the new threat. Blood Claws, with bright red and yellow markings on their armour, shrieked battle-cries and ran with chainswords drawn at the closest orks. A Dreadnought stomped free of its clamps and levelled its assault cannon at the greenskins.
Ulli spotted Lord Ragnar Blackmane himself leaping free of his grav-restraints and drawing his frost blade, which flashed like a bolt of lightning. Blackmane was accompanied by Ulrik, the eldest of the Wolf Priests, his face hidden by his wolf’s skull helm, and a squad of Wolf Guard in Terminator armour hung with trophies and honours. Ulli’s heart should have leapt to see his Wolf Lord come to bring destruction to the greenskins, but the deaths of his battle-brothers were too raw in his mind to let in any joy.
He heard a familiar howl, one that echoed around the peak even above the gunfire and war-cries from below. On the promontory stood Aesor Dragon’s Head, his own frost blade raised, not in salute to Blackmane but in challenge. In the greenskin throng Ulli saw the ork leader stop in its charge forward and return the challenge, raising its cleaver high and bellowing a wordless response.
Aesor wanted his duel with the greenskin. He would die here fighting it, or defeat it and live on forever sustained by the corruption inside him. He could not lose.
Ulli knew the path the future would take if Aesor won. The Space Wolves would run to him and embrace him as a victorious brother, and they would all be exposed to that corruption – all those sons of Fenris who did not have the protection of a Rune Priest’s psychic discipline. How many would fall to the corruption entering their minds through their greatest flaw? It would return to the Chapter, that corruption, perhaps to the Fang itself. And if the greenskin won the duel it would continue its campaign on Alaric Prime, escape the mountainside in the confusion of battle and take its machine-curse to the Imperial Knights fighting below.
Whoever won that duel, the Space Wolves and this world would suffer for it. Both Aesor and the greenskin had to lose.
They both had to die.
Ulli could not fight them himself. He was a poor opponent for Aesor or the ork at the best of times and now he was exhausted
and wounded. His fellow Space Wolves were too far away to intervene, and even if they could, would they kill Aesor before they were exposed? Ulli had seen what Aesor had become. Blackmane and the rest of the Great Company had not. No Space Wolf would stay his hand when the kill was necessary – except if the kill were of one of his own. Even Ragnar Blackmane might hesitate.
Ulli had to do it himself, and this time his rune axe would not help him. He leaned against the rock, almost robbed of all his strength by the weight of what he had to do.
The ork bounded up to the promontory and bellowed a war-cry. Aesor howled in reply. The ork vaulted onto the rocky spur and slashed at Aesor, who parried and stepped aside. The duel had begun. There was no more time.
Ulli drew in a breath of the cold mountain air, felt it run like freezing water through his ruined lungs, and ran back into Sacred Mountain.
SEVEN
The datamedium cavern had escaped the bloodshed. The orks had not got that far before Blackmane’s assault drew them away. The Dominus Vult still lay in its pooling blackness. The charred eye sockets of the dead baron watched Ulli as he limped into the chamber. The sounds of battle were little more here than a dull crackle of distant gunfire.
Ulli knelt on the floor and laid his axe beside him. He tried to divine some reaction to his presence, some flicker of recognition against his psychic sense.
‘You tried to take my soul,’ he said quietly. ‘You were nearly successful. That was when you found your way into my mind with perfidy and deceit. Now, I bid you enter.’
He felt nothing. A drop of blackness, like glistening tar, dripped from the Imperial Knight’s faceplate onto the crystal floor.
‘My brother saved me,’ continued Ulli. ‘But he lies dead and I am alone. We both know you can break me. And we both know you cannot turn down a mind like this to ravage. An Imperial psyker, a Rune Priest of Fenris. How many of your kind ever claim a trophy like me?’