by Ben Counter, Guy Haley, Joshua Reynolds, Cavan Scott (epub)
There was a response to that. A low whisper, a laugh or a curse, not a sound but a rumbling at the base of Ulli’s skull.
If the machine-curse reached the Chapter, it would enter their minds through their pride – through the sin of every Space Marine. And it was also the sin of the daemon.
The chamber began to melt away. Darkness ran down the walls. The floor shifted under Ulli, deepening into the trash-choked base of a deep ravine. Skulls and long-withered bodies lay in the detritus and Ulli caught the familiar scent of carrion and smoke.
Sacred Mountain was gone, and Ulli was somewhere else.
There was a memory that Ulli kept locked away, using the mental techniques the Rune Priests had taught him. He had not forgotten it entirely, for it was much too important a part of him to abandon. But it was dangerous, and so he had placed it behind a barrier of mental steel, shut away as the keeper of a library might shut away a blasphemous work too valuable to burn.
It was a memory that at all times would create the heresy of doubt in Ulli’s mind, except in those rarest cases when it would give him strength. Knowing the difference was a discipline he had learned in long sessions of meditation and sleep-doctrination, before the vigil of the Rune Priests who trained him.
The memory was one of the cold slab against his back, and the heat of the incinerator nearby. The sound of cracking bones and spitting fat in the flames. The sight, blurry and painful, of a stone ceiling above him, flickering orange.
He heard breathing beside him as the thrall, muscular and tanned deep bronze on his shirtless back, hauled another of the Vulture Clan dead into the incinerator.
Ulli had forced his eyes open all the way, and drawn in a weak, ragged breath in spite of the pain in his side. Bolter shell fragments, he would later learn, had lodged in his chest cavity and would need weeks of surgery to remove.
‘Stop,’ said a voice, deep and commanding. The thrall, one of the thousands who worked maintaining the Fang under the command of the Wolf Lords, halted and looked around uncertainly. ‘My lord?’ he asked.
‘This one lives,’ said the other voice. Ulli forced his head around and saw two Wolf Priests overseeing the disposal of the Vulture Clan bodies. One was the same who had shot him at the Valley of the Burning Stones, whose name he would later learn to be Vortigan Breakbone. The second wore a suit of polished black power armour with a wolf’s-skull helm, the pale bone grinning down at Ulli as the second Wolf Priest regarded him.
Then, this Wolf Priest had been a vision from a nightmare, an otherworldly power sent to judge the dead. Now Ulli knew him to be Ulrik the Slayer, the most senior Wolf Priest of his generation.
‘Damnation,’ spat Vortigan. ‘This one’s stubborn. Be warned, Brother Ulrik, he’s a witch-child.’ Vortigan drew his combat knife, as long as a sword, but a dagger in his hand.
Ulli Vulturekin had not fully understood their words, but he knew well enough their meaning. He also knew that it was no use reasoning with the man who had killed him once already.
He turned to the wolf-skull helm and forced himself to meet its eyes. Lenses of red were set into its sockets, reflecting the furnace fire. ‘Stop,’ Ulli gasped, hoping this Wolf Priest would understand enough of his tribe’s dialect. ‘You do not know what I can do.’
‘Then tell me,’ replied the wolf’s skull in a version of Fenrisian that Ulli Vulturekin could just understand. ‘But be quick. My brother here has made up his mind about killing you, and I cannot stay him for long.’
Ulli swallowed, a painful movement that reminded him how severe the wounds inside must be. And then he told Ulrik the Slayer just what Ulli Vulturekin was.
Ulli held on to the memory as the new world formed around him. This time it was not taken to a place from his own mind. He was here on the machine-curse’s terms, and it had laid out for him a vision of Hel such as the fieriest Imperial preachers would fear to conjure up.
Crevasses brimming with corpses criss-crossed the blasted landscape, reaching to the foot of the wall that bounded a massive dark city. The bodies writhed and pulsed with decay, bursting like pustules in eruptions of bile and filth, and they screamed in the drizzle of corrosive sludge that fell from a purple-black sky. Faces melted away. Hands reached out, were stripped to bone, and dissolved to nothing.
The city’s towers and cathedrals were vast organs, heaving out over the edge of their confinement like rolls of corpulent belly. Lengths of entrails slithered into the seething death, fanged mouths sucking up the decaying gore. Banners showing the symbols of the carrion insect and the gouged eye hung from the highest spurs of bone, where flocks of enormously bloated flies hung like dark clouds.
Daemons leapt and cackled on the edges of the crevasses, dragging corpses out with hooked spears and throwing them onto the stones like landed fish to be gutted, cut up, and thrown back in. Some choice heads and organs were carried to lords of their kind who sat on palanquins, snatching up the finest and gulping them down. A few were taken by messenger-daemons to the gates of the city, to be passed on for the delectation of its rulers. Each daemon was a vision of decay, a corpse bloated and rotting but animated with a gleeful purpose, and each had a single yellow eye that bled malicious light.
‘This is where you bring me?’ called out Ulli, knowing the corruption could hear him. ‘A world of daemons and decay? I am a Space Marine and a son of Fenris! I know no fear! And I saw worse than this before I left my crib. Do you seek to challenge me or to make me laugh?’
A tide rose through the rotting bodies and they swelled up into the air in a foetid column of flesh. A face formed in the mass, noseless, with three pits for eyes over a wide frog-like mouth. The whole thing was enormous, the size of a tall building.
‘You lie, Ulli Vulturekin,’ it said, though the voice was not truly sound but something conjured in Ulli’s mind. ‘You despair to know your mind will be lost in a place like this.’
‘Not as much,’ retorted Ulli, ‘as I would despair to be a greenskin slave!’
The face creased with rage. The world the corruption had created flickered and shifted, as if in its anger it lost its concentration for a moment.
‘What did it have to offer to bind you into service, daemon?’ yelled Ulli. ‘A million dead? A billion? A world for you to defile? And was it enough to make you kneel before the beast?’
The daemon’s rage rained down as scalding blood. Its eye pits caught fire, flames consuming liquefying flesh. A Space Marine had pride, but the daemon – and the machine-curse was most definitely a daemon in information form – had rage. That was another of its sins, and it was inflamed by Ulli speaking of how the greenskin must have summoned it forth and bound it into service.
The world melted around Ulli. The sky ran down the horizon like wet paint. The walls sagged under their own weight, spilling the rancid offal of the city out onto the plain. Ulli planted his feet and willed stability around him, so he stood as an island in a churning sea.
The mass of corpses fell apart. Limbs rained down and vanished, drops of corruption in the swirl of bile that now made up the world. The noxious mass churned around Ulli and he dropped to one knee, driving the butt of his axe into the ground to steady himself.
‘Now,’ said Ulli through a grimace of concentration, ‘I will show you a place of my own.’
In his mind’s eye he created it, and around him it took shape. It was a place from his youth, the substance of another toxic memory he kept locked away even more closely than the first time he spoke with Ulrik the Slayer. A cave in the Valley of the Burning Stones, cut of sharp obsidian deep into the valley wall, stifling and hot. The heat came from the fire in the centre of the room, guttering with blackened bones.
Ulli had been here as a youth. He remembered most the smell of it – even before the enhancement of his senses the stench of the burning offerings had been dizzyingly intense. Ulli was kneeling in the cave just as he had b
een when the elders of the Vulture Clan had hauled him in there and gripped his shoulders to hold him still.
The elders were there now, shadowy figures half remembered. In the flames leaped a darkness – the darkness they had called forth with the ancient sorceries of his tribe. Even then, ignorant and afraid, Ulli had known the blasphemy of that sight, the long, spindly limbs forming from the air, the many eyes winking white in its substance, the spread of ragged wings behind it filling the cavern.
‘They brought me here,’ said Ulli, still tense with concentration. The memory was delicate and the machine-curse daemon was strong, and he could not let it unravel around him. ‘They conjured it forth. The Spirit of the Burning Stones. One of your own kind. The daemon that enslaved the Vulture Tribe.’
Ulli stared into the eyes of the daemon forming in the fire. Drops of blackness spat and hissed in the fire. Trapped there in his memory was the machine-curse daemon, pinned in place by the force of Ulli’s mind. Ulli had trained for this, for endless hours in the scriptoria and breaking halls of the Fang.
‘No trick can stay me,’ spat the daemon. ‘This is my world, this place inside your head. I cannot be deceived, I who am deceit! I cannot be destroyed, I who am destruction!’
‘Every one of my people was given to the Spirit of the Burning Stones,’ continued Ulli. ‘Brought here and possessed by it, then spat back out again with their minds in ruins. But not me. I resisted it. I looked it in the eye and I cast it out of me. I was the strongest witch-child they had ever borne, and the Spirit could not take me.’ Ulli stood, his head reaching the ceiling of the cavern that had seemed so huge in his youth. ‘And they feared me! I was marked for death when the Wolf Priests came for them! Do you understand now what I can do, daemon? I can crush your kind with the power of my soul, and you are trapped in here with me! Do you despair? Do you know fear?’
‘Blasphemer!’ spat the daemon back at him. It writhed in the flame, trying to break free. Ulli felt it struggling in the back of his head, pounding the inside of his skull. ‘Wretch! Filth! The gods of the warp will tear–’
‘I am the god of this place!’ yelled Ulli, ‘You are the broken slave of a greenskin beast! And I command you to burn!’
The flames leapt up. The chamber was full of fire. The obsidian walls and the Vulture Clan elders bled away and all that remained was the flame, raging white and blue-hot.
The daemon screamed. The sound filled Ulli’s skull. It lost any shape, and with it any resemblance to the daemon Ulli Vulturekin had defied beneath the Valley of the Burning Stones. The machine-curse daemon broke apart into the information of which it was composed. Scraps of cogitator code fluttered in the fire like burning insects.
Ulli took the whole world inside him, encompassed in the obsidian cavern, and crunched it into a single diamond-hard point of knowledge. In there was contained the daemon, compressed into white-hot agony. Aside from that there was a void inside him, a pure and endless space where the daemon would find no purchase.
Ulli let his senses reel out. He had the scent of his prey already and it did not take him long to follow the trail up out of Sacred Mountain and onto the slope. He followed the stink of the corruption, the sweat and chainblade oil of a Space Wolf – Aesor Dragon’s Head, still fighting his duel with the greenskin lord.
And Ulli could sense the greenskin itself, the reeking hulk of alien muscle, its machinery belching thick smoke. Ulli perceived the burning red anger of the ork’s mind and held on to it, drawing his consciousness closer, willing the connection to become stronger.
Ulli took the prison in which he had trapped the daemon, clutching it in a psychic fist. He drew it back and willed all the strength of his arm into that mental grip.
The strength Ulli called upon was what had caused Ulrik to spare his life. It was the same quality that had denied his possession by the Spirit of the Burning Stones – the raw strength that pooled in Ulli’s mind, a reservoir of power that he so rarely had the chance to tap. Most uses would destroy him, burning out his brain or tearing a hole through to the warp. But now, with the daemon in his grasp, he could use every drop of it.
Ulli rammed the daemon into the ork’s mind. The daemon poured screaming into the ork, clashing with the furnace of hatred within the alien. The daemon took on its shape as the machine-curse and, without room in the ork’s skull, it was forced into the only place it could go: the machinery built into the ork’s body, the generators and weaponry grafted onto its spine and the back of its ribcage.
Ulli did not see what happened, but he felt it. He felt the daemon, uncaged and furious, course through the ork’s half-mechanical body. He felt the ork’s body prised apart by the force of it, the bones splintering, the organs pulping, skin and muscle tearing. Ulli could feel its pain and he felt in himself that savage joy of battle again, that spark of hot Fenrisian fury.
EPILOGUE
Ulli heard later what happened outside on the mountain slope. The other Space Wolves battling there witnessed Aesor Dragon’s Head duck a swipe of the greenskin’s cleaver and charge shoulder-first into the alien’s midriff. The ork wrapped its massive arms around Aesor and the two wrestled, Aesor forcing its jaw open with one hand while the ork tried to crush the ceramite of Aesor’s damaged armour. None of those watching could guess who would win, and struggling with the mass of greenskins further down the slope there was nothing even Wolf Lord Blackmane could do to intervene.
The machinery built in to the greenskin’s body glowed deep red, and the sizzling of its flesh added to the smoke. The ork howled, a terrible sound that shook the mountain’s peak, and flames licked from its body. Black corruption spurted from the joints of the machinery, spattering foulness across the icy rocks.
Aesor fought back, but the death grip was around him. The ork didn’t have Aesor’s skill as a master swordsman, but it was stronger than any Space Marine. Aesor couldn’t break out of the hold and as the flames grew they caught on his hair and the wolf’s-tail talismans hanging from his armour.
Then, with a sound like thunder breaking around the peak, the ork’s body exploded. The greenskin and Aesor Dragon’s Head vanished in a burst of flame and debris, and burning darkness that cast across the snow like a rain of black blood.
The greenskin horde bellowed in rage and grief to see their lord, who to them must have seemed invincible, destroyed in an instant. The Space Wolves echoed the sound as they howled in anger to see the death of the young and noble Aesor Dragon’s Head.
It was the Space Wolves who used that anger the best. Ragnar Blackmane, who was fighting alongside the Dreadnought Karulf the Wizened, vaulted up onto the shoulder of the war machine and howled out his fury. The Space Wolves took up the call and leapt into the orks with renewed anger, vengeance adding strength to their arms. The orks were shocked and shattered, and fell back in ill-ordered mobs as Blackmane dived from Karulf’s shoulder into the thick of them.
It was a few moments later that Ulli, exhausted, stumbled from the entrance to Sacred Mountain. He saw the blackened circle where Aesor and the greenskin had fought, and smelled the last wisps of the machine-curse daemon dissipating on the mountain wind. Ahead of him, down the slopes, the orks were in rout, fleeing from the Space Wolves and being chased down by the Blood Claws. Ulli held his axe out in front of him and used the last reserves of power inside him to will onto its blade the runes of hatred and rage, the purity of war, revenge and contempt.
The sun by then was low on the horizon, and the rocks around the peak cast long shadows. The burning runes made a pool of light around Ulli as he took up the hunter’s howl. He let himself forget what he had done there on Sacred Mountain, the things he had seen, the memories he had dredged up, and replaced them with the hatred of the greenskin and everything it represented.
Ulli ran down the slope at the orks. His mind was full of nothing but the desire to destroy them. The Fenrisian joy of battle was all that mattered now, and
it was with a great relief that he felt nothing else as he plunged into the fray.
An hour after the sun had set, the last ork was hunted down around the mountain peak and despatched by a Blood Claw’s chainsword. Ulli heard the sound of it dying as he cleaned the blood off his axe in the snow heaped up by one of the Stormwolf gunships. Ulli took a handful of the snow and rubbed it across his face to wash the worst of the ork blood out of his eyes. It was thick and gelid in his hair, smeared across his armour, and its taste was like a mouthful of metal.
A shadow approached, cast by the moon hanging high in the clear sky. Wolf Lord Blackmane approached. He was no older than Ulli, for Ragnar Blackmane’s rise to Wolf Lord had been faster than any in memory and the men of Fenris called him the Young King. His face was tanned and noble, the hair pulled back in a topknot of braids, and in spite of his youth his canines were already as prominent as those of a Long Fang.
‘Brother Ulli Iceclaw,’ said Ragnar. ‘You fought well today. Before we reached you, and afterwards. The Knights of Alaric Prime and your brothers alike owe you much.’
‘What victories we won here were not without their price,’ replied Ulli. He scraped a gobbet of blood from his eye with his thumb. ‘I cannot take solace in a battle well fought when of my brothers who came to this mountain, only I lived. I do not know whether to rejoice that I live, or mourn those who did not.’
‘There will be a place for both,’ said Lord Blackmane.
‘How did you find us?’ asked Ulli.
‘I am not the one to answer that,’ replied Blackmane. He pointed to a band of Blood Claws returning from the hunt. ‘Brother! Come forth.’
A familiar figure walked out of the Blood Claws – this one was not a Blood Claw, but wore the pack markings of a Grey Hunter, with the eagle’s wings badge of the sky hunter on one knee guard.
‘Sigrund!’ cried Ulli, and jumped to his feet to embrace the pilot of the Skjaldi’s Lament. ‘I thought you lost, my brother. I thought I saw you die.’