When he spoke, his voice was similarly youthful, lacking the brazen edge so obvious in the throats of all the augmented warriors present.
‘It would have been faster to teleport here, would it not?’
Grimnar shrugged, the massive wolf pelt on his shoulders seeming to shrug with him. ‘We rarely trust teleportation. Only in hours of direst need. Now speak. Why did you beg me for an audience?’
‘Beg you? Not quite, jarl. We wish to negotiate the terms of your surrender.’
Grimnar nodded, as if such words were the wisest sounds ever to leave human lips.
‘I see. And if I wish to name you an oathbreaker, a lying viper with piss for blood and an idiot boy swimming too far from safe shores – what then would you say?’
Kysnaros closed his eyes for a moment, shaking his head, the very image of patient benevolence. At his side, Lord Joros smiled, enjoying the jest.
‘Logan,’ the inquisitor replied. ‘Come now, it’s over. Will your Chapter really fight on without you?’
He laughed, the sound a brutal bark. ‘Of course. Just as your Grey Knights would. We are brothers, us and them. If only one Wolf was left alive in all of mankind’s Imperium, he’d still defy his enemies until the last breath fell from his broken body. Your knights are the same. I saw it in their eyes when we first met. I saw it when they duelled the Great Beast of Armageddon. I see it in each of them now. They know the value of blood and tears. You…’ he nodded to the diminutive inquisitor, ‘…do not. And I wonder if you realise how you scar your Grey Knights’ hearts against you, by committing them to wars they don’t wish to fight.’
I felt my mouth open, and closed it quietly. Throne aflame, he made it hard not to admire him.
+He reads us like a scroll,+ Malchadiel sent.
+He really does.+ My eyes flicked to Lord Joros, his hands resting on his sheathed blades, much in the same way Jarl Grimnar leaned on his axe. +Well, some of us.+
Kysnaros was fast losing his feigned patience. ‘Your flagship is lost.’
‘We have other ships,’ said Jarl Grimnar.
‘Your Chapter cannot hope to stand against us.’
‘No? Hmm.’ The Great Wolf looked back over his shoulder at his men. ‘The boy-lord says we can’t stand against him.’
‘Strange, my jarl,’ replied one of the scruffy Wolves – a balding warrior with shaggy sideburns. ‘We were doing well before they wiped their arses with an honourable oath of armistice.’
‘Aye,’ Rawthroat agreed. ‘We were. Perhaps we should invite them to Fenris, jarl. They’d find a warmer welcome there.’
Grimnar nodded to their words, turning back to Joros and Kysnaros. ‘Tell me, which one of you whoresons gave the order to open fire on our shieldless, weaponless vessels?’
‘It was I,’ said Joros. ‘It gave me no pleasure, but the deed was done for the greater good.’
The jarl nodded. ‘I’ve marked your face, knight. I’ll remember it from now until the Wolftime. You have my word on that. No Fenrisian ever forgets one who violates the laws of sheathed blades and bared throats. Once those laws are broken, all rules of decorum and honour are abandoned. To betray a betrayer is never counted as a sin.’
Kysnaros tied his long blond hair into a ponytail, keeping any stray strands from his face. ‘Enough of this. The Imperium’s woes will not bide while we stand here and make superstitious promises. Chapter Master Grimnar, you will surrender as agreed, and your Wolves will stand down.’
Jarl Grimnar gave us his canine smile again, showing wet fangs. ‘That,’ he said, ‘will not be happening.’
II
Lord Joros of the Eighth Brotherhood had ruled with a cautiously ambitious hand for seventy years. He was respected by those of us in his brotherhood, though scarcely loved; a warrior admired but rarely emulated.
The list of his deeds was more impressive than his unapproachable exterior might suggest. While he lacked a great many commendations for command, as a duellist and a front-line fighter, it was acknowledged across the order that few could match his reputation and skills with two falchion blades. A vital aspect in any blademaster’s repertoire is the ability to read an opponent’s movements, and react with greater speed than they can act in the first place. Joros was a master, and his reflexes were renowned.
And yet, his blades had scarcely cleared his scabbards when Logan Grimnar’s axe of blackened steel and burnished gold cleaved into our Grand Master’s breastplate and throat, ending a worthy, respectable life of service with a single crunching chop.
Joros went down, felled by the axe blow and dead before he hit the ground. The Great Wolf’s axe – named Morkai after some heathen Fenrisian superstition about a god guarding the Halls of the Dead – ripped back out, blood sizzling on its active metal surface. In the time it had taken me to look back from Rawthroat to his liege lord, my own Grand Master was slain. That should explain, at least partially, how quickly the High King of Fenris moved.
‘Hold!’ Kysnaros screamed above the rattle and clank of a hundred Grey Knights raising weapons; three hundred storm troopers shouldering their hellguns; and a host of inquisitors ready to react each according to their own proclivities.
None of us moved a muscle. None but Grimnar. The Great Wolf swung his axe once, a casual arc to spray us with flecks of our lord’s blood.
‘That’s for my ship,’ he said. ‘Do you have yet more worthless words to babble, or are we finished here?’
‘Logan… Lord Grimnar, your ship is lost and you have hundreds of weapons aiming right at your heart.’ Kysnaros stepped around the slumped, bleeding body of the former Eighth Brotherhood Grand Master. ‘It’s over. Even you can see that it’s over.’
Grimnar took a step back. ‘The only thing I see is that oath-breaking son of a whore bleeding all over his own deck. I ask again, do you have more words, more threats, to share? We both know you need me for what you intend.’
‘Surrender,’ the Lord Inquisitor said softly.
‘So you can use me as a banner of submission, to wave before the Wolves and pray it will force them to their knees? Tell me you’re not foolish enough to think that would work.’
Kysnaros sneered, adding petulance to his array of expressions.
‘Don’t make me kill you.’
‘Don’t make me laugh.’
The teleportation flare flash-blinded several of the storm troopers closest to the aura of dispersion, and caused the deck to shiver beneath our boots.
But we were ready for it. Joros had told us to stand in readiness, and the moment had come. As the distant machinery aboard the Scramaseax pulled at the physical forms of Jarl Grimnar and his men, we threaded our powers through the veil between worlds, and pulled back. It felt like trying to hold water between my fingertips; I had no idea if it was even working.
The teleportation mist thinned and faded. Grimnar, Rawthroat and the other two Wolf Guard remained in place. I could see the jarl’s reaction in that moment – how his fingers tightened around the haft of the axe, how his eyes narrowed as his mind raced. Like an animal backed into a corner, he was ready to fight no matter what. Beneath the instinctive readiness was a deeper intelligence – he was more than a warrior, he was a general calculating how much destruction he would wreak amongst his foes before finally falling to their blades.
I had no doubt he’d fight us even as we cut him to pieces. He’d gut a dozen of us before he breathed his last.
Any hesitation at all would have seen them dead or captured. We were already moving forwards, already marshalling our efforts to pin them in place with kinetic force, when Jarl Grimnar’s storm bolter barked a single cry. His three Wolf Guard fired with him, each in different directions.
The explosive bolts smashed against ceramite in a chorus of detonation, preceding a moment of gruesome silence. Four knights crashed to the decking, each of them killed outright, holes blown through their throats.
‘Hold!’ Kysnaros cried again. ‘Bind them!’
We re
leased the power we’d gathered, but even as a mere piece of the whole communion, I could feel the weakness in our shared grasp. Grimnar had known how best to hurt us. Four justicars lay dead, with their squads reeling in the bond-broken moments of psychic fallout. Their squad leaders no longer channelled their powers into a unified force. Worse, I could feel each knight struggling against the onset of pain and anger threatening to overwhelm them.
Jarl Grimnar and his Wolves burst out of existence in a storm of light. I had a momentary glance, through the shielded hangar bay doors, of the wounded Scramaseax coming about and trying to make her final attempt at an escape.
Kysnaros looked at the four dead knights, then at Joros murdered at his feet.
‘Let them go,’ he said quietly.
TWENTY-THREE
ARMADA
I
None of us really understood Kysnaros. His thoughts and the reasons for his actions remained equal mysteries.
As time passed, it became clearer to all of us on the fleet’s fringes that the Lord Inquisitor had earned his rank and title from a punishing series of small-scale crusades and street-level purges. Admirable work, no doubt. But he was ill-suited to managing a campaign of containment – especially one that was failing so catastrophically.
Worse, we’d driven the Wolves to show their teeth.
The Grey Knights destroyer Blade’s Fall drifted back to the inquisitor’s growing armada, reporting an inability to destroy its target: one of the troop vessels from Armageddon now docked at the Kyrius Expanse refuelling station. A Space Wolves cruiser patrolled around the installation hub, finally leaving with the transport when the whaleship was due to depart.
By that point, the hundred thousand men of the Uruvel Outriders had scattered across seven other vessels, departing for other warzones on other worlds. A lone Grey Knights ship had no chance of catching all of them, let alone destroying them all before they reached their destinations.
This was a story we came to hear a dozen times, each time with a different retinue of vessel names. And now, when the Wolves outnumbered and outgunned our pursuit ships, they let us know in no uncertain terms how the game had changed. The Xiphos and the Makhaira, sister ships to the Karabela, limped back to the armada’s mustering point in the same week, both reporting Space Wolves vessels not only firing on them, but firing first.
We lost contact with the Kaskara, the Spatha and the Glaive of Janus; the latter serving for almost ten thousand years as the flagship of the First Brotherhood. The Karabela was one of the ships tasked with tracking it down, and to my eternal regret, we succeeded.
The night we found her, Castor broke from the warp at the edge of the Corolus System, tracking what both Malchadiel and I could only describe as a ‘heartbeat in the warp’. Just hearing it gave me a headache – this insistent, throbbing pressure against my temples.
I knew the feeling, having sensed it once before.
‘It feels like Armageddon,’ I said to Annika. ‘It feels like dawn on Armageddon, when the battle was won and a hundred of my brothers were gone in a moment of blood and fire.’
Locating the Glaive took no time at all. She was a hollow hulk orbiting an untouched Adeptus Mechanicus listening post, serving the priests of the Machine God as a bountiful source of scrap metal if the salvage crews crawling all over her were anything to go by.
‘Kill them,’ I’d ordered. ‘Kill them all.’
Malchadiel shook his head. ‘Belay that order, Captain Castor.’ My brother stood before me, blocking my view of the parasites at their macabre work. ‘Do you wish to be responsible for making this worse, Hyperion? Really? Don’t make the Inquisition’s war your own.’
We’d solved the mystery of the heartbeat in the warp. We’d been drawn by the sound, the pressure of the sensation, only to learn it was the lingering consciousness of over fifty of our order’s most powerful knights, slain in a single blow.
‘That,’ Malchadiel had said, ‘was why it felt like Armageddon. It was the very same thing.’
II
We rejoined the armada sixteen days later, coming home to find Kysnaros’s fleet had grown yet again.
+Throne of the Emperor,+ Malchadiel pulsed when we saw what awaited us on the occulus.
‘All stop.’ Castor was out of his throne, straightening yet another brocade jacket. ‘I said all stop, damn you.’
The screen was filled by the battlements of a vast battle-barge, drifting in slow patrol. Along its red-armoured hull, white skulls were painted in unity with the stylised black ‘I’ of the Inquisition.
‘Identify yourself,’ the vox crackled, ‘or be destroyed.’
‘That seems a trifle theatrical…’ Castor said, before looking over at the both of us.
‘Identify yourself,’ I replied.
‘This is the Adeptus Astartes battleship In Sacred Trust, serving the Holy Ordos of the God-Emperor’s Inquisition. I repeat, identify yourself.’
Malchadiel looked at me. ‘God-Emperor?’
I took a breath. ‘Fanatics.’ Rare were the Chapters that ever considered the Emperor a god. Such belief was for the deluded masses we were sworn to protect. ‘This is the Grey Knights frigate Karabela, returning to the armada as ordered.’
A pause. Perhaps a relay of identification information, passed from ship to ship in search of clearance. How things had changed. We’d never before broadcast our actions across the fleet network, in keeping with our codes of secrecy. For all Kysnaros’s fervour, he was damning every human to a mind-scouring purely for the fact they’d witnessed our ships, let alone seen us in the flesh. I wondered if he was as blind to his own hypocrisy as he seemed. You could never tell with inquisitors; no other creed of human being is as apt to twist their perceptions to suit their own desires.
‘Proceed, Karabela.’
‘Identify your Chapter, if you please.’
‘We are the Red Hunters, and deeply honoured to serve our lords alongside the Knights of Titan.’
I didn’t reply. Castor terminated the vox-channel with a single switch click, and raised his immaculately trimmed eyebrows.
‘I have a question, and one I believe is relevant to the situation at hand.
‘Ask it.’
‘Your Codex Astartes lists that a Space Marine Chapter shall number one thousand warriors, does it not?’
‘It does.’ Among a million other regulations and rituals.
‘Auspex readings indicate almost twenty ships in Red Hunters colours have joined the armada. That would suggest we’re dealing with…’
I looked back at the occulus. Malchadiel joined me at the railing, as we cleared the bulk of In Sacred Trust, and bore witness to the war-fleet beyond. It was suddenly much easier to see why Kysnaros and his allies commanded such power and influence within the Inquisition.
‘Their entire Chapter is here. Kysnaros has summoned an entire Chapter.’
III
We’d been back two days before the order finally came. Another five ships were reported destroyed or assumed lost, and although his voice was thickened by reluctance, Kysnaros appeared before every officer and knight in the fleet via hololithic image.
At the end of the cold war’s eighth month, with the Terran standard calendar ready to turn from M41.444 into the new solar year 445, Lord Inquisitor Kysnaros finally ordered us to abandon pursuit of any vessel tainted by the Armageddon conflict.
None of us were surprised by his admission of defeat. After seven months of harrowing interception duty, destroying undefended outposts, annihilating civilian transports, and exchanging brief, passionless butchery with the Wolves, we’d expected his eventual capitulation.
We were wrong.
‘Fenris!’ The robed, life-sized hololith spread his arms in beneficence. ‘We shall make all speed to Fenris, home world of the treasonous Wolves. There we shall give them the ultimate choice: to serve loyally once more, after a penitent crusade of appropriate length… or to enter the sequestered archives as sinners never to be sp
oken of again.’
Fenris. The fortress-monastery of a First Founding Chapter. This was no longer a matter of skirmishes and sporadic void battles. Malchadiel looked at me in disbelief.
+Civil war,+ he sent from the other side of Captain Castor’s throne.
What could I say to that? I nodded in agreement, unwilling and unable to lie to my brother.
IV
For the first time in months, I went to Annika before she could come to me.
I didn’t wait on ceremony or manners – I didn’t even knock on her chamber door. The bulkhead rolled open at my psychic pull, and I walked right inside.
During the more than a year of our companionship, I’d grown closer to Annika than I had to any other human I could recall. Not counting my former life, she was practically the only human I’d ever conversed with in depth, beyond a few long discussions with Captain Castor over games of regicide.
I’d touched minds with her a thousand times and more – at times both apt and awkward. Once, she’d been painting a scene of her home world with an amateur’s eager hand, and had refused to speak to me for days after I’d distracted her at a crucial moment. Another time, I’d touched her mind the same moment as Clovon was touching her flesh, and I’d immediately recoiled with my skin crawling. On yet another occasion, I’d interrupted her in a fistfight with Darford, and my voice in her mind had interfered enough with her focus that she’d had her nose broken.
I’d trained with her myself, watching the play of her muscles as she sparred, and smelling the scent of her sweat from across the room. Even a healthy animal like Annika tired so much faster than a knight ever did. I found that fascinating, to see the differences of Adeptus Astartes physiology highlighted in such stark, visible terms. It’s one thing to be considered divine. It’s quite another to see comparative evidence.
I’d also listened to her speak of the ordos and their politics. I’d heard tales of her past purges and operations that went awry. I’d learned Fenrisian curse words from her lips, and taught her many of the myriad ways of blocking incoming blows with a quarterstaff.
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