Born of Flame

by Nick Kyme

  He was a legionary, that much was certain, but so barbarously dressed only his size and his bearing separated him from the lesser men in their furs and leathers labouring alongside the Terran work gangs. A wolf pelt hung from heavy silver brooches set at his shoulders. The skin lay over a full suit of close-fitting leather that covered him head to toe. The dozens of expertly cut panels mimicked the exposed musculature of a flayed man. It was the brown of flesh left to desiccate in dry highlands. Armour was a generous word for it. The leather was hard, but too full of joins and easy holes for swords to find to offer real protection, and would give none at all against more advanced weapons. But it was impressive. Firelight caught on the edges, gleaming off the involute knotwork covering every part. A mask fashioned into a bestial muzzle hid the warrior’s face. Eyes glinted in the darkness beneath. The flash of a hunting beast’s eyes from the thicket before a furred weight bears you to the ground and hot breath heralds death.

  The figure approached. Loken instinctively braced for combat.

  The warrior’s red beard parted to show fanged teeth, and he laughed.

  ‘My friend!’ said the warrior. ‘You are a little edgy today. I bid you welcome to the Hrafnkel, flagship and domain of Leman Russ, the Great Wolf, the Wolf King, the Lord of Winter and War!’

  Confusion overtook Loken.

  ‘Bror Tyrfingr, is that you?’

  ‘Aye, who did you expect?’ Bror slapped Loken hard on his pauldron. ‘The Allfather Himself?’ Bror held out his hand. Loken took his forearm. Leather glove gripped ceramite plate. ‘It is good to see you, Loken.’

  ‘When you left Titan, I thought you might never come back. I see I was right.’ Loken gestured at Tyrfingr’s leather suit. ‘You are leaving us then,’ he said. ‘To rejoin your master.’

  ‘No, no, my friend,’ said Bror. ‘I was commanded by my king to join Malcador’s private army, and there I will remain until told otherwise. My loyalty is to the regent now. He is my jarl,’ he said, the foreign word a wet, guttural growl in his throat. ‘But Leman of the Russ will forever be my primarch. He is my father. I visit with him to renew bonds of kinship and fealty, and to discuss the coming attack upon the Warmaster. I will return to Malcador’s side soon enough. We shall fight together again, you and I, I swear it.’

  Loken suspected Bror had returned to report on his new master to his old. Russ had a hunger for intelligence that matched Malcador’s. He refrained from saying so.

  ‘Why are you dressed in that way?’

  ‘Ha!’ Bror slapped the leather panels covering his iron-hard stomach. ‘Like a member of the Vlka Fenryka you mean?’

  ‘This is what Space Wolves wear?’

  ‘When we are among our own, aye.’ Tyrfingr glanced up. ‘My friend, I advise you, only those not of Fenris use the term “Space Wolf”.’

  ‘I apologise if I disrespect you,’ said Loken.

  There had always been bonds of brotherhood between the different Legions. The Space Wolves defied them in their oddness. They were a breed apart, as isolated as the Khan’s White Scars, and more savage. They were made of the same raw matter, Loken and Tyrfingr, but the mould they were stamped from was so very different.

  ‘If I took offence at that,’ said Bror, ‘I would have to commit to feud with the entire galaxy. Just try not to say “Space Wolf” aboard this ship. You will seem ignorant. The Rout does not take kindly to ignorance, and they will not take you seriously.’

  They left the embarkation deck by a set of large doors and headed upwards into the ship. Loken had been aboard many Gloriana-class vessels. They were all of a pattern, but the Space Wolves had made the ship their own as much as they possibly could, tearing it bloodily from the grasp of reason and refashioning it in their own, superstitious tribal image. Other Legions favoured polished stone, gleaming metal and glass to line their halls. The Space Wolves covered the metal walls with carved wood and bone sheets so large they could only have been harvested from monsters. The greater halls had elaborate interiors of wolf-headed posts and panelling decorated with entwined beasts whose contortions inevitably ended in the fanged mouths of their fellows. Even lesser ways too unimportant for wholesale decoration acknowledged the character of the Legion: mossy rocks in bubbling pools of water, bunches of dried herbs tied up in bundles hanging from the ceiling, primitive weapons chained to the walls, as if imprisoned.

  For all its size, the Hrafnkel had the atmosphere of a chieftain’s hall. The air was scented with smoke and poorly preserved meat, herbs, burned fat, wet fur, and the hot, musky smell of animals sleeping in their dens.

  Its corridors were as likely to be lit by flickering torches as they were lumen strips or biolume panels. Fire bowls guttered in the suction winds of atmospheric recyc units, the walls behind them furred with soot.

  ‘You like it dark,’ said Loken.

  ‘Too much light dulls the senses,’ said Bror. ‘If you think this is dark, you would hate the Aett.’ Another phlegm-rich word, more growled than spoken. If the Fenrisian language had a relationship to Imperial Gothic, it was obscure.

  ‘The what?’

  Tyrfingr chuckled throatily. ‘The Fang. They call it the Fang. Only don’t say that either. It’s the Aett, or nothing.’

  The illusion of a savage king’s demesne would have been total had it not broken in many places, showing the technology beneath. Patchwork repairs made after Alaxxes had been undone by the ship’s recent forays beyond the Solar perimeter. New scars piled atop old wounds; the ship was damaged through and through. Whole sections were sealed off. Drifts of wood ash intermingled with mortals’ bones where fires had broken through bulkheads and torched compartments. In other sections, the Space Wolves’ primitive cladding had been ripped out to enable access to the guts of the ship. Beating hammers had the Hrafnkel shivering with a fever’s trembles. It was a giant beast, wounded close to death. It would be decades before it was brought back to its full capabilities.

  Loken had heard Leman Russ intended to leave within the week.

  Tyrfingr took Loken further into the ship, and the damage became less apparent, though it was never entirely absent. They ascended damp stairways and lifters whose mechanisms struggled against shafts bent out of true. After a time they reached the spinal way, the great stem-to-stern thoroughfare that all grand starships possessed.

  Even there, below the towering windows, where a transit monorail ran with shushing haste, and ornate gates led to the palaces of astrotelepathy, astrogation, weapons control, the enginarium and other vasty domains, the sense of a primitive settlement remained strong. Every few hundred metres carved menhirs, their bases still dirty with alien soil, stood sentinel in recesses which in other Legions’ ships statues might occupy. Loken had seen few of Bror’s brothers until they reached the spinal way, where they thronged in some numbers. Most wore segmented leather costumes and masks. They were similar to Bror’s in the broadest sense, but no patterns were the same. Each was a unique expression of the warrior encased inside. The leather suits were more individual to each man than a human face. Fantastic beasts fashioned from hide stared at Loken as he walked by, and he felt out of place in his clean, grey power armour. Those few legionaries wearing their war gear were hardly less outlandish, for the storm-grey battleplate was decorated with twisting patterns, hammered runes, ropes of teeth, and the tips of wolf tails mounted in cast, angular brasses.

  Bror took Loken aboard a crew train crammed with thralls. Many of them wore costumes as heavily decorated as those of their masters, and Loken guessed these were the higher ranking kaerls of the Chapter. The monorail accelerated mercilessly, turning the spinal way to a blur.

  They reached the command spire soon after, and headed on towards the Wolf’s Hall, Leman Russ’ throneroom.

  The long defensive corridor leading to the hall was lined solely with enormous sheets of ivory. The place was populated by the Varagyr, who other men called the Wolf Guard. These heavily decorated Space Wolves Veterans stood guard outside the hall, th
ough Loken would have applied that term only loosely, because they did not stand at rigid attention, but congregated in clumps of two or three, talking with each other in the uncouth Fenrisian tongue as loudly as revellers, seemingly inattentive to their task. Not even their livery had any consistency to it. The Legion badge of a red, snarling wolf upon the heraldry plate of the left pauldron was the only commonality. In other places of prominence Loken saw double-headed wolves, rearing wolves, howling wolves and all manner of wolves besides.

  ‘My lord does not stand on ceremony,’ whispered Bror, seeing the look on Loken’s face. ‘We don’t do parades.’

  ‘I see,’ said Loken.

  ‘Better to be loyal and a little rough than polished drillmasters with treacherous hearts, eh?’ Bror said.

  His words came across as a direct challenge, until Bror elbowed Loken and grinned. His elbow thudded off plasteel. Even though Loken wore his own armour, he was glad Bror wasn’t wearing battleplate.

  ‘These here are the Wolf Guard of the Einherjar, the jarl’s inner circle. They are here to honour you. All this is for your benefit.’ Bror raised a hand and grinned at a fellow of his. The warrior was dressed in his power armour without his helm, and had his face covered by a leather mask like Bror’s. He nodded in response.

  ‘I am honoured,’ said Loken.

  ‘You should be,’ said Bror.

  Loken was sincere. He was honoured. Once he would have dismissed the force as savages, regarding his own Legion as far superior. That was before the Luna Wolves had become the Sons of Horus, and the Sons of Horus had become traitors. Russ’ wolves, the true wolves, had proved the more faithful.

  They passed through the throng of warriors, having to beg pardon so they could go between them. There was no sense of discipline to them at all, but Loken knew this concealed a terrifying prowess in war.

  Braziers gave off a suffocating heat. Firebowls burned animal oils that furred the ceiling with fatty deposits. At the far end of the corridor huge, circular ivory doors barred the way. A serpent ran around the outside, framing in its circle of scales a tempestuous sea crammed with monsters and foundering wooden ships. The serpent’s mouth was clamped firmly around its own tail. Loken recognised the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of eternity, but he had never seen a representation like this before.

  ‘Bror Tyrfingr!’ roared a bearded giant. He wore a leather suit like Bror’s and smelled like the cave of a hibernating bear. He grappled Bror, a half-wrestle, half-embrace that had the pair of them staggering about the corridor. Loken was forced to step back to avoid their boisterous greeting. The men grunted as they pushed at each other, before collapsing into laughter and hugging fiercely.

  ‘Ah, brother Loken,’ said Bror, his arm hung around the shoulders of the warrior. ‘This is Varagyr Kettril Modinsson, called Dourface, of the retinue of Hvarl Red-Blade, the Jarl of Sepp.’

  Kettril gave Loken a massive, infectious smile. ‘The lone wolf,’ he said. He held out his arm. Loken took it, only to be pulled into an embrace he would rather have avoided. He got a mouthful of musty pelt before Kettril released him.

  ‘It is a privilege to meet you, brother, wolf to wolf,’ said Kettril.

  ‘I have no brotherhood, not anymore,’ said Loken, a statement that caused Kettril to pull him close again.

  ‘Never say that again,’ Kettril whispered. ‘We are all wolves of the Emperor here. If you find yourself lacking in a good warrior to watch your back,’ he nodded his head towards Bror in jest, ‘you can call on me. This I swear by the fires of the world forge.’

  ‘I thank you,’ said Loken, unsure of what to say.

  ‘The Einherjar have gathered to the Wolf King,’ said Kettril to Bror. ‘Speak clearly and with pride,’ he said to Loken. ‘And leave nothing out.’

  Kettril whistled shrilly between his teeth. The doors opened. Beneath the ivory cladding were standard adamantium blast doors, thick and proud as those of any ship. This epitomised the Space Wolves, Loken thought. The deception of iron hidden under primitivism.

  ‘Go on then,’ said Kettril. ‘Do not keep the Lord of Winter and War waiting.’

  The hall beyond was huge, but the number of warriors and the way they clustered in its centre made it seem small and intimate. The heights of the ceiling were lost in smoky darkness. A few lancet windows let in enough of Terra’s earthshine to reveal the carved monsters lurking at the tops of pillars. Loken wished they had remained hidden. They reminded him of unclean things he had seen aboard the Vengeful Spirit.

  Firebowls and resinous torches were the sole sources of light. Tiny lumen indicators on power armour blinked in the dismal hall, shifting like sparks as their bearers moved. Tyrfingr pushed his way to the front through two score feral warriors. There were lords there aplenty, and other Legiones Astartes sporting primitive bone charms over their power armour who could only have been Leman Russ’ famed priests. Many of the company wore the Rout’s strange leather masks. A couple had helms fashioned in the shape of wolf skulls. The masks danced in the flickering light, making the hall appear like an underworld populated by lost gods. Only a handful of the warriors were barefaced, but they looked as uncanny and fierce as the others.

  Upon a throne of bones sat the Wolf King. Bror led Loken towards the primarch without ceremony. Men were coming and going from various smaller doors in the sides of the hall, and the primarch paid no attention to his visitor until he was announced.

  ‘My jarl!’ Bror called, shoving past a black-armoured barbarian. ‘I have him, I have brought you the last loyal Luna Wolf!’

  Approaching the Wolf King was like striding towards a storm. The light changed. The air changed. Subtle pressures played upon little-used senses, those that warned of impending misfortune. They were the senses that told a woman her son was lost in battle, that alerted a child to the danger hiding in the dark. The world became a different place in the presence of Russ, less certain, more primal. Stepping close to him was to step back in time to man’s distant past, when fire kept beasts from the cave, and every boulder had a name.

  Russ broke off his conversation with his advisers and surged to his feet.

  ‘Fenrys hjolda!’ he shouted. ‘Garviel Loken, back from the den of the arch traitor himself. You are not as dim as I thought if you survived that expedition!’ His taunt was delivered with a smile. ‘Come to me, loyal son of the Emperor.’

  To have Russ turn his full attention on you was like attracting the personal enmity of a storm. Barely less imposing were the enormous wolves flanking his throne, one black, the other silver. Their majesty beggared belief; it was hard to imagine creatures such as they existing at all outside the mind of a dramaturge. The head of the smaller – and it was only ever so slightly smaller – would have reached Loken’s shoulders if it stood. They stared at him through narrowed yellow eyes. The black curled its lips, showing fangs more like swords than teeth. Upon its head was a bald patch of knotted pink scar.

  He dearly wished it would not stand.

  Though the name of his beloved, dishonoured Legion evoked creatures like them, Loken did not like these wolves.

  On the wall behind Russ was hung a large spear. A haft as thick as a comms array’s sounding pole terminated in a sculpture of a snarling wolf. From the mouth protruded a sword-long, leaf-headed blade of shining gold. Fine knotwork crawled all over the plated plasteel. Slung under the wolf’s body was the vented box of a disruption field generator, the power transmission cabling and field dispersal studs cunningly hidden by the decoration. There were subtler technologies woven into the blade besides. It was a psy weapon, a thing of the Lord of Mankind, come out of His forges and suffused with His mastery of science and the warp. Even inactive, it gave off a particular feel, a resonant echo of the Emperor’s presence, that bred unease and filled the hearts of men with dark foreboding.

  Leman Russ hated it. Somehow, Loken could tell that. Russ leaned away from where it hung. It was situated too far from his throne for him to seize to defend himself
, whereas his other weapons, his giant-sized bolter and monstrous frost blade, were close to hand. More than once the Wolf King glanced at it sidelong, as if he did not trust it to remain where it was.

  Bror Tyrfingr knelt at the feet of his lord, the sole true sign of deference Loken had witnessed thus far in his time upon the Hrafnkel.

  ‘Get up, Bror,’ boomed Russ, waving his hand widely. ‘I won’t have Loken here trotting back to the old man and describing my sons as grovelling wretches.’ He grinned savagely at Loken. ‘You will be reporting, won’t you? That sly old hound has his eyes everywhere.’

  ‘So do you, I think,’ said Loken.

  Russ smiled at Bror. ‘We have nothing to hide in the Rout, eh, my sons? Tell Malcador what you like. Perhaps if you do he might stop bothering me with his questions.’

  Shouts and mutters of agreement sounded from around the room. Loken estimated there to be a hundred or so warriors in the hall. Not only Russ’ council of jarls and his priests, but the Legion’s equivalents of Chaplains, Forge Marines and Apothecaries also. Without his helm display he could not be sure. He doubted he would have dared activate it even if he had his helmet on. The Wolves might have overreacted to the clumsy, unintended slight of a curious augur sounding.

  ‘Someone get this man a seat!’ said Russ. ‘And some mjod!’

  A chair was produced. Russ gestured that Loken should sit. A bronze drinking horn was passed into his hands. At Russ’ urging Loken sipped the liquid. It burned his mouth, his throat and his stomach in succession with a flavour like engine oil mixed with acid. He stifled a cough. The drink would kill a mortal human.

  ‘Good, yes?’ said Bror. All the Space Wolves – the ones whose mouths he could see – were grinning at his discomfort.

  ‘It is not to my taste, my lord primarch,’ said Loken diplomatically.

  ‘Ah, give it a few more sips,’ said Russ. His accent was thicker than when Loken had last met him – the only time he had met him – in Malcador’s Himalazian retreat. The primarch dropped back into his throne. He made a show of not caring what people thought of him, but it was a show. Malcador had told him that. ‘It gets better the more you drink. It took the warriors of Fenris only a few years to develop a liquor that will intoxicate a legionary quickly, but we spent many years in perfecting it. Go on.’ Russ raised his hand and waved it again. ‘A big gulp this time. Mjod is not for sipping.’