Aphael turned away from the rockface and stalked back the way he’d come, past the waiting rows of haulage transports, their hopper doors open and load-cranes extended. As he went, the men in the tunnels were quick to get out of his way. They’d grown wary of his erratic moods since the assault had ground into the sand.
He ignored them. As he got nearer the tunnel exit, the marks of excavation gave way to a rough roadway and permanent lighting. The tunnel roof and walls had been carved wide enough to allow Rhinos and Land Raiders to enter, which was one of the reasons hollowing it out had taken so long. Light armaments were already being shipped into the enclosed space. As the Cataphracts drew closer to their goal, they would be augmented with heavier weaponry. By the time the final walls were breached, whole companies of Rubricae would be waiting to pile in.
Aphael reached the tunnel entrance and stepped into the bright, harsh light of the Fenris morning. His eyes seemed to have lost their usual photo-reactive speed, and for a moment he was half-blinded by the glare. Fresh snowfalls had covered over much of the devastation, but the causeways were still jammed with men and materiel. Plumes of smoke were everywhere, either from labouring vehicle engines or from fires lit by the troops to banish the worst of the chill.
A Prosperine captain hurried up to him. The man’s face was hidden behind his environment mask, but Aphael could already sense his fear. This would not be good news.
‘Lord,’ the man said, bowing clumsily.
‘Make it quick,’ snapped Aphael, wishing he could scratch his flesh for just a moment.
‘Captain Eirreq has voxed from the flagship.’
‘If the Lord Temekh wishes to speak to me, then he can do so himself.’
‘It’s not that.’ The man swallowed. ‘Lord Fuerza. His life-signature has departed from the aether.’
Aphael felt his primary heart jump a beat.
‘Out of range?’
‘I do not believe so, lord. I was told to inform you that, as far as the scryers can ascertain, he is dead.’
Aphael felt the dam of his pent-up fury break then. The frustration, the irritation, the fear of what he was becoming, all came to a head. Without thinking, he grabbed the warrior by his chestplate, holding him aloft in one hand.
‘Dead!’ he roared, uncaring who heard him. At the edge of his vision, he could see soldiers putting down their weapons and staring. ‘Dead!’
Let them stare.
‘Lord!’ cried the captain, struggling ineffectively against the power-armoured grip. ‘I–’
He never had the chance to finish. Aphael swung round, hurling the fragile body against the near wall of the tunnel entrance. It impacted with a thick, sickening thud, and slid down into the slush. Once there, it didn’t move again.
Aphael whirled round to face the rest of his men. There were hundreds of them close by, all staring at him. For a moment, a single, terrible moment, Aphael felt like launching into them too. His gauntlets crackled with the first sparks of his sorcerous fire, the deadly trade of the Pyrae.
Slowly, with difficulty, he reined himself in.
What is happening to me?
He knew the answer. Every sorcerer in the Legion was schooled to know the answer to that. In time, the Changer of Ways always extracted the price for the gifts he bestowed, and even the Rubric was no guarantee of escaping it.
I am being turned into the thing that I hate.
‘Get back to work!’ he bellowed at the men.
They hurried to comply. None of them made any move towards the prone body of the captain. Perhaps they would later, when Aphael was gone, moving furtively and in fear of what the Masters would do to them.
Aphael looked up. Far, far into the hazy distance, the pinnacle of the Fang soared into the icy air. Even after being blackened by days of bombardment, it was still magnificent. It rose defiant, as immovable and gigantic as the Obsidian Tower on the Planet of the Sorcerers. For the first time, Aphael noticed the similarities in the structures. It was just one more mockery.
‘I will break it,’ he muttered, uncaring that he spoke out loud. His left hand clenched into a fist, and he hammered it against his helm. The pain of the impact helped to dull the incessant itching.
So he did it again. And again.
It was only when he felt the warm trickle of blood down his neck that he stopped. The sensation was strangely calming, as if the crude medicines of the old leeches had been applied, relieving the pressure within his tortured body.
The respite was fleeting. Even as he turned away from the mountain, ready to walk back to the command platform above the causeway, he could feel the burning start to return. It would never leave him alone. It would plague him, torment him and goad him until it got what it wanted.
‘I will break it,’ he mumbled again, hanging on to the thought as he limped away from the Fang.
As he passed from the front, the mortal soldiers looked at one another, startled. Then, slowly, they returned to their duties, readying the army for the assault to come, trying not to think too hard about the behaviour of the warrior they had been taught to revere as a god.
Chapter Sixteen
The pyramid reared, vast and dark, into the fire-torn sky. Its flanks were dull, caked in the red dust that covered all of Gangava. Huge holes had been punched in its sides by heavy weapons, and the edges of the rents were still licked with flame.
What resistance there was had been swept aside by the Wolves, wiped out with sharp-edged disdain. The entire city was burning, and those few defenders who had not perished in the assault now faced a lingering death by fire. The scale of the violence was overwhelming. There had been no respite, no quarter, no mercy. Another Chapter, the Salamanders perhaps, might have made some provision for civilian evacuation, or paused in the attack to assess the possibility of asset recovery for the greater good of the Imperium.
Not the Wolves of Fenris. The task had been set before them, and they had brought it to completion. Gangava was destroyed, rendered down to ash and molten iron. Nothing was left to preserve, nothing to remember. The city had been scoured from the face of the galaxy as completely as Prospero had been.
Almost.
The pyramids still remained, insolently defiant, still free of the horrifying presence of the Vlka Fenryka. Ironhelm had insisted on that. No battle-brother would assault the central bastions until the ruin of the city had been compassed.
I want you to see the failure of your dreams, Traitor, before I come for you. I want to hear you weep, just as you wept before.
Now the time had come. The spearhead had assembled in a huge courtyard before the main pyramid, out in the open, careless of the lack of cover, bristling with desire to go for the throat. Fully three hundred battle-brothers were there: all of Harek Ironhelm’s Great Company, other packs who’d arrived at the muster ahead of their brothers, plus the twelve Rune Priests who’d accompanied the forward assault squads. The wyrd-masters stood with Ironhelm’s command brotherhood, their glyph-inscribed armour blazing arterial red.
Ironhelm turned to Frei, the one who’d brought them to Gangava in the first place.
‘There is no doubt?’ he asked a final time.
By way of answer, the Rune Priest drew a bag of bone-fragments from a capsule at his belt. The pieces looked insignificantly small as he tipped the contents into the palm of his gauntlet. Reverently, he cast them on the ground, and they clattered against the broken stone.
For a moment, Frei said nothing, gazing at the patterns on the bones. Each piece was inscribed with a single rune. Trysk, Gmorl, Adjarr, Ragnarok, Ymir. The sigils had an individual meaning – Ice, Fate, Blood, Ending – as well as a collective one. For a master of scrying the mysterious power of Fenris, they could reveal hidden facets of the present, or secrets of the past, or portents of the future. In their presence, all brutal laughter was silenced, all weapons lowered. The Wolves venerated the runes, just as their gene-father had done.
It was long before Frei spoke. When he did, his
voice was hoarse from days of shouted orders and storm-summoning.
‘The runes tell me he is in there,’ Frei said. ‘His spoor reeks, trapped in the heart of the pyramid. But there is something else.’
Ironhelm waited patiently. All around him, his battle-brothers did the same.
‘I see another presence. The Bane of the Wolves.’
Ironhelm snorted.
‘That’s what he’s calling himself. This we already know.’
Frei shook his head.
‘No, lord. That is not his name. It is another power, locked in the walls with him. If we enter, we will face it.’
‘And that troubles you, priest? You think any power in the galaxy can face our fury? Even a primarch cannot stand against our combined blades.’
Frei stooped to collect the bone fragments. As his fingers reached for the oldest device – Fengr, the Wolf Within – the piece broke cleanly, separating into two down the middle.
Frei froze for a second, staring at the broken rune. Ironhelm could sense his shock. He hadn’t touched the bone fragment – it had just shattered.
From the pyramid ahead of them, a faint boom like distant rolling thunder rocked the ground. The sky above them shuddered, and the flames around them guttered.
Then the moment passed. Ironhelm shook his head, shaking off the flicker of dread that had briefly latched on to his soul. Uncertainty was replaced by anger.
Still you taunt me. Even now, you cannot resist the cheap trick.
‘Arvek,’ he voxed. ‘Are the voids down?’
‘They are, lord,’ came the rolling voice of Kjarlskar over the comm. ‘The fleet has a firing solution and awaits your orders.’
Ironhelm looked up at the pyramid before him. Its very vastness was like an invitation. It could be atomised from orbit whenever he chose.
The retinue around him waited for his response. He sensed their eagerness. Like hounds straining at the leash, their kill-urge tugged at them. From all over the city, more Wolves were arriving every moment, their claws dripping with the blood of recent slaying, ready to make the push to completion.
‘Lord...’ came the voice of Frei, oddly shaken.
Ironhelm gestured for him to remain silent.
‘This is the moment the wyrd turns, brothers,’ he announced, speaking softly but firmly over the mission channel. ‘This is what we came to do. There will be no bombardment from orbit. We will enter the den of the Traitor, and kill him as we look into his eye.’
He unlocked his frostblade and thumbed the power weapon into activation.
‘That is the way of us. We keep the danger close. Take up your weapons, and stay hard on my heels.’
The fires had reached the service levels below the command bridge of the Nauro. They now raged out of control across eighty per cent of the ship, and had long since made the task of salvaging her impossible. Georyth had given up trying to fight the blaze conventionally and had resorted to constructing two-metre-thick firebreaks at the major intersections, surrendering huge areas of the warship to immolation.
Now those bulwarks had failed. The temperature on the habitable levels had reached the upper limits of survivability, even in the environment suits that all the remaining crew now wore. The ship was in the final stages of collapse, its engines ready to explode, its Geller field near cracking, its void shields unable to activate.
We did well to get this far. Russ’s teeth, just a little further.
Blackwing sat on the command throne, overlooking the bustling bridge below impassively. All the survivors, two hundred or so, milled about on the platforms and gantries, getting in each others’ way and gumming up the necessary business of running the ship’s few remaining functions.
They had nowhere else to go. Barely three hundred metres down, the corridors were red-hot from the fires and the air was unbreathable. Only the bridge and some other ancillary chambers remained, pockets of habitation amid a hurtling mountain of burning space junk. How long those pockets would remain intact was hard to predict. Minutes, certainly. Hours, hopefully.
‘In range yet, Navigator?’ Blackwing asked over the comm.
Neiman was a dead man. His observatory cell was cut off, separated from the command bridge by corridors of slowly melting metal. He’d had the chance to withdraw to safety but had chosen not to take it. That action alone had given the Nauro her best chance of reaching its destination, since the Navigator could only make the difficult transition to real space accurately from within his sanctum.
‘The more you keep asking, lord,’ he replied irritably, ‘the longer it will take to make the calculations.’
For someone doomed to an agonising death under the flames, Neiman sounded remarkably phlegmatic. Blackwing had noticed this trait in Navigators before. Something in their mutant genetic makeup seemed to invoke a kind of fatalism. Perhaps they saw things in the warp, things that made them somehow less concerned about their own particular fate. Or maybe they were just cold fish.
‘We don’t have long, Djulian,’ Blackwing replied, watching on the auspex read-out as another bulkhead failed. He used the Navigator’s first name as a courtesy, which seemed the least he could do. ‘Give me an estimate.’
‘An hour, perhaps. Less, if you let me get on with things.’
‘Thank you. Report as soon as you can.’
Blackwing shut off the comm-link. There was a commotion ahead of him. One of the real space viewers over the command bridge, a huge dome of plexiglass a metre thick and several wide, was cracking. The line of stress snaked its way from the adamantium frame, breaking into rivulets at it reached the centre of the curve.
There were no void shields active. When the physical hull went, the whole bridge would be open to space.
Blackwing stood up.
‘That’s enough,’ he announced over the ship’s open channel. ‘We’ve done all we can. To the saviour pods. Now.’
Some of the crew looked up at him, hope suddenly kindling on their faces. Others, the kaerls mostly, looked appalled.
‘We have not yet translated, lord,’ came Georyth’s voice.
The Master was standing on the stairway immediately below Blackwing, slumped with fatigue. His voice was thick and slow, betraying the liberal use of stimms to keep him on his feet.
Blackwing had to smile. Georyth had been a pain in the arse – a pernickety, officious pain in the arse – but he’d also been a fine Master and had earned himself a place in any sagas that came out of this sorry episode.
‘I had noticed that, Master,’ said Blackwing. ‘Our trajectory is fixed, and only Neiman can pull us out of the warp. As soon as the Geller field’s down, I’ve triggered the saviour pods to eject. Much as I find each and every one of you personally objectionable, it seems a waste to let them go empty.’
Georyth swallowed.
‘And you, lord?’
Blackwing picked up a helm from the floor beside him. He was in Scout-pattern void-armour, the last suit he’d managed to salvage from the ship’s armoury before the fires had engulfed it. An extension of his usual carapace plate, it did little more than keep the vacuum out and the temperature at survivable levels. Not for the first time on this mission, he missed his old Hunter plate.
‘Your concern is touching,’ he said, clamping the helm in place and feeling the seals hiss closed. ‘Patronise me with it again and I’ll shoot your pod down myself.’
Georyth nodded, responding to the sarcasm with a weary resignation. He’d learned how to cope with it over the past seventeen days.
Seventeen days. Four fewer than the estimate. Blood of Russ, I love this ship. When she’s gone, I shall weep for her.
‘Very well, lord,’ said Georyth, clenching his fist against his breastplate in the Fenrisian style and making to leave. ‘The hand of Russ ward you.’
‘That would be nice,’ agreed Blackwing.
Already, the mortals were streaming down from their stations and making for the service corridors leading to the saviour pod bays
. The bridge emptied quickly. All the crew knew how precarious the situation was, and getting out of the path of the breaking real space viewer was simply good sense.
With their departure, the bridge looked huge. Huge and fragile. The cracks in the viewers continued to grow. They looked out on to nothing but blackness, but it wasn’t the dark of the void. If the chromo filters were removed from the plexiglass, the view would be of the immaterium, a mad whirl of colour and movement. No human wished to look out onto that, and so the viewers were made permanently blank while in warp-transit.
For a moment, Blackwing pondered opening them, revealing the true substance of the matter through which the doomed ship plunged. It was a tempting prospect, and one he’d never indulged before. Would he go mad, just by looking at it? Or would it leave him indifferent, just as so much else in the galaxy did?
His thoughts were interrupted by a crack far below him. Something big and heavy had given way. Despite himself, despite all his conditioning, Blackwing felt a tremor of alarm pass through him. Standing on the bridge of a ship that was literally falling to pieces as it hurtled out of the warp and into a planetary war-zone was about as insane as it got.
And once he thought about it in those terms, the situation made a whole lot more sense.
I am a son of Russ. Not a good example, to be sure, but one of his mad progeny nonetheless, and this is the kind of thing the Blood Claws dream of doing.
He strode forwards to the railing around the command platform, as if by getting closer to the prow he could ride the coming inferno better.
Something else broke then, a strut or a bracing rod, far back in the spine of the vessel. The echoes of its demise filtered through the burning corridors, prompting more muffled crashes from down below.
The Nauro was dying under his feet, component by component, rivet by rivet.
‘Come on, Neiman,’ Blackwing hissed, his pulse pumping, watching the cracks in the plexiglass above him grow. ‘Come on...’
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 158