The Long Fangs unleashed their cargo of destruction and the gates to the pyramid dissolved into piles of smoking slag. Huge bronze lintels crashed to the ground, brought down by toppling pillars. Images of zodiacal beasts were blasted apart, masterpieces of depiction destroyed in a few moments of concentrated fire.
The Eye was the last to go. The beaten metal, hung over the main entrance gates, took more punishment than the rest before it finally caved in, raining broken chunks on to the burning detritus below. As it broke open, a sigh seemed to pass through the air, as if some warding presence had been withdrawn. The giant pyramid shuddered, and fragments of iron and stone tumbled down its sheer sides. The mighty gates had been reduced to a gaping, jagged-edged mouth, utterly dark and forbidding.
Ironhelm didn’t hesitate. He was first in, leaping over the tangled ruins at the base of the breach and barging aside metal struts the size of a Rhino’s flank. The Wolf Guard came with him, crashing through the devastation in their Terminator plate, loping fast and low across the uneven terrain. In their wake came the rest of the Great Company, a whole host of gunmetal-grey warriors thirsting for combat.
‘The vengeance of Russ,’ hissed Ironhelm over the mission channel.
Every pore in his body oozed with kill-urge. He could feel the Wolf within uncurl again, stretching its limbs in the dark, stirred by the prospect of fresh blood. Yellow eyes opened in his mind, red-rimmed and intense.
The breach opened out into an inner hall. Its roof disappeared into the gloom above, supported by gigantic pillars of obsidian. The air was hot and dusty, thick with red motes thrown up by the explosions. Giant sigils of the Thousand Sons had been engraved into the stone, dim and half-seen in the shadows. The place was thick with the sweet smell of corruption, as if some ancient wrong had sunk into the stone and remained there, dormant and deadly.
The Wolves swept onwards, surging through the echoing hall, their armour black in the darkness and their helm lenses glowing. All carried their weapons ready, some with bolters, others with blades. There was no whooping or bellowing, just a low, murmured snarling. The Great Company had been unleashed on the pursuit, and every mind within it was focused with remorseless purpose on the task at hand. Like blood running down an axe-edge, the Wolves raced straight into the heart of the pyramid.
They were met by no enemies. The first hall led to another, even vaster, laid out in the same fashion. The Wolves’ footfalls echoed into the shadows, rebounding back from the dark.
Ironhelm felt no lessening of his vengeful fury in the eerie silence. Mortal enemies would have been an irrelevance in such a place – they would simply have delayed the encounter that he yearned for, the one that he’d yearned for ever since the dreams had started.
As he ran, he found he recognised the stonework around him. He recalled the sigils, looming out of the gloom and passing in the shadows. Their patterns had walked in his mind for decades. He had run this path before, over and over again.
I am meant to be here. This place, this kill, has been ordained for me, locked in the wyrd. I am ready for it. By the Allfather, I am ready for it.
The second hall gave way to a third, then a fourth, each one larger than the last. The sheer scale of the pyramid began to become apparent. In its sullen, shrouded majesty it was the equal at least of those glass-faced edifices destroyed in Tizca. There were no libraries here, though, no repositories of learning and scholarship. This was a poor imitation, an empty copy of that which had once existed, for the original was impossible to replicate. What was destroyed by the Wolves remained destroyed.
The packs passed through a final gateway, soaring high beyond imagining. A central chamber yawned away from them in all directions, gigantic under the apex of the pyramid. The air felt even thicker, as if something massive pressed down heavily on it. Great braziers, each the size of Imperial Guard Sentinel walkers, sent sapphire light bleeding across the marble floor. Banners, hundreds of metres long, hung heavily from chains suspended in the distant roof, all inscribed with dimly-lit devices.
They were company emblems. Ironhelm didn’t look at them. He had no wish to be reminded of what the Thousand Sons had once been.
In the centre of the chamber was a raised platform reached by steep stairways extending in four directions. It was the pyramid in miniature, crowned by a flat space little more than a hundred metres across.
On the platform was an altar.
Before the altar stood a man.
Ironhelm increased his pace as he saw his target. His helm display didn’t pick up anything, but his eyes didn’t deceive him. A hunched figure was there, slightly under standard mortal human height, waiting for them. Even from far away, Ironhelm’s keen vision picked out the details on the man’s face.
The skin was lined and ancient, puckered like leather and festooned with age-spots. He wore wine-red robes that clung to a slender frame, and leaned against a long wooden staff. His hands were like claws, scrawny with uncut nails. His hair must once have been long and full, but now hung from a balding pate in silvery straggles.
As the Wolves closed in, the figure looked up to watch them approach. The man saw Ironhelm approach, and shot the Great Wolf a strange look. It was a mixture of many things.
Contempt. Pity. Pride. Sorrow. Self-hatred. Hatred for them.
Perhaps the expression was hard to read because the man’s face was unusual in one important respect.
Ironhelm bounded up the steps, leaving his retinue a few paces behind as ever, letting the disruption field across the frostblade flare into life.
‘Now let the galaxy witness your second death!’ he roared, hauling his blade back as he crested the final steps, tensing to leap into contact.
The man lifted a withered finger.
Ironhelm froze in mid-stride. Behind him, his pack was similarly locked into stasis. The entire Great Company ground to a halt, imprisoned in their gestures of impending murder.
Ironhelm roared soundlessly with frustration, flexing his steel-hard muscle-bundles against the maleficarum. His power-armour servos whined, straining at the unnatural bonds that constrained them. He felt sweat burst out across his brow, trickling down his temples. The vice remained, though it yielded a little.
I can fight this.
The Great Wolf clenched his jaw, feeling his fangs scrape across his flesh, battling the sorcery that clamped down on his limbs with every sinew.
‘You are powerful, Harek Eireik Eireiksson,’ said the old man. His voice was thin, dry, and tinged with an oddly paternal-sounding regret. ‘That should not surprise me. I have watched you grow over many centuries.’
Ironhelm felt his lungs labouring, his hearts pumping. If he could have shouted, he would have screamed his defiance. One of his arms shifted a fraction. The deadening power over his body trembled.
‘All that you wish for is to kill me,’ remarked the old man, looking through a single rheumy eye at his assassin. ‘You may succeed. Even now I feel your vital spirit overcoming the bonds I have placed on it.’
He shook his head in grudging respect.
‘So strong! You Wolves were always my father’s most potent weapons. What could I ever do to withstand that? Even at the height of my powers, what could I ever have done?’
Ironhelm felt his lips pull back in a snarl. Control over his muscles was returning. He sensed his warriors all doing the same thing. The frostblade inched closer to its target.
The man made no effort to get out of the way.
‘Time is short,’ he said. ‘So let me tell you why I brought you to Gangava. It was to give you a choice. That is the way of my kind. You think us without honour or scruple, but that verdict obscures many truths. We have standards of conduct, though they differ from the ones you still cherish. I myself make a point of observing them.’
Ironhelm felt the bonds crack further. His arms moved a whole centimetre before the restraining clamps reasserted themselves. If he could have smiled, he would have broken into a wolfish grin.
‘I was once told the truth, and failed to heed it. Mindful of that, I offer you the truth now. I have passed beyond your comprehension, son of Russ. Even now, my soul is split. Only a fragment remains here. It was enough to bring you, to keep you from the greater battle as it unfolds. If you kill me, I shall be free to go to the other place, and my presence there will be terrible. But if you stay your hand, your future may yet be different. That is the choice.’
The old man looked at Ironhelm keenly, his single eye unwavering.
‘Consider this the honour of my calling. A path of ruin awaits you, and I show you the way to avoid it. If you do what your primarch could not, and stay your hand, then the Bane of the Wolves will never come to light.’
Ironhelm managed to grind out a guttural snarl, though static flecks of blood burst from his lips with the effort. His arms shifted again. The bounds set on his limbs felt suddenly fragile, as if one more push would shatter them.
I feel you weakening now.
The old man remained rigidly in place, though he winced. His wasted hands clutched the staff more tightly, and he leaned against it with effort. His control was being dragged to its limits.
‘And so the moment comes. I can hold you no longer. This is the choice, Harek Eireik Eireiksson. You can walk away, and you will never see me again.’
Then he lowered his voice, and the wizened face took on an expression of dreadful warning.
‘But slay me, Dog of the Emperor, and we shall meet again very soon.’
The real space viewer buckled outwards, torn between the forces raging against it. It had been well designed and made, a peerless example of Imperial craftsmanship from the era when mankind had truly aspired to unmatched mastery of the stars. Blackwing watched the material flex horribly, trying to hold itself together. It had lasted longer than he’d expected, but still looked ready to blow at any moment.
‘Neiman...’ he voxed, bracing himself for whatever came next.
‘Calm yourself,’ grunted the Navigator over the comm. ‘We’re coming out now.’
The mutant’s voice was cracked and gasping. Flames crackled in the background.
Blackwing felt a surge of relief. Below him, fires were now running riot through the servitor pits. The semi-human automata just kept working, even as their skin flaked and rolled back. From far back in the bowels of the ship, Blackwing heard massive warp-coils begin to wind down. They made a strange grinding noise, as if huge iron bearings had been placed out of sync with one another and were trying to negotiate some kind of priority.
‘That’s what I wanted to hear. You’ve done well.’
‘You have no idea, Space Wolf.’
Blackwing bristled at the term. It was what offworlders called the Vlka Fenryka, ignorant of the ways and language of Fenris. Like all his breed, he thought it was a stupid name.
But Neiman was hardly ignorant of any of their ways. He spoke with all the precision of his profession, and now he was dying. So Blackwing replied carefully too, honouring him as he would a pack-brother.
‘Until next winter, Djulian,’ he said.
There was no further response from the comm, just a snap and a hail of static. Blackwing tried it again, with the same result. The Navigator had gone.
Then the floor of the bridge buckled, as if the ship had hit a sudden burst of turbulence. Blackwing braced himself awkwardly in his void-suit, clambering back toward the throne. A gantry collapsed close to where he’d just been, hitting the rail around the command platform and crashing into the pits below. The rest of the bridge groaned as the metal was twisted and stressed by the forces of real space re-entry.
Blackwing achieved the throne again and sat heavily on the burnished seat. There was a shudder, and more explosions. Klaxons began to blare out across the upper decks.
No one is left to hear you. No one but me.
Blackwing felt the effects of translation before the instruments reported it. His whole body lurched, as if his organs had been sucked out into the open, re-arranged and put back again. The fabric of reality seemed to slur, to drag, before reasserting itself. A powerful wave of nausea rushed across him, nearly blinding him with its intensity.
Then it passed. The Nauro had dropped out of the warp.
Blackwing depressed a control rune, and the snapping sound of saviour pods blasting free of their support cages echoed up through the burning corridors. Then he withdrew the chromo on the real space viewers. The true black of space replaced the false black of the warp-guards. The long range augurs picked up signals. Ship-signs. Dozens of them.
And far off, past the cordon of battleships, was the planetary signature he’d keyed into the cogitators himself seventeen days ago.
Gangava Prime.
The floor began to ripple like breaking pack-ice. The cracked real space lenses trembled, spawning new snaking hairlines. More booming explosions ran through the ship, shaking the backbone of it. Every warning rune on the tactical console was red and flashing.
Blackwing got up from the throne, running his gauntlet finger across the armrest as he did so.
‘Glad I insisted on getting you, girl,’ he said aloud, watching as the structure of the bridge began to fold in on itself. ‘Arfang was right. Oirreisson is a man of poor taste.’
Then he tensed, watching for the first viewer to erupt outwards. There was no hope of getting to the saviour pods now, much less the shuttle hangars. What remained was luck.
Or, as the Rune Priests had it, wyrd.
The first dome shattered, blowing up in a coronet of twinkling points. The gale of atmospheric expulsion clutched at him, and a maelstrom of debris flew out of the breach in the hull, whirling into space. Then another one went, pulling more loose matter into the void. As more viewers exploded open, Blackwing saw a servitor pulled free of its harness, tumbling out through the open viewers, still on fire until the frigid void extinguished it.
Blackwing hung on to the throne, making full use of his enhanced strength to pick his moment, watching the lattice of transparent lenses above him disintegrate.
Now.
He pushed himself away from the throne and swept upwards.
As soon as he left the floor of the bridge, he lost control, spinning like the rest of the jetsam toward the void-sucked real space viewers. He had an impression of whirling chaos, of the whole ruined bridge sliding in front of his eyes, before he was sucked out, ripped into the void, and everything got very, very cold.
His breath became deafening in the enclosed space of his helm, ragged and quick. For a moment, his disorientation was almost complete. Stars, as vivid as he’d ever seen them, swept by as he rotated, out of control and flailing.
As he spun round again he saw the broken flanks of the Nauro drift across his vision, retreating fast into the distance. The damage was worse than he’d dared to imagine. The entire engine level was open to space, blazing away in defiance of the vacuum around it, shedding components in a spinning cloud of burn-black metal. It was a shadow of the ship he’d commandeered on Fenris, a shattered, hopeless wreck. Saviour pods spiralled away from it like seeds falling from an ekka pine.
Something about the silence of space made everything seem to take place in a weird kind of silent slow motion. Blackwing actually saw the plasma drives explode before he felt anything of it. Bright yellow light flowered out from the darkened hull-carcass, rushing into the void in an utterly gorgeous sphere of monumentally impressive destruction. The vessel snapped clean in two, its components flying apart like a snapped femur, each spur lit up by subsidiary detonations.
Then the impact caught up. Blackwing went from spinning aimlessly in space to being tossed around like an ice-skiff in a Hel-gale. He felt a sharp blow as something hard and metal hit his void-armour shell, then another, then many more.
He tried, fruitlessly, to right himself, or at least to cradle himself against the rain of debris, all of it moving wit
h incredible speed through the frictionless void. It was as he was doing this that an ancillary drive-shaft, a piece of solid metal the length of a Thunderhawk, rushed up to meet him with the remorseless inevitability of basic physics.
Blackwing had time for three thoughts. The first was that, after all he’d survived over the past two weeks, this was a poor way to go. The second was that, when it hit, it was going to really, really hurt.
Then the shaft slammed into him at full speed, cracking against his armour with the full momentum of the plasma-drive explosion, shattering his helm-visor and bursting the shell of his breastplate open. The void raced in, sucking both air and consciousness out.
As he tumbled away from the impact, trailing droplets of blood and oxygen from his wounds, his eyesight blurred and slipping away, he had the third thought. A familiar shape had intruded on to the edge of his waning awareness, grey and blunt-edged, bigger by far than the Nauro and in much better shape.
Blessed Allfather, he realised, before blood ran across his eyes and blinded him. That’s the Gotthammar.
The bonds snapped. The old man staggered back, his staff falling from his grasp and clattering on the floor.
Fast as a throat-cut, Ironhelm was on him. The frostblade whistled through the air, resuming its course as if no interruption had taken place. The Great Wolf adjusted the trajectory subtly, compensating instantly for the movement of his target.
The man made no attempt to protect himself, nor to run from the blade. Freed from the crushing weight on them, Ironhelm’s muscles sprang back to life instantly, propelling the crackling edge into the kill-zone. The frostblade bit true, cleaving the man’s chest open diagonally from shoulder to waist.
The old man looked at Ironhelm a final time, somehow hanging on to a sliver of life. His single eye remained open, staring inscrutably.
Then he was down, his blood running across the stone freely. Ironhelm towered over him, poised to strike again, mindful of the ways of the Traitor. His newly released Wolf Guard leapt up to join him on the platform, all eager to defend their master against the awesome power of the fallen primarch and his daemonic allies.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 159