The entire Chapter had achieved orbit, sweeping away resistance with the same contemptuous ease as the Thousand Sons had so many days ago. The massed landings were only moments away.
Ironhelm boarded his pod impatiently, leaned back against the adamantium walls and felt the restraint cage slam into place. The shell-doors hissed closed, and launch klaxons began to blare.
‘Land me on the summit,’ he snarled over the comm.
That would be dangerous, with no margin for error – the bulk of the pods were being sent down to the causeways. The operators of the bays knew better than to argue, though, and the coordinates were duly set.
‘Clear to launch, lord,’ came a voice over the comm.
‘Do it,’ ordered Ironhelm, bracing for the release of the clamps, and then the dizzying, whistling descent towards the surface. It could not come soon enough.
I am coming for you.
The launch-tube doors flew open, and the pods began to fall. In every direction, Wolves vessels powered into battle, tearing apart any enemy ships too slow to evade their guns.
He knew what the enemy would be thinking now. He knew that, all along the causeways, entrenched Spireguard battalions would be looking up, realising that their fleet was deserting them and that they were being left to fend for themselves. It was then, as they watched the skies darken, that the same terrible thought would enter every one of their terrified minds. He took a cold pleasure in that.
This is the planet of the Wolves. And they have come to take it back.
Sturmhjart spread his arms wide, kindling a rage of storm-energy. Fists of lightning raced out, engulfing Magnus in a nimbus of coruscating brilliance. The sigils on the Rune Priest’s armour exploded into life, burning heartblood-red.
Greyloc and his two Wolf Guard leapt into action, snarling with pent-up rage. They went for Magnus like a pack taking down a konungur – one at the throat, one at the breast, one at the legs. Their armour shimmered from Sturmhjart’s protective aegis as they charged into combat.
Greyloc was fastest. He got his talons up into the primarch’s face, raking and tearing. Magnus fell back, rocked by the speed of the assault. Though he stood over a metre taller than the Terminator Marines, the pace and ferocity of the attacks pushed him on to his heels, and he stumbled.
Magnus the Red, son of the immortal Emperor, primarch of the Thousand Sons, stumbled.
‘For the Allfather!’ roared Greyloc in triumph, his whole being consumed by the awesome, feral power of the hunt. Like Wyrmblade before him, the absolute hatred engendered by Magnus lent him, for a time, truly astonishing power. ‘For Russ!’
Greyloc bludgeoned the primarch back another pace, howling his hatred in scarcely intelligible frenzy. Magnus got his sword in place, but it was cracked aside by a savage swipe of wolfclaws.
A Wolf Guard made contact, plunging his talons into Magnus’s leg. Sturmhjart bellowed with kill-pleasure at that, and his wyrdfire roared with even greater intensity. The other Wolf Guard crunched his claw into the primarch’s chest. The Wolves had the scent of blood in their nostrils, and it made them awesome.
Magnus staggered again, crashing into the wall behind him, breaking it open, demolishing it as he passed through. Greyloc leapt after him, closely followed by the others. Sturmhjart kept on their heels, consumed with an inferno of raging wyrd-flame. The four Wolves harried, stabbed and hammered at the retreating daemon-primarch, their fists flying and blades biting. There was no let-up, no respite, just a flurry of horrifying blows, each one sent hurtling into contact with a visceral, remorseless passion.
They drove the daemon-primarch back further, tearing through another wall, laying waste to everything around them. The noise of roaring and slavering was deafening, a hideous cacophony of hate-filled defiance that rose, booming, into the narrow space of the fleshmaker halls.
‘Death to the witch!’ bellowed Greyloc, utterly possessed by kill-urge, his whole body pumping with furious energy.
He was fighting at such a pitch of perfection that it made him want to scream aloud. Greyloc could feel himself burning up as he fought on, damaging himself irretrievably through the very action of such unrestrained violence. There was no retreat from this, no possibility of recovery. He was fighting himself to death, using up every gram of potential in his mortal body.
I am the weapon.
Nothing less would do. He was contesting a living god, and only his indomitable faith, his unshakeable certainty, his complete commitment, would possibly match up to that awesome task.
My pure state.
So he pushed Magnus back again, giving him no time, no space. Another wall crashed into ruins, destroyed by the lightning-crowned rampage of their furious progress.
They burst through the rubble into a wide, open space. They’d broken out of the laboratorium and into a hangar of some kind, one of the many hundreds that studded the mountain near the summit. There was a single gunship left on the apron, ruined and black from heavy battle-damage. At the far end of the launch bay, a gale roared past. The thundering of the vengeful wind boomed around their ears, fresh from the frigid airs of Asaheim, harsh and howling.
The soul of Fenris. It shares our fury.
The Wolves tore onwards, wreathed in Sturmhjart’s wyrdlight, bellowing defiance, landing blow after blow, each one of which would have ended another fight but in this case merely prolonged it.
But their strength, for all its extravagant majesty, was fixed by clear limits. Magnus was a child of the Emperor, one of the peerless twenty who had lit the fires of the Great Crusade, and his poise could only be disrupted for a short time. The onslaught had been horrendous, the worst he had endured in a thousand years, but his strength was near-infinite and his guile scarcely less so. He straightened, towering over his assailants, and remembered what power lay within his gauntlet-grasp.
One of the Wolf Guard let his defences slip for a fraction of a second, and that was enough. Magnus’s fist crashed into his face, hurling him out of contact and sending him flying metres through the air. The Wolf Guard crunched heavily to the ground, his helm smashed in, and didn’t get up.
Sturmhjart was next, caught by a devastating blast of witchfire from Magnus’s outstretched hands. The Rune Priest bent double, clutched by sudden, agonising pain.
‘Hjolda!’ he cried, writhing in apoplexy, blood spraying from his armour-joints.
Magnus clenched his fist, and the ceramite shell exploded, throwing a storm of flesh and bone across the hangar floor. Then the primarch whirled back to face Greyloc and the surviving Wolf Guard. The equanimity had been wiped from his face, and his wine-red hair hung in straggling clumps around him. He was bleeding, and limped from a deep wound to his leg. Only once before had his physical form sustained such wounds, and the remembrance of that pain enraged him.
‘You have angered me, Dog,’ Magnus snarled, back-handing the Wolf Guard viciously out of contention, breaking his back with a messy snap. Then he lowered a crackling fist at Greyloc.
He never loosed the witchfire. A spinning ball of plasma hit Magnus directly in the torso, throwing him across the hangar. Another impacted, and another, knocking him further back. Limbs flailing, doused in supernova-hot bolt-residue, Magnus slammed into the carcass of the downed Thunderhawk. He smashed it apart as he crashed into it, his golden fists plunging through the crushed adamantium superstructure like a raging child trapped in a doll’s house.
You know nothing of anger, Traitor, boomed Bjorn, lumbering from the wreckage of the hangar wall and punching another flurry of plasma bolts from his arm-cannon. This is anger. This is hate.
The bolts impacted, one after the other, each aimed with exact precision. Magnus was enveloped in a furious, screaming inferno, a stream of starbursts that bludgeoned him back further, smashing him deep into the wreckage of the gunship.
He still stood. He fought back. For a moment, it looked as though the primarch would rip the Thunderhawk’s structure apart completely.
Then the pr
omethium tanks ignited.
The explosion was titanic, rocking the entire hangar and sending a blast-wave sweeping across the apron. Magnus was engulfed by a bulging sphere of white-hot destruction, an orb of flame that raced out, surging up to the hangar roof and running along the stone like quicksilver. Greyloc was hurled to the ground. Cracks raced across the apron, deep and gaping. The wind howled, dragging tongues of flame through the tortured air.
Only Bjorn endured. He kept firing, over and over, pouring more plasma into the raging torrent of destruction.
When Magnus finally emerged from the heart of it, his face was contorted with murder. Skin hung from the bone, smouldering and blistering. His golden mantle was black, his bronze armour scorched. His mane of hair was gone, replaced by a flesh-tattered skull. His lone eye was star-red, burning like metal on the blacksmith’s forge. Huge gashes had opened in his flesh, revealing a lattice of shifting, luminous colour beneath. The physical cloak he’d draped over his daemonic essence had been ripped open, snatched away by the furnace.
Magnus leapt from the inferno, straight at Greyloc, streams of fire trailing him like an angel’s wings. Bjorn swept his plasma cannon round, but too slowly. The wounded primarch crashed into the Wolf Lord as he struggled to regain his feet. Magnus felled him with a hammer-blow from his clenched fist, still flaring with raging promethium. Greyloc’s head cracked against the stone, and for a moment his guard was down.
Magnus plunged with both hands, tearing up the Jarl’s breastplate with grasping fingers. Silver-gold warp-energy blazed out, dissolving the ceramite in hissing clouds. Magnus delved deep, seizing both Greyloc’s hearts in his crackling fists.
The Wolf Lord screamed, his limbs going rigid with agony. With a sickening wrench, Magnus ripped the beating organs free, hauling them from Greyloc’s still-living chest, snapping the clutching trails of gore, and hurled them aside.
For a moment, the Wolf Lord retained consciousness, somehow managing to hold the gaze of his killer.
Beneath his helm, his white face was harrowed but defiant. His eyes reflected, for the final time, a fleeting vision of a snow-smooth plain, of prey moving under the harsh sun, of the icy wind against his naked arms.
My pure state.
Then the arms went limp, and the blood-glare from his lenses died.
Jarl! roared Bjorn, his voice distorted by loathing.
Still firing a stream of plasma bolts, the Dreadnought strode right into the primarch, his lightning claw blazing with angry disruption. The two giants came together in a crash of warp-energy, promethium, and steel on steel.
As Magnus and the Fell-Handed fell into terrible, devastating combat, the storm around them whined to a new pitch of vitriol. The ground beneath their feet cracked open further, tearing chasms in the plascrete floor. The ancient Dreadnought, fuelled by the greater rage, forced the distracted primarch on to the defensive again, gouging at Magnus with his talons and blasting him from close range. At such proximity, the terrible plasma backdraft affected Bjorn nearly as badly as his enemy, but he maintained the barrage nonetheless.
Step by step, shrouded in smoke and trails of fluid energy, the two fighters staggered towards the open hangar bay in a grotesque, swaying embrace, each trading hammer-blows of crushing, heart-stopping force. There was no shielding left over the portal. Beyond the plascrete edge of the apron, the bare rock carried on for a few metres before plunging down sheer. They reached the precipice, blazing away at each other with strikes of such brutality that the rock edges crumbled under them.
Magnus had been hurt. He’d been hurt more profoundly than any mortal had hurt him before. His shock at that translated into his movements, which had become strangely halting and erratic. All his easy grace had left him, and he fought like a bar-room brawler, clubbing at the heavy armour of the Dreadnought even as Bjorn thundered back.
They got closer to the edge. More rocks broke away, streaming down the steel-hard flanks of the mountain in tumbling trails. The drop was nearly vertical. They were thousands of metres above the causeways, duelling in the high heavens like the gods of Fenrisian myth, surrounded by the lancing tongues of lightning and the death-cry of the gales.
Far below them, there was fire and slaughter. The Wolves had landed in their hundreds, and now ran amok across the stone, cutting threads at will. Columns of them were streaming towards the broken shells of the gates, entering their own citadel again with the deadly light of pursuit in their eyes. The skies were studded with the outlines of drop-ships and the dark trails of Thunderhawks. Far above that, surrounded by leaping bursts of chain lightning, heavier ships were slowly descending through the upper atmosphere.
They both saw it. Even as he fought, Bjorn let slip a triumphant snarl.
Ironhelm is here, witch, he taunted, plunging his claw hard into the bronze armour and twisting the blades. This is death for you.
Magnus seemed beyond speech. The flesh around his mouth was ragged, burnt ebony by the clinging promethium and torn into a gash by the Dreadnought’s slashing strikes. He grabbed the barrel of Bjorn’s plasma cannon, clamping claw-like fingers over the red-hot muzzle.
Bjorn fired it again, engulfing Magnus’s wrist in a searing holocaust of energy. The primarch clung on, absorbing the terrible heat, twisting and crushing the blunt barrel-end into a blocked mess. His gun rendered useless, Bjorn switched to his claws, driving them again at the primarch’s ravaged face. The talons connected, tearing more of the flesh from the daemonic essence beneath.
Stone pillars broke and crumbled from the cliff edge, and a filigree of cracks ran under Bjorn’s mighty feet. Both titans teetered on the very lip of the chasm, exchanging blows even as the icy abyss beckoned them down. The harsh wind of Asaheim clutched at them, dragging them closer to oblivion.
It was then that Magnus, weary, wounded and burned as he was, seemed to remember his dread authority at last. He let fly with a broken hand, and fluorescent warp-energy spat from his outstretched fingers. Bjorn’s claw crumpled, withering amid a storm of varicoloured madness. The talons flexed wildly, then cracked apart.
Weaponless, the venerable Dreadnought powered in close, attempting to grapple with the primarch and bear him over the edge. Magnus evaded the manoeuvre, punching out with his other hand. Though bereft of a blade, the daemonic flesh was still potent enough to crack Bjorn’s sarcophagus open, rending a jagged tear in the long face-plate. Bone icons shattered, and runes were cloven asunder.
Bjorn reeled then, finally exposed to the full power of the primarch’s wrath. Magnus cocked a flaming fist, aiming for the eye-slit. Bjorn could do nothing. The blow came in hard, tearing up the reinforced plate, rocking him back on his central axis, forcing him closer to the edge. Magnus swung round, positioning himself on surer ground, pushing the Dreadnought half over the drop and holding him in place one-handed. The ground supporting Bjorn’s clawed feet gave way, dissolving in a mini-avalanche of rubble and ice-blades.
‘You were on Prospero,’ hissed the primarch, his voice a horrific echo of what it had once been. ‘I recognise your soul-pattern.’
Bjorn tried to reply, but his vox-generators had been destroyed. He could feel systems failing all over his artificial body. At last, the hellish existence he’d been forced to endure for so long looked like coming to an end. He couldn’t be too sorry about that.
‘Did you really think you could kill me?’ Magnus rasped, sounding both incredulous and furious. His free hand kindled with fresh witchfire. ‘If my brother could not, what hope have you?’
It was then that Bjorn saw the shape careering down the slope above. A huge, armour-clad warrior, loping down the sheer ice-face toward them. Far above that was the profile of a drop pod embedded near the very summit of the Valgard.
Within his cracked shell, what remained of Bjorn’s ancient mouth smiled.
Ironhelm pounced, leaping through the air, hurtling fast, arms outstretched. He crashed into the locked figures with the force of a Land Raider at full acceleration. Ther
e was a hard clang as armour smashed into armour. The ledge shattered, and all three of them wheeled over the broken edge of the precipice, rolling down the steep slopes in a cloud of broken stone and flying ice.
Ironhelm’s head snapped back as he hit something at speed, then his arm crashed through a rock outcrop, smashing it open. He slid and tumbled, falling over and over, destroying the flanks of the mountain in his fall. He had the vague impression of Bjorn crashing straight through an ice-field before the Dreadnought’s huge body passed out of view. Showers of snow were everywhere, blinding him. He heard Magnus crying aloud and caught snatches of daemonic flesh flashing close to him before being torn away by the descent.
He fell, and fell, and fell. There was nothing to break the whistling plummet except loose snow and fire-blacked stone. Ironhelm slammed into a fresh outcrop and felt it shatter before he corkscrewed away. Everything was in motion, disorientating and whirling in a white-out of sensory deprivation.
Then, with a sickening crash, he hit something bigger. Even cocooned in his Terminator plate, the impact was staggering. Ironhelm blacked out, his body bouncing like a whip-crack before grinding painfully to a halt.
It was a ledge, one of the thousands of steps in the jagged upper reaches of the Fang, a hundred metres wide and high up the dizzying cliffs of the ultimate peak.
Ironhelm felt awareness return almost immediately, and knew then how much he’d been damaged. Pain surged through his body like a roaring fire, blazing across his tortured joints and spliced bones. He could feel the steel plate in his skull rattle loose. That meant his cranium was fractured, a prognosis consistent with the sun-hot agony that buzzed behind his eyes.
He snarled with anger, and thrust himself to a half-sitting position. Magnus was there too. The two of them had come down together, kicking and flailing. There was no sign of Bjorn, though there was a long gouge running down the rock behind the primarch, torn out of the stone like a plough’s furrow. Snow and pack-ice still fell in clouds, laced with biting slivers of rock.
Space Marine Battles - the Novels Volume 1 Page 169