by Various
The battlesuit loosed a volley of plasma rounds after him. They were comfortably off-target, though Ulrik felt their heat washing over him.
The first of the pods opened to disgorge fresh Space Wolves upon the battlefield. Ulrik recognised a few of them, saw the badge of the Sun Wolf on their shoulders and knew who must have brought them here; as if he hadn’t suspected it already.
Of all the twelve Wolf Lords, only one would have disregarded the High Priest’s orders and followed him here. Only one would have been so eager to prove himself – for the thousandth time – in action.
That one had just saved Ulrik the Slayer’s life.
Krom Dragongaze’s red cloak billowed around him as he stepped out of the drop pod. Its violent landing had sent cracks through the hard earth, but his gilt-edged artificer armour had easily absorbed the brunt of it.
He heralded his own arrival by firing a volley of explosive bolt-rounds into the air. In his other hand Krom clutched his signature weapon, Wyrmclaw, a huge double-bladed frost axe. It only took him a moment to choose his target.
‘Take out the battlesuit,’ he roared into his comm-bead.
Towering above all else, the tau machine was an irresistible lure to him, particularly as it was already damaged. The battlesuit’s head had been staved in and its pilot had thrown open its chest hatch in order to see. As a bonus, it seemed to have beaten the Wolf High Priest. The prospect of succeeding where Ulrik the Slayer had failed made Krom’s mouth water.
His orders were received and understood by his Wolf Guard, his company’s fiercest warriors. With the exception of the Old Wolf’s Kingsguard, Krom’s Wolf Guard was the largest among the Great Companies – thanks to the example he set for his warriors, he was quick to claim.
They leapt from the drop pod a breath behind their lord and fanned out around the enemy, bolt pistols and storm bolters rattling.
‘Keep your distance,’ their pack leader cautioned them over the vox-net. ‘One of those things can shatter power armour with a blow, but we have the advantages of speed and agility over it. Best to weaken its defences with ranged fire, then move in for the kill.’
That was Beoric Winterfang, always the calm voice of reason. His age and wisdom had been cited by some as a useful counterbalance to Krom Dragongaze’s hotheadedness, but he was one of Krom’s disciples all the same, and as loyal as the rest of them.
‘Sometimes, I wonder if you have wolf’s blood in you at all,’ Krom grumbled to himself, not for the first time. Beoric’s centuries of distinguished service, however, demanded his respect.
The battlesuit shuddered and reeled beneath the Wolf Guard’s sustained assault. It was anything but helpless, though. It snapped up a giant arm – more precisely, a multi-barrelled cannon attached to its shoulder joint – and unleashed a blinding storm of plasma rounds upon its assailants.
There was scant cover to be had, so there was little the Space Wolves could do to evade the white-hot fire that swept over them. They could only weather the onslaught as the markings and adornments on their armour blistered and burned.
Jormund Thunderclaw, a head taller than the others in more durable Terminator armour, pushed his way to the front of his battle-brothers. He planted his feet in the ground and brought his cyclone launcher to bear. A cluster of krak missiles screamed out from over his shoulders to blaze a laser-guided path towards their substantial target, bursting against the battlesuit’s energy shield and engulfing it in noise, fire and smoke. Its cannon continued to lash out, but half-blindly now.
Many of Ulrik’s strike force were recovering their wind, and the rest of the tau had begun a hasty pullback, finding themselves outmatched. The remainder of Krom’s Drakeslayers – his Blood Claws, Grey Hunters and Long Fangs – were harrying their foes’ heels, speeding their retreat. The High Priest had rejoined the battle too, in spite of his injuries.
Krom pierced the miasma around the construct with a narrow-eyed glare. His nostrils twitched at the scent of burning electrics. The battlesuit’s cannon had been silenced. Any moment now, he judged, its pilot would make a break for it, try to trample his way over the blue-grey perimeter that was tightening around him. Krom saw his chance and took it.
Ignoring Beoric’s sage advice – as was his right – he charged, lips peeled back from his fangs and axe awhirl above his head.
Wyrmclaw was edged with the ground talons of a Fenrisian ice wyrm; its blade cut harder than diamond and was lent additional power by the arcane runes carved into it. Krom smashed the blade into the battlesuit’s right knee joint, where a missile had already struck. For a moment, the axe remained lodged there, drawing out more smoke and furious sparks. It wasn’t enough.
The pilot glared down at him from the battlesuit’s chest cavity, its black eyes inhumanly cold. Krom threw himself with all his strength, all his fully-armoured weight, shoulder-first against the pylon of the battlesuit’s right leg. Already off-balance, at last it fell. Krom recovered his axe with a wrench as the suit toppled away from him.
His Wolf Guard joined him now, at Beoric’s command. They swarmed the felled machine, hacking through its sputtering shields with frost blades and power weapons. They dragged the hapless pilot from its cockpit and were snapping, howling, vying for the honour of tearing out its throat.
Within minutes of Krom Dragongaze’s arrival, the battle was won. He puffed out his chest with pride and turned to face Ulrik.
‘You’re welcome,’ Krom grinned.
‘I told you to stay behind at the Fang,’ Ulrik snarled.
‘I had a feeling I might be needed here,’ Krom answered him, brazenly.
Ulrik subjected him to his grim helm’s full glower. Most men – even those of Fenris – would have flinched from its judgement in fear. Not Krom, though. It was not for nothing that he was known as Dragongaze, or the Fierce-eye.
Krom’s head was bare, with bright russet hair sprouting from his scalp and chin, spilling over his gorget in plaits. He met Ulrik’s searing gaze with equally fiery red orbs of his own, and showed by the twitching of his lips that he relished the contest. The wolf-skull totem that he wore on his back loomed over his own skull. It appeared to be leering at Ulrik too, eye sockets full of insolence.
‘We have idled too long at the Fang,’ said Krom. ‘My Drakeslayers are impatient to bloody themselves again, after missing out on the Great Hunt.’
A growl formed at the back of Ulrik’s throat, but he let the matter drop. He had made his point – for what good it might do, what good it ever did – and Krom’s disobedience had saved him, after all. His death would have wounded the Sons of Russ grievously – especially with the Great Wolf still missing.
Olav Brunn padded up to him. ‘High Priest, the tau may be licking their wounds for now,’ he counselled, ‘but they will doubtless regroup and attack again. If the Great Wolf is to be found here–’
‘Grimnar came here,’ interrupted Krom, ‘to this planet?’
‘To explore the ruins of the city here, we believe,’ Ulrik confirmed, ‘and Olav is right, we may not have much time to search for him.’
Krom nodded and turned away from him abruptly. He fixed his eyes on the mildewed walls of the city across the plateau, as if he expected them to wither as most men did in the heat of his glare. At the same time, he barked into his comm-bead, jolting his Great Company into action.
Ulrik gave the same orders to the members of his smaller force. The Drakeslayers, however, were hungrier and better rested than the High Priest’s battle-brothers and, spurred on by their Wolf Lord, they took the lead.
Krom had his Wolf Guard form up around him and loped towards the crumbling city gates himself. He made sure to beat the Wolf High Priest through them.
The city reeked of dust and decay, making Krom’s nose itch. Its streets were narrow and winding, lined by the skeletons of half-demolished buildings. He felt hemmed in. A heavy silence had rushed in to fill the void left by the end of the battle, and the grey sky seemed a long way away.
The city had not been lived in for long before the Dactylan catastrophe had forced its evacuation. It felt lifeless, soulless, sterile. An ill place for hunting. Few feet, Krom knew, had trodden these streets in many decades, even centuries.
Few feet, he thought, and yet some...
The dust had been disturbed, and recently. There were too many trails to separate one from another, so he dispensed with the business of trying to follow them. He had his company fan out across the rubble. If there was something to find here – a clue to the Great Wolf’s whereabouts or Grimnar himself, perhaps crippled and in need of assistance – a Drakeslayer would find it or he would know the reason why.
Krom rounded the curve of a great mouldering dome, long since laid low by spiny roots that had risen up beneath it, thrusting outward triumphantly through its shattered doors and windows, only to then succumb themselves to age and blight.
A junction loomed, at which five narrow roads corkscrewed away from each other. Krom split his Wolf Guard into packs and chose the central route for himself: the one least likely, in his judgement, to loop back towards the walls.
Scant minutes later, however, he caught familiar scents on the breeze and came face-to-face with six battle-brothers, treading the same road as him but in the opposite direction. This place is a maze, he thought sourly. A man without his wolfish instincts – and less importantly, his armour’s auto-senses – would have lost himself by now.
The first discovery was made by a novice Blood Claw. His voice burst over the vox-net, proud and hungry to impress. A moment later, Beoric Winterfang delivered a more measured report from somewhere further eastward. The content of his message was much the same as that of the Blood Claw’s. Each had come upon the site of a recently fought battle – and each had found its casualties.
‘I recognise Uri Stormhammer,’ Beoric voxed. ‘A staunch member of the Old Wolf’s Kingsguard. He has been dead for some days.’
‘Then Grimnar was here,’ Krom replied. And may be yet.
‘My lord, I see another corpse,’ chimed in the eager Blood Claw. ‘It’s a Space Marine, my lord, but not of Fenris. He bears the symbol of Caliban.’
Krom’s top lip curled at the mention of the Space Wolves’ ancient rivals.
‘We have Dark Angels here too,’ Beoric confirmed. ‘One has clearly been felled by a chainsword – and, my lord, I see no tau. We have no tau bodies here.’
That could only mean one of two things. It was inconceivable that any Space Wolf had fallen without taking at least one of his enemies with him. So, had the tau simply removed their dead for burial? It was not impossible, but they had engaged Ulrik’s force outside the city – and so far, Krom had detected no fresh tau scents within it.
He clenched his fists inside his gauntlets. It had been a long time since Krom had gone toe to toe with a Dark Angel – and then he had certainly proven which of them was superior. He would relish the chance – an excuse – to prove it again.
He took a moment to consider that happy scenario. Another vox, however, demanded his attention. He recognised the voice of Egil Redfist, the Blood Claws’ commander.
‘Lost contact with three of my Wolves,’ he reported ominously. ‘I’m sending you details of their last known location and leading my pack there now.’
So, there were still enemies – living enemies – hiding in the city. Dark Angels? No, thought Krom, they wouldn’t lurk in shadows. Tau? Perhaps… But the hairs on his neck and down his spine were tingling, as they had been, he realised, since he had passed through the crumbling gate. The air had a scent, a taste of something he couldn’t quite define, but it clawed at the lining of his nose and prickled his throat.
Krom Dragongaze’s instincts were never wrong. There was something evil here.
‘This one can still be saved,’ said Wsyr Flamepelt.
He was speaking of a grey-haired Long Fang, whose hand he had seen protruding from beneath a pile of stones, whose body he had uncovered.
The Long Fang’s wounds were deep, but his enhanced physiology had staunched the bleeding and slowed his metabolic rate to less than a crawl. It might be weeks or longer before he woke – Space Marines could remain in healing comas for centuries – but wake he would.
‘Too late to tell us what happened here,’ Ulrik grumbled.
He ordered that the brother be returned to the Canis Pax where he could be properly tended to, then strode away, his heavy brow furrowed beneath his helm.
He had voxed Krom Dragongaze, and knew that the Drakeslayers had found more bodies. Not enough to suggest a massacre, he considered, but cause for concern nonetheless. What had happened to Logan Grimnar that had kept him from tending to his wounded or burying his dead? For that matter, what brought him – the Dark Angels too, not to mention the tau – to these festering ruins in the first place?
‘Another Dark Angel over here,’ Olav Brunn grunted. This one was far beyond helping. His armour was seared and dented; he lay crumpled against the foot of a spiral staircase that led nowhere.
Ulrik cast a shrewd eye over the corpse, seeking clues to the mystery. The Dark Angels and the Space Wolves had long been rivals, but fighting one another to the death was quite another thing. Unless, he concluded, the Angels had been touched by the taint of Chaos. He studied the body closely, but the Space Marine, Ulrik satisfied himself, was only what he appeared to be.
He updated Krom on his situation, eliciting a cruel bark in response. ‘I make that seven of theirs to five of ours,’ the Wolf Lord boasted. Thus far, thought Ulrik. Unlike Krom Dragongaze, he didn’t see everything as a competition.
He was listening, with one ear, to a vox-report from the Canis Pax in orbit. He had instructed its shipmistress to make continuous scans of the planet’s surface. He voxed the news to Krom.
‘The tau are regrouping on the plateau, with a dozen more battlesuits. There may be advance parties searching inside the city already.’
Could the tau have ambushed Krom’s missing Blood Claws? he wondered.
Krom snarled, ‘Good. Let them come.’
‘No,’ snapped Ulrik, feeling his gorge rising again. ‘We cannot let the tau delay us here. Save that battle for another day. We need to find what we came to this benighted world for and get out of here. Do you understand me, Krom?’
‘As you will,’ the Wolf Lord allowed thickly, then broke off contact.
Ulrik took a breath and reminded himself of the Fierce-eye’s more admirable qualities. He had certainly had to recite them often enough. The Great Wolf had repeatedly threatened to expel Krom from his Chapter; either that or rip out his throat. It had been the High Priest’s thankless task, each time, to ask him to reconsider.
It was Ulrik – an old wolf even then – who had recruited Krom and overseen his training. He had seen Krom’s belligerence and bouts of fiery rage as weapons worth tempering. The many great victories that Krom had since won, the foes left bloodied in his wake, the unshakable loyalty he inspired among his Drakeslayers, all of these things showed Ulrik’s choice to have been the correct one.
And now I owe him my life…
A sudden flurry of vox reports assailed his ears. At the same time, he heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire coming from the north-east, deadened by the intervening stone buildings, and then more gunfire, this time from the south.
The Space Wolves were under attack.
At the very first gunshot, Krom bolted into action.
He sprinted across the dead city’s narrow roads, through the shells of its sundered buildings, scrambling over heaps of debris. He came up short, letting loose a howl of frustration, as a solid wall rose to block his path. He turned and pushed his way back through the Wolf Guard who were following at his heels, seeking a way around it.
He reached the site of the battle too late. It was almost over.
A half-pack of Grey Hunters had surprised a tau scouting party. There had been six tau to three Space Wolves, but the xenos were unskilled in hand-to-hand combat and
their attackers had been upon them before they could use their pulse rifles.
Four tau had been efficiently dismembered; the remaining two had fled in opposite directions for their miserable lives. The Space Wolves would have chased them down without a thought – and Krom would probably have joined them – had Beoric Winterfang not arrived at that moment and instructed them to stand fast.
‘The High Priest said we weren’t to let the tau delay us,’ he reminded Krom calmly, in response to the Wolf Lord’s murderous glare. ‘Nor would it be wise to split our forces any further than we have, until we know more about the threat we face.’
The knowledge that Beoric was right did nothing to assuage Krom’s anger. He unleashed it upon the nearest viable targets, the Grey Hunters. He raged at them for letting the tau escape, not being faster, stronger, more alert. ‘When we return to the Fang,’ he swore, ‘you’ll each spend a week training with the Blood Claws, learning to use those blades – and should I ever witness such a clumsy display again, I’ll beat you black and bloody myself. No excuses. I will not have–’
He broke off, realising that was his voice was competing with a new sound.
He whirled around as a craft plunged, whining, out of the sky behind him. It was small and black, the shape of an arrowhead. It bore no Imperial design. Nor was it tau, judging by its harsh lines and angles. It was coming right at him – a suicide run, Krom thought, and he bellowed at his men to scatter and leap for cover.
The craft pulled up short of the ground, tilting to evade the surrounding buildings by a hair; it was more manoeuvrable than Krom had imagined it to be. He glimpsed a pilot behind its glacis, saw two more heads poking out of a weapons emplacement at its stern.
‘What in the warp is it?’ he cried.
Then the gunners got to work, strafing the street ahead of them with thousands of tiny, sharp projectiles spat from a long-nosed cannon. Krom had ducked into an archway, letting its intricate stonework bear the brunt of the assault. Some splinters ricocheted off his armour, however, and a few stuck in it: slender, quivering shards of crystal, glistening with neurotoxins. He knew what he was facing now.