by Various
As the last of the human prisoners turned and ran from the pain engine, the wretch found himself face to face with the World Eater. Swinging his metal skull around on its titanium spinal column like a morning star, the Chaos Space Marine stove in the prisoner’s skull. The victim fell before the spiked might of the World Eater, and the traitor splattered the prisoner into the sand with stamps of his gore-speckled boots.
As the two Dark Angels looked on, the gladiatorial pain engine glided up between them and the Blood God’s champion. The Interrogator-Chaplain offered an open gauntlet towards the World Eater to indicate that the pain engine was all his. The maniac’s smile broadened – a simultaneous acknowledgement of the offer and the fact that he was looking at a dead man.
The World Eater broke into a powered run. As the pain engine accelerated to meet him it reached out with its hook. Smashing the limb to one side with his flail, the Chaos Space Marine began to beat the machine back furiously. Ducking beneath a storm of lacerating hooks, the World Eater allowed the chain-flails to pass overhead before hammering the engine with the reinforced cranium of the tech-priest. The xenos audience screeched with excitement and pain lust.
As sparks flew from the liquifier appendage, the traitor’s improvised weapon failed him, the metal skull detaching from the priest’s blood-slick spine. Stamping at the pain engine with his boot, the World Eater seemed unstoppable. The brute became a feverish storm of powered kicks and punches. With a kick knocking the gladiatorial machine back on its gravitic field, the maniac picked the metal cranium up from the sand, carrying the weapon like a primitive might a rock. The stinger pod on the engine’s tail recoiled, sending a stream of static torment at the Chaos Space Marine. The World Eater didn’t move.
‘Again!’ the traitor roared, an infernal echo to his voice. The weapon seemed to do nothing to the monster. The cybernetic menace blasted the World Eater a second and a third time, each time to bawling encouragement from its opponent.
The World Eater yelled and ran at the clanking contraption. Knocking aside the engine’s flaying hook with the metal skull, he proceeded to smash at the armoured shell until the cranium too came apart in a shower of circuits and brains. His maniac’s smile now horribly contorted with rage, the World Eater grabbed the side of the pain engine. Pushing upwards with a furious heave, the Chaos Space Marine flipped the construct over.
Without the stability of its gravitic motors, the horrific fusion of flesh and instrument of torture landed on the thick plate of its hunched back. Sparks flew and the mechanism belched black smoke. It rolled across the sands, each time attempting to right itself. With gravitic motors getting a fix on the ground, the pain engine came to a stop. Shell-mounted flasks were smashed and the monstrosity’s hull sizzled and steamed with its own foul fluids. The liquefier appendage showered the sand with sparks and the stinger pod hung at a crooked angle on its segmented metal tail.
Krom watched as the impossible happened. The World Eater wasn’t finished. He stormed towards the pain engine, intent on ripping the gladiatorial machine apart. He would probably have done so, if it hadn’t been for the stuttering stream of acid the pain engine spattered into his face. With its mechanism damaged and feed lines broken, all the monstrous machine could send the Chaos Space Marine’s way was the acid left in its liquefier guns. The World Eater had never screamed before but as the acid spray ate through his face, he heard the sound of his own suffering echoing in his ears.
‘Get him up,’ Krom heard from behind him. ‘Get him up.’
It was the two Dark Angels. As the brother in blue put Krom’s arm across his back, his compatriot grabbed his other arm and hauled the Space Wolf off the floor. Krom tried to shrug the Dark Angels off him but his heavy plate, its sluggish servos and fibre bundles resisted.
‘Can you fight?’ the Interrogator-Chaplain said, his syllables clipped with a nobility of purpose.
‘My plate has no power,’ Krom growled, almost like an accusation.
‘Can you fight?’ the Interrogator-Chaplain demanded again, his courteous tone laced with authority.
‘Have you ever met a Wolf who wouldn’t?’ Krom bit back.
‘Not yet,’ the Dark Angel admitted.
The three Space Marines stopped as they saw the pain engine, billowing black smoke and bleeding fluids, surging across the sands towards them. ‘Which is as well, for I fear this will require all three of us. Our tainted friend got things rolling but we shall have to finish this monstrosity.’
Krom wasn’t sure he could trust the Dark Angels any more than he could his captors – the rivalry between the Wolf and the Lion was far from dead. Krom was a creature of immediacy, however. He lived and fought in the moment. Necessity made for strange allies and alliances.
‘We shall put an end to this show,’ Krom promised, through his pain. That was all he was willing to say.
‘Brother Othniel will flank right, myself left,’ the Interrogator-Chaplain told Krom.
‘And me?’ the Space Wolf growled with disgust.
‘You will wait for an opportunity,’ the Dark Angel assured him. ‘We shall create one if we can.’
As the pain engine rattled noisily on, the Interrogator-Chaplain and Othniel dragged Krom across the arena, the toes of the Wolf Lord’s boots creating a pair of trenches in the sand. As the machine got close, the Dark Angels dropped Krom without ceremony and peeled off to the sides. Clattering to the ground, Krom pushed himself up on his arms. His plate was like an armoured coffin about him. As the Dark Angels stalked around the pain engine it turned slowly on its gravitic motors, hovering near Krom like a hound defending a buried bone.
Suddenly the Dark Angels ran at the monstrous engine, their robes flowing after them. Othniel reached the gladiator first, skidding to a stop just before the throat-tearing swipe of the machine’s hook. Surging for the weaponised appendage, Othniel balanced the might of his powered blue plate against the hydraulics of the bone-fused limb. The pain engine struggled, but Othniel held fast, forcing the armoured thing back across the sand. Unlike the World Eater or even Krom himself, the Dark Angel’s attack lacked ferocity, but he more than made up for that with stalwart determination.
The Interrogator-Chaplain came from the other side, jumping up onto the side of the pain engine’s armoured shell. Leaping across its hunched back, the Dark Angel cleared the monstrosity with knightly elegance. The pain engine, however, fired the screw-shaped barrels of its stinger pod. Unable to raise the barrel on its broken tail, the pain engine missed the Interrogator-Chaplain and blasted itself in the back.
As the thing drifted backwards towards Krom, Brother Othniel released it. With its gravitic motor stuttering about him, Krom looked up at the pallid flesh of the pain engine. It was muscular, clammy and horrifically interfaced with the dark machinery. With tendons taut and the pain engine’s organic muscles flexing horribly, the Wolf Lord couldn’t tell whether the thing was in some kind of private agony or ecstasy. Then Krom saw his opportunity. The pain engine’s brawny neck ran into its armoured helm, but under its jaw the Space Wolf spotted a weakness. He had to be fast, however, before the monstrosity recovered and slaughtered them all.
Forcing the fingers of his powerless gauntlet straight, Krom thrust his palm up through the abomination’s throat. Helped by the backwards drift of the thing, Krom punched his hand like a claw up inside the pain engine’s armoured helm and skull. The construct spasmed, the muscles of its chest and arms contracting. Smoke belched from the machine and fluids were expelled from all its ports. In that second, Krom Dragongaze knew he had it. With disgust-fuelled violence the Space Wolf reached up inside the engine’s xenos skull and crushed the twisted thing he found inside. Alien gore poured through the holes in its helm onto the sand.
The monstrosity’s gravitic drive stuttered and failed. Withdrawing his bloody gauntlet, Krom heaved himself and his dead plate to one side, moments before the motor failed and the pain engine came crashing down on the arena sands, a smoking wreck.
Amongst the audience there was movement. Columns of coliseum guards were filing down through the terraces. Dressed in leathers and carrying a combination of electrified nets and bidents, the dark eldar appeared ready to secure the arena. Jets of flame spouted from nozzles set in the arena wall, growing in length and power. The raging inferno turned blood and sand to glass, forcing the remaining prisoners to gather in the centre of the arena.
The Dark Angels helped Krom across the sand in his dead plate, away from the unbearable heat of the flames. The survivors became a throng of silhouettes. The flames corralled them together before dying suddenly in a great whoosh of heat. As his eyes adjusted to the vanishing glare, Krom saw that the coliseum guards had run up in place of the flames. They encircled the survivors with their number. For the first time, Krom realised that the maniac World Eater was still alive – although a horrifically disfigured mess, roaring into gauntlets he used to cover what was left of his face. The Wolf Lord and the Dark Angels would have killed the traitor, if it hadn’t have been for the dark eldar surrounding them.
The xenos held crackling nets, while presenting the twin tips of their forked spears in a circle of death. As the leather-clad guards closed on the Space Marines, Krom bridled. He was exhausted from the prolonged demands of survival in the arena but his victory already had him bristling with a desire to savage his alien captors. From behind, the Dark Angel Interrogator-Chaplain spoke.
‘If you choose to fight,’ he said, ‘then the Dark Angels shall fight with you. Know, savage prince of the Wolf King, that our lives will be forfeit. I appeal to you. Return quietly to your cage. From there we can make plans for our liberty.’
Krom spat blood at the sand in disgust, the spittle hanging from his chin whiskers.
‘Wolves weren’t meant for cages, Angel,’ Krom growled back at him.
‘There is no honour dying like this,’ the Interrogator-Chaplain told him.
‘I will kill every xenos that tries to lay their filthy hands on me,’ Krom rumbled.
‘Of that I have no doubt,’ the Dark Angel said. ‘But what do you think they are going to do when the corpses of the alien dead are at our feet?’
‘They will flood the arena with flame,’ Krom admitted, managing to shake the effects of the poison from his head.
‘The cages offer us a chance, at least,’ the Interrogator-Chaplain said.
The dark eldar guards tightened the circle about them, the double blades of their spears tapping the plate and dimpling the barbarian flesh of the Wolf Lord. Krom glared his hatred up the length of the weapon at the guard ready to thrust it through his chest.
‘Alright, Angel,’ Krom said, raising his arms in the lifeless plate with difficulty. ‘We do this your way.’ The Wolf Lord turned the hatred in his eyes on the Interrogator-Chaplain, who nodded the blankness of his skull helm in silence. ‘But I hope you are caged with me,’ the Space Wolf snarled.
Surrounded by a forest of spears, the Space Marines were escorted back to their cells. The barred compartments were built into the arena wall so that prisoners could see what was expected of them during the dread games. The cells were little better than the escort, with spikes and razored shafts projecting inwards, limiting the movement of the prisoners and frustrating attempts to batter down the barred doors or rush their gaolers.
Krom wasn’t surprised that the dark eldar took such measures. Compared to even the brawniest of the dark eldar beastmasters, clutching their whips and the chains of their chimeric creatures, the Space Wolves were hulking demigods. They drowned the wretched aliens in their shadows.
Returned to the cells with the remaining members of the Drakeslayers, Krom arrived to grim acknowledgments of ‘My lord’. The Space Wolves had seen what Krom had been forced to suffer out on the sands and had gone wild in their cells. Now they met their captain with grave, whisker-lined faces in the gloom and eyes that burned like candles in the night.
One face that was not there was that of Jormund Thunderclaw. Krom had lost so many of his brothers that his friend’s face was now but a ghostly memory, fading further with each new loss. Krom bit back his bitterness. He had to look out for the brothers that still lived.
Hengist Ironaxe’s features looked greyer and more drawn than usual, while Rorven couldn’t help a mumbled exclamation of ‘By the Allfather’ at the extent of Krom’s injuries. Haegr Fangthane came to the bars, despite his own wounds, and Brorn Grindalson even reached out to touch the Wolf Lord’s ruined plate in reassurance. The Space Wolf was forced back by the thrust of a dark eldar spear. Ulf Horghast, Lars Thorgil and Ingrimm Thunderfell growled, spat and kicked at the bars of their cell, drawing the attentions of the xenos to them instead.
‘You would do well not to antagonise them, brothers,’ the Interrogator-Chaplain told them as he helped Krom along. Grundar Greymane gave him the winter bleakness of his eyes.
‘By the Allfather,’ Greymane spat. ‘My Wolves would savage them all.’
Krom tottered, the poison still potent in his blood and his plate dragging him down, but the Interrogator-Chaplain caught him.
‘I believe you,’ the Interrogator-Chaplain said. ‘But not today, they won’t.’
Krom did not get his wish. The dark eldar guards forced the Interrogator-Chaplain to help the Wolf Lord into a cell with his own – Grundar Greymane, who continued to spit blood, and an unusually reserved Beoric Winterfang. The Interrogator-Chaplain and Brother Othniel were placed in the next cage.
Sitting in the cell, with the points of spikes scraping against his plate and cage-spanning blades beneath his chin, Krom had some time to consider whether he had been right to submit to incarceration. Beoric was no Iron Priest, but with time to kill, the leader of Krom’s Wolf Guard went to work doing what he could with his lord’s plate and damaged power pack. After he had managed to restore partial power, the suit was still a drag on Krom’s bestial reflexes but allowed him some protection and manoeuvrability. Meanwhile, Grundar did his best to tend the Fierce-eye’s terrible injuries.
Feeling well enough to move around the tiny cage, the Wolf Lord kicked away a bowl of slop the gaolers had provided to ensure the prisoners kept up their strength for the spectacle of the show. Krom suspected all the food and water they were given was drugged to keep the dangerous Space Marines sedated until they were once more required for the arena. He had ordered that all such offerings be ignored. The Drakeslayers did not need such comforts. The spilling of blood was their mead and the righteous butchery of the Emperor’s enemies their sustenance.
As the hours passed under the gloom of the imprisoned stars, Krom regained his strength, his coordination and his mind. It had been a battle – every bit as torturous as the one fought on the arena sands – but eventually he felt his engineered body starting to break down the alien poison, though who knew what side effects it still might have.
Krom watched as prisoners from other cell sections were marched out into the arena to fight for their lives against a menagerie of alien beasts and the small army of warrior women that called the coliseum their home. Crowds came at all hours to shriek, hiss and soak up the merciless violence of the arena. The dark eldar came for their fix of death, perverse pleasures to fill the rancid emptiness of their hearts.
When he wasn’t watching the gladiatrix and their monsters, studying their murderous craft, Krom turned his attentions to the cages in which he and his men had been housed. He found Beoric Winterfang, the leader of his Wolf Guard, staring at him. His eyes were glazed with regret, and he quivered with an animal fury bubbling below the surface. Krom knew what was coming.
‘I failed you,’ the sergean
t said finally.
‘You fail yourself, sergeant,’ Krom told him, ‘if you entertain such fantasies – for I know it would be a fantasy indeed, if Beoric Winterfang failed anyone.’
‘My lord,’ Beoric said. ‘It is a failing to not be at your side when you need me.’
‘Then I was wrong,’ Krom told him with a grim smile. ‘You’re always failing me. Why, only three days’ past, my mug of mead was just beyond my reach. The day before that I noticed a mark that needed polishing on my plate.’ Krom looked Beoric in the eye and tried to draw a similar smile from his sergeant.
‘Only yesterday,’ Krom went on, ‘I needed to answer nature’s call. I looked around. Where were you, sergeant? Where were you?’
Beoric managed a weak curl of the lips, but his eyes still spoke for the guilt he felt at not fighting by his Wolf Lord’s side in the arena.
‘You jest, my lord,’ the sergeant said, ‘but your life was left in the hands of untrustworthy Angels.’ Beoric gave the Interrogator-Chaplain in the next cage the daggers of his eyes. The Dark Angel nodded slowly at the Wolf Guard sergeant, as though he were acknowledging some thanks or compliment. As Beoric went to get to his feet, Krom grabbed his arm and pulled him back down.
‘My life was in the most capable hands of all,’ Krom assured him. ‘My own.’
‘It’s my opinion, my lord,’ Beoric said.
‘And I respect that, but opinions are like chin-whiskers. We all have them,’ Krom said. He looked over at the Dark Angels. ‘Present company excepted. If you want to worry about something, sergeant, worry about getting out of here.’
Krom stared at the Dark Angel in his dark plate, hood and filthy robes, who hadn’t said a word since they had been returned to their cells.