by Various
Krom would not be put off. Instead of withdrawing, the Space Wolf moved in closer. With his remaining blade clutched against his chest, ready to thrust forth and gut the gladiatrix, he reached out with his free hand. A leather strap, a chain or a lank limb, anything to get an anchor on the alien warrioress. Flipping back, she escaped the clawing grapnel of his gauntlet, the shaft of the glaive turning and twirling. Sparks flew from the back of the armoured hand as his gauntlet was smacked away. The flat of the second blade batted Krom’s remaining weapon free from his grip.
Before he could react – his movements a slow-motion nightmare – the gladiatrix had jabbed with her glaive, the blade flashing forth in place of her retreat. Gouging a hole in the Space Wolf’s grey plate at his thigh, the shaft came at him again and again. Each thrust was a different angle, the glaive darting forth through Krom’s grasping defences and retracting before he could lay his fingertips on the weapon. A flashing stab through the cabling of the Wolf Lord’s midriff. One to the muscle of the right arm. A deeper gouge to the chest. The spinning blades of the glaive glinting in the dull, darklight of the captured suns, ready to take Krom’s head. The Wolf Lord imagined the fountain of gore that would follow. The murderous ecstasy of the dark eldar about them.
Krom looked up into his killer’s eyes. They sparkled with hatred and glee. Her taut musculature rippled beneath the pallor of her skin.
As the glaive came around, Krom ducked his head. As he did so, one of his red plaits bounced upwards, only to be sliced free by the blistering passage of the glaive blade above him. He bellowed as he pushed himself up from the sand. It was an ugly lunge. His hands came up, his fingers grasping for the dark eldar’s slender neck.
Momentary disappointment crossed the gladiatrix’s face. She pulled the glaive back and spun it overhead, intending to cleave the blade straight down through the Space Wolf. The shaft of the weapon hit Krom’s outstretched gauntlets. Locking his fingers about its length like a vice, the Wolf Lord held her there. The gladiatrix’s body contorted about the glaive, every muscle of her sickly slender form contracted to bring the weapon down. Krom’s arms burned from the wicked stab wounds the dark eldar had visited upon him. His lips retracted about his sharp teeth and a low growl issued forth from his chest. He would deny the gladiatrix her death fetish.
Krom heard footsteps approaching across the sand. His gaze was locked with his enemy. He dared not look away. A moment’s distraction could end him. He entertained the possibility of more warrior women, padding forth in bare feet to stab and gut him as their murderess held him in position. The sand-crunching steps were heavier than the coliseum killers, however. An angel of death approached.
Krom watched as the gladiatrix’s headdress was knocked from her head. Her face was suddenly covered by filthy, dun white material, pulled so tight that the Space Wolf could see the sharpness of her alien features through it. It was the Interrogator-Chaplain – come to end the xenos. A punishment suitable for the crime of the alien’s mere existence.
With the hem pulled across her throat, Krom saw the dark eldar’s mouth open in a silent scream, her sharp teeth piercing the material. As the chaplain hauled back on the material cutting across the gladiatrix’s throat and covering the abominate beauty of her face, Krom realised that he was strangling the alien with his own robes. The dark eldar released her glaive, which remained in the Wolf Lord’s vice-like grip, and tore feverishly at the material with her stiletto fingernails. There was little she could do, however. The garrotting robes were held by one of the Emperor’s Angels. The power of his engineered muscle and determination to do his xenos-eradicating duty were more than a match for the fell skill of an alien murderess.
The gladiatrix began to thrash. For her it was no longer about air. The chaplain was breaking her neck. She smashed the sharpness of her elbow uselessly into her enemy’s plate. She clawed at him and his hood-buried helmet. As he lifted her up off her bare feet, ready to end the arena’s deadly champion, Krom saw her spasmodic hands reach for a thin blade in her belt. Snatching it up, the warrioress made ready to stab the chaplain. Krom saw the discoloured metal and the concentrated venom that smoked from the blade. It was not like the glaive. The glaive was a show weapon. Something to please the audience with its twirling glint. Something to slow down opponents in preparation for a theatrical kill. The knife, however, looked like it could kill at the slightest nick or slice.
With his hearts thudding in his chest and mind swimming with blood loss and doom, the Wolf Lord willed himself to his feet. He thrust the double-bladed glaive back at the gladiatrix, slamming the blade into her chest. The chaplain released his quarry and stumbled back as the tip of the blade erupted from the dark eldar’s back. As he backed his filthy robes went with him, revealing the cold shock on the face of the warrioress. As her knife tumbled from her fingertips, landing blade first in the sand, a trickle of blood made its way down her face from the corner of her thin lips.
The Wolf lord roared and lifted the gladiatrix above his head, holding her there as she died, the impaled warrior woman working her horrible way down the blade and shaft of the weapon. But there was no audience to applaud his efforts or shriek its displeasure. The arena was a nest of pistol-blasting, blade-stabbing havoc. Black Talon raiders. Dark eldar guards of the Serrated Shadow. The deviant wretches that made up the coliseum audience and Commorrite citizenry. All were at each other’s throats, while two dark queens fought through the vicious slaughter.
Krom saw the coliseum queen in the spikes and extravagant leathers wielding an impossible length of barbed blades about her nightmare form. Her opposite was a lean killer, whose flesh was powdered theatrically to whiteness. She wore black boots and gloves that reached up her legs and arms. The gloves whipped with finger blades like razored wings, threatening to dice anything that got too close. Krom dropped his trophy, sickened by the alien butchery.
Above the warrior queens, shrieking skiffs visited blistering destruction upon the coliseum with exotic grav-craft mounted cannons. As bombs dropped from the gunships and blade-vaned barges, Krom hauled Interrogator-Chaplain Balthus forward.
‘Incoming!’ the Wolf Lord barked to what was left of his Drakeslayers, but as the bomb hit the arena floor it did not explode as he expected. Instead, a sizzling storm of dark energy tore up the sand, growing to form a dome of immaterial transference. As reinforcements in leathers, clutching tapering pistols, blistered forth from the globed gateway, Krom could see that it was a portable portal used to rush further troops into the coliseum.
Krom looked to Balthus and Grundar Greymane, who had Sergeant Beoric over one pauldron.
‘Do you hear that?’ Krom said. ‘I hear knocking.’
Grundar looked unsure.
The Interrogator-Chaplain wasn’t about to abandon such an opportunity.
‘It’s death to stay here,’ Balthus said to the Space Wolves.
‘It could lead anywhere,’ Grundar said.
‘Anywhere but here,’ the Interrogator-Chaplain shot back.
‘I don’t think we have a choice,’ the Wolf Lord said, moving towards the nearest portal. ‘Space Wolves: to me!’
As a walk became a run and both Space Wolves and Dark Angels converged on the sizzling dome of unnatural energy, dark eldar came at them. Splinter shot blasted from pistols ripped at their plate and warrior reinforcements put themselves and their blades between the prisoners and their escape route. The Space Marines would not be put off their path, however. They barged their way through the surprised xenos, and before the dark eldar could stop him, Krom had plunged into the interdimensional static of the portal. It washed over him like rising waters, filling the Wolf Lord with a feeling of pain and dreamy disconnection. For a moment his heartbeats died away and his stomach plunged in all directions at once. What felt like an eternity passed in several agonising seconds, as Krom emerged from the other side of the searing dome.
His plate immediately registered the cold. It bit at his flesh through the man
gled suit. Balthus, Brother Othniel and Grundar followed. Everything was quiet but for the evil hiss of the portal. They found themselves in a dark chamber, the architecture of which was twisted and rachidian. As the other Drakeslayers made it through the portal, Grundar laid the unconscious Sergeant Beoric down on the floor and made a brief inspection of his injuries. He was out cold, but apart from cracked plate and similar damage to his ribs and black carapace, Beoric looked like he was going to make it.
The Space Marines spread out to search the chamber.
‘Rorven,’ Krom said to the Space Wolf. ‘Watch the portal – wait, where’s Hengist?’
Looking about the drawn faces in the chamber it was clear that Hengist Ironaxe was not with them.
‘He was last to enter,’ Rorven said. ‘He was behind me and then–’
Krom made to enter the alien portal once more. He would not leave the Grey Hunter behind, not while he still lived.
‘My lord, wait,’ Grundar Greymane said, reaching out for him. At that moment a silhouette blazed through the interdimensional static. The Space Wolves tensed. Hengist Ironaxe appeared, his forehead betraying several deep gashes he had not had moments before. He clutched in his gauntlets something that Krom had never thought to see again. Wyrmclaw. The Wolf Lord’s rune-carved frost axe.
Krom cracked the caked blood about his face with a smile.
‘We thought we had lost you, brother,’ he said.
‘I thought you had lost this,’ Hengist told the Wolf Lord, ‘until I saw some xenos looter leaving the cell block with it.’
Taking the frost axe and admiring the blade, he took the Grey Hunter by the fist and held him there in appreciation. He looked behind Hengist at the unnatural energies of the portal.
‘Rorven, Hengist,’ Krom said. ‘Find a way to destroy that damned thing.’
As the Space Wolves searched, they found nothing but bodies. Dark eldar, with their throats slit and hearts cut out. A swift and brutal massacre had taken place – presumably by the Black Talon reinforcements that had entered the arena from the portal. Other than the dead, the building into which the Space Wolves had walked was deserted.
‘Fenrisian,’ Interrogator-Chaplain Balthus called. Following the voice, Krom and Grundar found the two Dark Angels out on a spiked watch-balcony. Looking around, Krom saw that they were standing on a crooked tower that stabbed up into the dust-choked void. The darkness of the sky was all nebulous reds and blue, reflected in the sulphuric snow that clung to the tower and caked the rocky twilight below.
‘We’re out of the webway?’ Krom said. It sounded like a question but was more of a statement. Balthus didn’t bother to answer.
‘This must be a dark eldar outpost,’ he told Krom. He pointed out the Serrated Shadow banners that fluttered in the gelid breeze. ‘A supply tower or base of piratical operations.’
The Wolf Lord nodded: ‘We found bodies.’
‘Some private war of xenos cults or clans,’ Balthus said.
‘Vicious dogs, eh,’ Krom said. It was one thing to attack a rival cult and their coliseum, but to launch reinforcements from the very bases from which the coliseum expected their own was especially black-hearted. For all the Space Marines knew, however, it could have been a daily occurrence in the Dark City.
‘See that?’ Balthus asked, pointing up towards a bright collection of five stars, like a rash blotting through the nebulous dust of the system.
‘They look close,’ Krom said.
‘They are,’ Brother Othniel said, the light of the stars reflecting off his blue plate. ‘It’s a quintuplet system – two binaries and a lone companion. Rare – and therefore easy to identify.’
‘So,’ Krom said. ‘Where are we?’
‘At a guess, one of the rocky, outlying moons or dwarf planets of the Skarapaz System,’ Brother Othniel told him.
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Krom admitted.
‘Which is probably why the xenos pirates are using it for a system outpost,’ Balthus said.
‘It’s not far from Harrow Worlds,’ Othniel said.
‘Damn, that’s close,’ Krom said. ‘My Wolves hold station over Dactyla.’
‘The Angels of the First are not too distant, either,’ Balthus said. ‘Now we are free of the webway, Brother Othniel will use his talents to contact the Librarians and astropaths of our respective fleets.’
Krom grunted and extended a grey gauntlet.
‘My thanks,’ he told the Interrogator-Chaplain. ‘For this. For the arena.’
‘Without cooperation, I am certain that we would all be dead,’ Balthus said plainly. ‘Emperor knows we have both lost brothers. But I take your hand anyway.’ The Interrogator-Chaplain took Krom’s gauntlet and the Space Marines shook on their shared deliverance.
‘Hopefully,’ Krom said, looking up at the dust-streaked heavens, ‘we would have made our primarchs proud.’
Balthus nodded slowly.
‘When our brothers arrive,’ the Dark Angel said, ‘I fear our truce will come to an end.’
‘Yes,’ Krom agreed.
‘For what our legions could never see,’ the Interrogator-Chaplain said, ‘was that the Lion and the Wolf were so similar in their differences. It is a blindness and burden that their sons bear to this day.’
‘Aye,’ Krom said, peering up into the blackness of the void. ‘A darkness indeed.’
‘Yes,’ Balthus said. ‘The darkness of Angels.’
PART SIX
THE WOLF WITHIN
An ornament hanging silently in the void, the Space Marines strike cruiser took station above the tiny world of Skarapaz XVIII.
‘It’s the High Priest,’ Sergeant Beoric Winterfang announced, identifying the vessel from its rugged outline. Still recovering from his injuries, the sergeant held his shattered ribs as he spoke. It was painful, but he did not let on. ‘Ulrik is here. Grandfather Lupus has come for us.’
Krom Dragongaze joined the sergeant out on the frozen rock of the unassuming world, sulphuric snow crunching beneath his boots. The plummeting temperatures would have killed any normal man. To the dark eldar who had made an outpost on the outlying world, it was no doubt a painful fetish. To Fenrisians, it was nothing. The mild chill of a world orbiting far from its five suns.
The pair watched as a Stormwolf gunship dropped from Ulrik’s cruiser, the Canis Pax, and made its way across the surface of the rocky planet.
As the Stormwolf came in to land, Krom read the name Rolling Thunder emblazoned on the gunship’s scarred side. It was a venerable craft and the veteran of many furious engagements. Putting down on the outpost’s primitive launch pad, the gunship whipped up snow and grit about it. Walking up behind the Wolf Lord and his sergeant were Grundar Greymane and the surviving Space Wolves. Behind them were Interrogator-Chaplain Balthus of the Dark Angels and Brother Othniel, the Librarian who had sent word of their location to both their Dark Angels brethren and the Wolves stationed over Dactyla. It was the Sons of Russ, however, who had received the message and come for their kindred.
Grundar Greymane started the chant, which was picked up by Sergeant Beoric and the Space Wolves about him. Before long it became a roared mantra.
‘Lupus, Lupus, Lupus…’
The transport compartment ramp lowered as the Rolling Thunder landed and cut its engines. A Space Marine emerged. It was not the High Priest, but the Wolf Guard Beregelt. He smiled at seeing his master.
‘My lord,’ the Space Wolf said. ‘Ulrik the Slayer offers you greeting.’
‘We are obliged to you and the venerable Slayer,’ Krom said, as Ulrik’s men filed out to assume a cordon about the gunship. Ulrik himself, a vision of doom in his wolf skull helm and furs, stepped off the ramp last, out onto the rock and snow.
‘Lord Dragongaze,’ Ulrik greeted Krom. ‘Scion of the Sun Wolf – it is a pity we should meet in such a benighted place.’
‘You are well met, wherever duty finds us,’ Krom told him honestly.
Ulrik’s optics settl
ed on the Dark Angels behind.
Krom glanced back and forth between the two. ‘This is…’ he hesitated.
‘Balthus,’ the Dark Angel said. He gave the Slayer a slow nod, which the Wolf High Priest returned with suspicion.
‘And Brother Othniel,’ Krom said, ‘who was responsible for determining our location and summoning aid.’
‘Yes,’ Ulrik said, his breath misting about him. He let the word hang there in the freezing air. ‘You can’t imagine how surprised we were to receive your message from an Angel of the First.’
‘The Interrogator-Chaplain and Brother Othniel were instrumental in our escape from the xenos.’
‘Yes,’ Ulrik said again. ‘You look like hell.’
Finally the Slayer stood aside, extending an arm towards his gunship. Sergeant Beoric and the surviving Drakeslayers filed between them and into the troop compartment. The Space Wolves were eager to get weaponry back into their hands and join their brothers under the High Priest’s command.
‘Interrogator-Chaplain,’ Ulrik acknowledged, using the appropriate term of address, as the four of them mounted the ramp. The door closed on the dark eldar outpost and the tiny, frozen world of Skarapaz XVIII. The engines fired and the Rolling Thunder took off.
‘Incoming transmission,’ Beregelt told Ulrik. ‘It’s the shipmistress, my lord.’
‘Shipmistress Asgir,’ the Slayer said, changing vox channels. ‘This is Ulrik. Our mission has been a success. We have extracted Lord Krom and his Drakeslayers. Prepare the ship. I want you to make way as soon as the gunship is aboard.’
‘The Canis Pax stands ready to receive you, Master Ulrik,’ the shipmistress voxed back.
As Balthus and Brother Othniel came up behind, Beregelt and another Wolf Guard took them by the plate of their forearms and slapped a pair of manacles on the two Dark Angels. The Interrogator-Chaplain did not resist, instead simply giving Ulrik the blank gaze of his skull-helm optics.