by Various
‘Repentance, this is the Canis Pax,’ Ulrik said. ‘Please respond.’
Static proceeded from the bridge voxhailers.
‘Repentance,’ the Slayer pressed, ‘I am Ulrik, High Priest of the Space Wolves. Your flotilla has sustained damage at my hand, but your destruction was not our intent. The galaxy is broad and wide and the mistakes made within its borders are many. This is one such mistake. We thought we were under attack and responded, as any of the Emperor’s blood is engineered to do. We seek parley to repair the damage we have done and atone for the offence committed. Please respond.’
Once more the Space Wolves’ patience was rewarded with static. All the while the Dark Angels vessels grew larger in the lancet screens. Krom turned on Brother Balthus.
‘Tell them,’ the Wolf Lord insisted.
The Interrogator-Chaplain, however, said nothing.
‘We have two of your brothers among our number,’ Ulrik said, the annoyance obvious in his aged voice. ‘A Chaplain and a Librarian that we should like to return to you.’
Krom detected it first. Something in the air. A heat without temperature. The sizzle of scorched reality.
‘Teleporter signatures!’ Shipmistress Asgir called out. While the Space Wolves had been concerning themselves with making contact, the Dark Angels had simply transported themselves aboard. A lead mist bled into manifestation on the command deck. Shapes in bone white terminator armour appeared on the bridge. Boltguns were primed as the Dark Angels peered down barrels and muzzles at their Space Wolf targets. The Space Wolves on the bridge, in turn, thrust their own weapons with ferocity and shock at the armoured interlopers.
Krom marvelled at the perfect execution of the boarding. He grabbed Brother Balthus once more by the filthy material of his robes and pulled them apart to reveal a teleporter homer on the Interrogator-Chaplain’s belt. Balthus must have had it on him the whole time.
Krom snarled, to himself rather than Balthus, but that didn’t stop a Dark Angel officer thudding the muzzle of his bolt pistol into Krom’s temple.
Balthus shrugged off the Space Wolf’s grasp, straightening his robes.
‘It doesn’t have to be this way,’ Krom said, as Balthus moved through the stand-off, uncaring of the boltguns and furious glares being cast across the command deck.
‘Angels are dead, Wolf,’ the officer hissed through his helmet’s vox-grille.
‘We have all lost brothers to the desperation of these shared circumstances,’ Krom said.
‘We share nothing,’ Brother Balthus said.
‘But we could,’ Ulrik suggested quietly. He stared at the Interrogator-Chaplain. ‘We have worked side by side in brotherly accord against a common foe.’
‘You opened fire upon our vessels,’ the Dark Angels officer said, his words sharp like the blade that sat in the scabbard on his belt.
‘We thought we were under attack,’ Krom said.
‘You were,’ Balthus told him, ‘but not by warriors of the First.’
‘Forgive me,’ Ulrik the Slayer said. The word seemed unnatural proceeding from the cracked lips of such a venerable Space Wolf. ‘Is that not what you are empowered to do, Interrogator-Chaplain? Forgive me. For it was my vessel that opened fire upon your own. My order that authorised that attack. Forgive the blunt words of diplomacy, that catch on the sharpness of my teeth and are an ill-fit for the mouth from which they come. Forgive one, like you, of the Emperor’s blood – who wishes a brotherly alliance out here, where the void is empty and humanity’s foes myriad. Accept a mistake for what it is and together we shall lay your kindred to rest.’
Krom looked from the High Priest to the Interrogator-Chaplain. Balthus had stopped wandering across the bridge and was now staring out through the screens at the Dark Angel ships holding the Canis Pax in their sights.
‘Interrogator-Chaplain–’ the Dark Angels officer began.
‘We are Adeptus Astartes all,’ Krom interrupted. ‘We have all come to this miserable corner of the galaxy on the Emperor’s business.’
Balthus turned to face them. He seemed to have reached a decision.
‘Very well. I seek a traitor of the Alpha Legion,’ the Interrogator-Chaplain began. ‘He has escaped from our custody and is to be punished for his many crimes – but first we have to find him, and that task has proven... challenging.’
‘We seek someone too,’ Ulrik said. ‘The Great Wolf. We hunt for him as he hunts for our Lord Russ. I know that in the past our fathers have not always seen eye to eye. I know that in the stormy present our Chapters have had precious little upon which to build brotherly love. I would ask you, Interrogator-Chaplain, to allow for a future in which our two Chapters work together for the accomplishment of separate deeds. Allow the Space Wolves, in recognition of the losses you have suffered at our hand, to hunt down your quarry with you. In turn, permit us to learn what we can of our lost leader from this transgressor – for the arrival of the Great Wolf with his warrior host in this wretched region of space will not have gone unnoticed.’
For the longest time, the Interrogator-Chaplain did not speak.
‘Stand down,’ he told his Dark Angels finally. The officer hesitated before re-holstering his pistol. The barrels of aimed boltguns drifted slowly towards the floor before the chaplain’s orders were conveyed to the Calibos, the Semper Fortis and the Repentance. Balthus nodded to Krom and then to Ulrik, the Wolf Lord and High Priest returning the solemn acceptance. ‘Once more,’ Balthus told them, ‘the galaxy shall witness the sons of the Lion and the Wolf hunting together.’
Krom could feel the lightness of his steps. It was welcome. His injuries were still healing and his artificer plate had only benefitted from the most basic of repairs. As he ran the suit still rattled about him and his armoured boots pounded the marble underfoot to shattered stone. On the low-gravity world of Stratovass Ultra, however, his plate weighed significantly less than it did on Fenris, or aboard the Canis Pax.
The Blood Claws of Squad Greymane ran beside him with Grundar following, a ravenous pack of Fenrisian wolves snapping and seething on adamantium chains. The beasts had the scent and were leading the Space Wolves through the mighty spirehalls and palatial pinnacles of Eyriax – the capital hive city of Stratovass Ultra.
Interrogator-Chaplain Balthus had brought them there on the trail of the Alpha Legionnaire, Sathar the Undone. The Ironpelt had followed the Canis Pax to this world from Dactyla. Ulrik the Slayer and Sergeant Beoric Winterfang had remained with the Space Wolves vessels, while Brother Othniel and the other Dark Angels had returned to the Repentance. The strike cruisers, both Space Wolf and Dark Angel, held station high above the hive world. Meanwhile, Krom had unleashed his Fenrisian beasts and the neophytes of his Drakeslayers on the world’s surface. With the Interrogator-Chaplain’s gathered intelligence and the hunter’s instincts of the Space Wolves, Krom was confident that they would catch Sathar the Undone.
Planetfall had taken them to the rusted dunes of Stratovass. The traitor’s scent had led them through the stilt shanties in the capital hive’s towering shadow. The Space Wolves had followed Sathar up through the Chartist dry docks, where the skeletal frameworks of merchant freighters, haulage brigs and tenders were under construction.
Krom had got his first look at their quarry in the nest of cloud-swathed spires that reached up from the surface of Stratovass like a spiked crown. Sathar was a broad, imposing figure in dark armour and robes, his face lost in a hood. Great bat-like wings erupted from the space between his backplate and pack, but it was impossible to tell whether they were real appendages or a theatrical affectation. Carrying the broad blade of a sword that was almost as tall as him, Sathar was fleeing through the vaulted halls and palaces of the spires. Krom caught sight of him on one of the myriad walkways extending between the nest of towers, moments before he disappeared in the clouds.
Without the pack of wolves and the keen senses of the indefatigable Blood Claws, they would have lost the traitor, since the clouds of Strat
ovass didn’t only bury the palace towers in a beautiful haze but manifested within the spirehalls, high corridors and great chambers.
As the wolf pack snaggled and snarled their way through the luxurious accommodations, their claws tore up rugs and flagstones. Grundar Greymane let the beasts have their head and run on their adamantium chains. His Blood Claws, young and short of hair, whiskers and fangs, moved through the palaces with a feral grace. In the low gravity, the slick glide of their movements took them over ornate furniture, through stained-glass windows and up grand staircases with ease. They were the headstrong Sons of Russ and the Emperor’s genekin, with nothing to fear from even the most powerful of the hiveworld’s inhabitants. Heavy-set, with a lifetime’s worth of muscle and experience, Grundar and his Wolf Lord were slower and more measured in their movements, with Brother Balthus in his fresh, streaming robes coming up behind.
‘Grundar,’ Krom said. ‘Bring him down.’
The Drakeslayers were so close. They had hunted the renegade up through the hive. Cornering him in the pinnacle palaces, the Space Wolves had given their quarry nowhere to go. Krom could not risk the possibility of the Legionnaire reaching a launch pad or pick-up from a terrace balcony.
At his Wolf Lord’s order, Grundar Greymane released one of his Fenrisian beasts. The wolf surged away from the pack, finally at liberty to run its prey down. The Space Wolves followed the creature as it weaved through pillars, bounded balustrades and made short work of hall expanses. It disappeared into the mists hanging in the palace chambers but its fellow beasts, still on Grundar’s chains, showed the way.
Suddenly Krom heard the most awful sound. The shriek of a beast in agony and shock, followed by a dismal moan of death that echoed perversely through the misted chambers. It wasn’t long before the Blood Claws found the wolf. It had been skewered through the jaws and the length of its body, by what Krom could only imagine was the Chaos Space Marine’s monstrous blade. Striding through the mist-cloaked antechamber, Krom found himself outside on a platform. Three bridgeways, made of chain and lightweight metal planking, spanned the gap between the palace tower they were in and the other spires reaching up out of the clouds. The jangling walkways themselves were lost in the haze.
Behind him, Grundar’s wolves snapped and spat, while the Blood Claws caught their breath and awaited orders. Laying his gauntlet on the chains of one bridge and then the others, Krom felt for the tremble and bounce of a recent crossing.
‘This one,’ the Wolf Lord said. A Blood Claw with a mane of red hair and side whiskers went to follow but Krom put his hand up. Sending a jangle through the chain walkway with his gauntlet, the Wolf Lord waited. He looked at Brother Balthus, who gave a nod of approval. A sharp clang cut through the cloudy obscurity in which the hive spires were lost. The sound of metal upon metal. Krom stepped back, the chain feeling suddenly loose in his grip. He listened for the sound of the falling walkway, the tangle of metal and chain cut away by Sathar the Undone on the other side. The traitor had waited for them, feeling for their crossing as Krom had done before intending to send the Wolves plummeting to their deaths. Stratovass Ultra was a low gravity world but a fall from the towering hive spires of the Eyriax would still mean certain death.
Krom studied the other two walkways. They vanished into the mist, so he could not be sure where they led. He turned to Balthus.
‘You’ve pursued this traitor before,’ Krom said to him. ‘What is the best course of action?’
‘We’ll separate and entrap him,’ Balthus said. ‘I’ll go this way.’ He indicated the walkway on the right. ‘You take your Wolves by the other route. We shall cut him off and attack from all sides.’
Krom nodded, and without another word Balthus set off across the jangling walkway. He was quickly swallowed by the looming mist.
Krom moved over to a Blood Claw called Skvaldigar Frostfang, an eager Drakeslayer whose scalp was a nest of short braids. He knew Skvaldigar to be savage and hungry for promotion.
‘Brother,’ Krom said, ‘do you think you and your Claws can make that jump?’
Skvaldigar grinned, showing his needle teeth.
‘Or we’ll die trying,’ the Blood Claw said.
‘Bring me that traitor,’ Krom ordered. ‘Alive.’
It was the Wolves’ best chance to corner him. The Blood Claws would attempt to jump across to the mist-wreathed spire while Krom, Grundar and the Fenrisian beast pack traversed the chain walkways between their tower and another. From there they could cross back to cut their quarry off.
‘Grundar, with me.’
Krom led the way towards another chain walkway. The jangling bridge drooped between the tower and the central spire. Grundar reached the light metal of the planks first, dragged on by the ferocious insistence of the wolf pack.
Looking back, Krom could see the hazy silhouettes of the Blood Claws leaping from the spire. In the low gravity of the hive world, their bounding steps took them far across the open space between the towers of the Eyriax. Krom lost the Blood Claws as they dropped through the clouds. The Wolf Lord knew that as the Space Wolves hit the tower lower down they would sink their gauntlets into the elaborate architecture and latch on. Then they would scramble up the side of the spire and surprise Sathar the Unbound from below.
Krom and Grundar ran, the wolves snapping ahead of them on adamantium chains. The walkway led them up onto another spire platform and in through the glorious, gothic antechambers of the planetary governor’s palace. The outlying spires through which the Space Wolves had worked their way had been largely deserted. The ruling elite of the tower top villas and palaces had abandoned the musty grandeur of their homes to pillaging servants and exotic pets left to pick over the food of their banquet tables.
Before they had reached these ostentatious dwellings, Krom and his Drakeslayers had moved up through the industrial sectors and rancid habs of the capital hive. There the Space Wolves had encountered mayhem. Sectors in full riot. Manufactorums ablaze. Hivers screaming for lost friends and family members. The city was alive with reports of stalking monsters, things of claw and fury that tore hivers apart. As Krom and his Drakeslayers moved up through the levels in pursuit of Sathar, the Space Wolves received no warm welcome. Workers in rubber suits and underworld wretches in rags and tattoos ran from the sight of the Space Wolves in their imposing grey plate. Grundar had questioned such behaviour but Krom had put the reaction down to the presence of the Chaos Space Marine and his compatriots.
The havoc that afflicted the capital hive had not been restricted to the riots and butchery of the underhive and mid-levels. The villas and palaces of the high and the mighty had been affected also. Unlike the hivers far below them, the planetary governor of Stratovass Ultra and his inbred kindred could leave and seek sanctuary in nearby hives. As Krom moved through the decimated door of a banquet hall, he got a taste of what the hive nobility had left behind.
As the two Space Wolves moved through the governor’s palace with its dust-thick halls and ghastly décor, Krom’s nose detected the coppery tang of death on the air, the unmistakable smell of slaughter. Grundar’s wolves picked up on it also, dragging him along on their unbreakable chains.
The air in the hall was thick with a red mist. Walls, paintings and tapestries were splattered with gore. The floor was slick with blood, while mounds of bodies and body parts sat like small islands in a sea of gore. Rusted chains criss-crossed the floor, with manacles still attached to hands and arms that were no longer connected to torsos. Krom was no stranger to slaughter, much at his own hand. He was a Space Wolf, one of the Emperor’s executioners. But this was something else. The huge hall had been full of people. They had not been killed out of necessity with bolt and blade. They had not even been sacrificed with cultish ceremony. They had been savaged. Torn limb from limb. The chamber had the feeling of an agriworld abattoir: the rawness of blood and fresh meat was overpowering. Krom licked his dry lips. He tasted the death that waited for him there.
‘Grundar
,’ Krom said as the wolf pack nuzzled their way around the piles of mutilated corpses and across the bloody expanse of the banquet hall floor. Grundar Greymane looked about him.
‘The doors were locked and reinforced from the outside,’ the Space Wolf said, confirming what Krom was thinking. He cast his gaze across the bodies in their ragged, gore-soaked clothing. ‘The chains. Hivers imprisoned in the palace halls. Some kind of ritual perhaps?’
Krom had encountered many false prophets and Chaos cults on myriad doomed worlds. He had interrupted dread ceremonies where bloody sacrifices had been used to bring forth monstrosities from the beyond. This did not seem to match those experiences.
‘Where’s the paraphernalia? The faithless heretics who would benefit from such dark arts?’ Krom asked.
Grundar hauled back on the chains of the drooling wolves and moved a dismembered arm over with the tip of his boot. Mind-aching symbols and scripture were carved into the skin of the ragged limb.
‘Perhaps they brought forth an abomination that wreaked havoc upon those that summoned it,’ Grundar hypothesised.
Krom took in the slaughter.
‘No,’ the Wolf Lord said finally. ‘The doors were barred from the outside. Whether these wretches were meant for sacrifice or not, I don’t think they got that far. No summoning took place. Something else got to them first.’
‘You can bet the Interrogator-Chaplain’s quarry or his accursed allies are behind this,’ Grundar said, before his wolves began pulling on their chains and barking furiously. Their sudden savagery was turned on the end of the chamber where the hall opened up into a balconied area where banqueters would have once talked and relaxed after their meals.
‘My lord,’ Grundar said, responding to the animals’ ire.
Krom already had his bolt pistol clutched in one grey gauntlet. At the wolves’ warning, he quickly drew Wyrmclaw. The glazed blades of the frost axe reflected the red of its bloody surroundings.
Suddenly the light from the balcony died. An armoured figure had landed, a silhouette against the bleak mist, the figure’s rippling cloak and bat’s wings filling the opening. It was the Interrogator-Chaplain’s quarry: Sathar the Undone, the heretic Krom and his Drakeslayers had hunted up through the Eyriax hive. The traitor had embraced his darkness indeed. As a silhouette he cut a figure of ragged ruin. Sathar bled danger and a rank-hearted confidence into the air. His plate was a thing of twisted beauty, buried in a hood and robes that cloaked the monster’s dread presence.