by Various
These weapons were no match for power armour, though. The Dark Angels pressed their attack, penetrating deeper into the hall. It was then that the first of them fell, stricken not by bullet or blade, but by the malignant energies leaping from the mind of a black-robed psyker. The malevolent conjurations sent the Dark Angel crashing to his knees, blood spilling from the vents in his helmet. An instant later, the hulking warrior fell unmoving to the ground.
‘Long Fangs along the gallery! Target the Thousand Sons!’ Krom bellowed. ‘Grey Hunters, strike down the psykers! Blood Claws and Wolf Guard, with me!’
As he roared out the last order, Krom swung up and over the balustrade. It was a simple matter for someone who had climbed the craggy slopes of Asaheim’s mountains to lower himself from one tier to the next. With their Wolf Lord leading the way, the Drakeslayers followed, eager to join the fray.
Ulrik caught hold of Sathar, pulling the traitor behind the cover afforded by the balustrade. Steel and stone were shredded as a concentration of bolter-fire peppered it. The Thousand Sons had noted the arrival of Krom’s warriors and were taking action to stem their descent. Several Blood Claws were sent hurtling to the floor below as shells slammed into them or ripped apart the columns they were climbing. In the next instant, the arcade trembled as the Long Fangs loosed a barrage of lascannon and missile fire at the Chaos Space Marines. Ulrik could feel the impact of their concentrated fire as a still greater tremor, yet when he looked out from behind the shattered balustrade, the Thousand Sons were unharmed.
‘The enemy is not without protection,’ Leoric snarled. ‘They use sorcery to shield themselves from our guns.’
‘Nor is that their only trick,’ Ulrik swore. Below he saw the Thousand Sons sorcerer – surely the one called Medeb – stalk away from his comrades. Sparks crackled all around him as the fire from the attacking Dark Angels smashed against his arcane shield. Medeb pointed his staff towards the Dark Angels standing between him and the platform. Instantly, the Space Marines were flung back, sent flying across the hall by some unseen force.
‘Our fight is down there,’ Sathar declared, his words surprising Ulrik. The traitor was already swinging out over the side of the balustrade, shells tearing into the column beside him.
‘Try to counter their sorcery,’ Ulrik told Leoric as he pursued Sathar.
The moment the Wolf Lord showed himself, a shell slammed into his shoulder, splitting the pauldron. He lost his grip, hanging by one hand from the balustrade. Instinctively, he swung his body, using the momentum of his near-fall to propel himself towards a column on the tier below. More fire from the Thousand Sons struck at him, pitting and splitting the column. Again, Ulrik was forced to rely on his finely honed reflexes, casting himself out and away from the exploding stonework. His leap brought him slamming against another column thirty feet below, his armoured fingers digging gouges in the stone as he tried to arrest his momentum. Still the Chaos Space Marines pursued him with a vindictive fusillade, pushing the old Wolf to another hurried leap and another violent drop. The low gravity of Stratovass Ultra lessened the impact, but couldn’t entirely compensate for his fall.
Finally Ulrik reached the floor. He’d been spared the attentions of the enemy when he dropped the last couple of tiers. He quickly saw the reason. The Thousand Sons were falling back towards the ring of stones, pursued by a pack of Blood Claws. It was an eerie contrast – the young, ferocious Space Wolves and the ancient, lifeless pawns of Prospero. The Thousand Sons moved with an uncanny gait, neither organic nor mechanical in nature. There was little of the Space Marine left within the warriors of the Thousand Sons, just a malignant essence and dust.
Ulrik swung around, looking for Medeb. He found the fiend stalking among the stones, using his psychic powers to send charging Drakeslayers and Dark Angels flying. The sorcerer was striving to protect the cult leaders and especially the hierophant who continued to give voice to the profane invocation.
That invocation was now exhibiting its effects. Strange energies coruscated from the middle of the platform, whipping around the standing stones. The malignant forces rippled harmlessly about the armoured forms of the Space Marines, but against the bare flesh of the cultists the results were far more pronounced. Some of the heretics exploded in bursts of blood and bone, while others wilted into puddles of quivering flesh. Yet more were transformed, their bodies twisting and contorting into grisly new shapes. Arms erupted into masses of tentacles, heads expanded into fanged maws dripping with venom. One cultist shrivelled into a reptilian dwarf while another bloated into a feathered giant. The mutated throng renewed its assault against the Space Marines, striking out at Dark Angel and Space Wolf alike.
Ulrik met the assault of a hideously mutated creature. The thing rushed at him, crackling and laughing, its body already crumbling away as rampant mutations boiled through its flesh. A brutish paw slashed out, narrowly missing the side of his helm. Ulrik swept his crozius across the beast’s breastbone, collapsing the loathsome spawn like a balloon. For an instant, the thing tried to resist the annihilating force of the crozius, then with a snarl it sank into a puddle of oozing corruption.
‘Nicely done,’ Sathar’s voice rang in Ulrik’s ears.
The Wolf Priest spun about to find the traitor beside him. His cloak was slashed and torn and his armour stained with blood – little of it his own. ‘I tried to keep up with you, but it is daunting to keep pace with a wolf on the prowl.’
Ulrik gestured at the carnage unfolding all around them. ‘I understood that your fellow traitors would be lending a hand. Perhaps they aren’t as loyal as you think them to be.’
‘They are in reserve,’ Sathar said. ‘And I fear we will soon need them.’ As he spoke, the traitor aimed his pistol at Medeb, but the shot was diverted from its target, shearing away from the sorcerer to blast apart one of the cult leaders.
‘We’ll have the sorcerer soon,’ Ulrik declared.
Krom and his Wolf Guard had joined the assault against the Thousand Sons. Already two of the ancient traitors had been destroyed, their armour distorting in a blast of warp energy. Balthus and several of his Dark Angels were forcing their way through a cordon of giant mutants to reach the periphery of the platform.
‘They’ll be too late,’ Sathar swore. ‘He knows he’s finished. Now he wants to take everyone with him.’
Ulrik saw what Sathar meant. Medeb turned upon the cult hierophant, cutting the cultist down with a sweep of his staff. The invocation, however, didn’t falter. It was immediately taken up by Medeb himself. Now the cadences became more strident, less nebulous. There was imperative behind the spell now – not an appeal but a command. The sorcerer was pouring his own spirit into the conjuration, ripping asunder the barriers between reality and the immaterium.
Pulses of hideous power now spilled from the platform, rushing down among the remaining cultists. None were left unchanged, their bodies distorting in the most atrocious discord. The mortally injured, the hideously maimed: wherever a spark of life yet lingered, the greedy daemons swept in to control and reshape it.
Orbs of gibbous light dissipated from the midst of the circle, expanding and swelling until they assumed monstrous shapes. Beaked fiends bounded across the hall, immolating victims in blasts of daemonic fire while fish-like horrors fluttered up into the arcades upon winged lobes.
The battle had turned, the rampant horde of mutants and daemons forcing the Space Marines back. The Dark Angels became surrounded, and packs of Drakeslayers were cut off from their battle-brothers. All through the hall, the conflict degenerated into isolated combats pitting superhuman endurance against inhuman malevolence. A towering nightmare, its feline body bristling with psychic fires and spectral flames, charged through a swathe of Wolf Guard to snap and claw at Krom. Only the Wolf Lord’s reflexes kept the beast from landing a killing blow. Across from the embattled Krom, Balthus was similarly beset by a serpent-like fiend with six heads, the flattened husk of a Dark Angel caught in its coils.
&n
bsp; ‘I fear it is time to deploy my assets,’ Sathar told Ulrik. ‘Try to remember who is the enemy.’ The traitor issued orders into his vox bead.
Sathar’s signal brought an almost immediate response. His associates, the resources he’d kept in reserve, had been lingering on the periphery of the Chancellery. Now they filed into the great hall, deploying along the lower arcades. Like the ones Krom and Grundar had fought in the governor’s rooms, they were from the Alpha Legion. Ulrik could scarcely believe he was in this hideous situation – fighting alongside the traitors he longed to tear apart.
Yet as disaster loomed, it was the Alpha Legion who brought relief to the reeling loyalists. From the lower arcades, their fire raked the mutant throng. The great crystal face of the window was shattered as missiles came shrieking into the courtyard to batter the largest of the monsters. Ulrik had a fleeting impression of a gunship circling through the storm.
With the sudden onslaught of the Alpha Legion throwing the cult into disarray, Ulrik saw his opportunity. Medeb had overplayed his hand and exposed the nature of his ritual. He was the key; without him the spell would lose focus. Perhaps the gate would even shut itself entirely.
‘I’m going for the sorcerer,’ Ulrik told Sathar, nodding at the traitor’s pistol. ‘Cover me... or at least don’t shoot me in the back.’
Ulrik knew if he hesitated, his chance might be lost. For the moment, the forces raging across the hall had left a breach. Any instant might see it close again. He had to act. Lunging forwards, the Wolf Priest hurtled up the platform. He felt the rampaging energies of the gateway rippling around him. Some of the Fenrisian talismans he bore were reduced to ash by the eldritch assault. Only by holding his crozius before him was he able to force a path through the maelstrom. Even then, he found his progress barred. The Thousand Sons, those still animated by the spirits bound within their armour, moved to intercept him.
Raising his plasma pistol, Ulrik sent a ball of energy searing through one of the Chaos Space Marines. The ancient armour exploded, burst apart by the fury of the escaping spirit. He scowled at his spent weapon. The plasma would need time to cool before it could be unleashed again. That left two opponents in his way. As one, the ghostly warriors lifted their boltguns and took aim at their foe. Ulrik glared back at them. He might reach one, but doing so would leave him open to the other.
Snarling a prayer to Morkai the death wolf, Ulrik sprang towards the enemy on his right. His crozius swept out, smashing across the Chaos Space Marine’s helm, splitting it open. The traitor staggered back, an uncanny light bleeding out from the crack in its helmet. The boltgun fell from its fingers and it pitched backwards, collapsing in a burst of warp energy.
Ulrik was surprised to find that the other had failed to fire upon him. The closeness of Sathar’s scent told him that the traitor must have intervened, striking down the Chaos Space Marine before it could attack.
‘Leave Medeb to me,’ Ulrik warned Sathar. The sorcerer had to be taken alive, had to disclose what he knew about the Great Wolf.
Medeb saw Ulrik coming. Until the last moment, the sorcerer maintained his invocation, keeping the daemonic gateway open as long as possible. It wasn’t until Ulrik brought the crozius swinging towards his head that Medeb ended his incantation. Bringing up his staff, he blocked the energised mace. Sparks erupted from the antagonistic energy fields, the unholy emanations of the warp-infused staff straining against the sacred properties of the crozius.
‘You find no victory here, cur of Russ,’ Medeb taunted. ‘All you can do is meddle.’
Ulrik glared into the beaked mask of his foe. ‘Magnus said the same thing before we burned your world.’
Twisting the crozius around, he brought his boot crashing into the sorcerer’s gut, pushing his foe back. When Medeb swept his staff around to parry, Ulrik ducked beneath his adversary’s strike, pushing the staff away, and struck the sorcerer’s left wrist. Ceramite, flesh and bone were obliterated in an instant, pulverised by the destructive field surrounding the crozius.
The stricken sorcerer stumbled back, staring in disbelief at his severed hand. As he started to raise his staff to retaliate, the Wolf Priest’s crozius crashed down upon it. Instead of merely breaking the staff, the impact caused it to explode, unleashing the malefic energies Medeb had drawn into it. The resultant blast obliterated the sorcerer’s head, leaving only a smoking stump behind.
Ulrik scowled down at the dead sorcerer. Drained by the ritual he’d performed, Medeb had been unable to protect himself from his own power. It was a fate the traitor deserved, but with his destruction the Space Wolves had lost the hope of picking up Logan Grimnar’s trail.
The discord of battle still raged through the courtyard, the Dark Angels and Space Wolves finishing the daemons and mutants conjured by House Morvane’s ritual. The Alpha Legion, Ulrik noted, had already withdrawn, stealing back into the shadows before they could be confronted by those in service to the Allfather.
Sathar had remained behind.
‘You have kept your word to me,’ he told Ulrik. He gestured to where Balthus was despatching a knot of cultists. ‘But you must break your word to him.’
‘Never,’ Ulrik snarled at the traitor. He reached for his plasma pistol. The weapon was ready to fire again, ready to cripple Sathar if he tried to flee.
‘I know you will,’ Sathar said. ‘It is why I took such a risk. You aren’t hunting me.’
Ulrik’s voice became a bestial growl. ‘You said Medeb had crossed the Great Wolf’s trail,’ he declared.
‘So he did, but I think you’ll agree killing him was necessary,’ Sathar said. ‘Besides, there is a better way to track down your Chapter Master. Trust that I can help you find him. Even a Space Marine must sometimes show a little faith.’
Ulrik was sickened by the debate that tore at him. What should he choose – his duty to his Chapter or his obligation to his allies? Sathar might be twisted, but the traitor hadn’t yet told a lie. If he said he had knowledge of Logan, then he probably did. It was his hold-card, the piece he had kept off the table until he could use it to buy his freedom.
‘What do you offer?’ Ulrik demanded.
Sathar smiled.
‘The prism,’ he said. ‘Have your Librarian stare into it, only this time have him think only of your Great Wolf. The vision he finds in the lens will guide you. Of course, the prism is a thing of the warp. If Balthus learns of it, he will demand its immediate destruction. He will consider anyone who uses it tainted and corrupt – heretics to be destroyed.’
The revulsion boiling inside him was unlike anything Ulrik had ever experienced. Duty and obligation fought within him, but he knew where his loyalty must fall. ‘Go,’ he snapped at Sathar. ‘If our paths ever cross again, I will show you no mercy.’
Sathar nodded and hurried across the platform towards the shattered window. ‘If our paths cross again, old wolf, it will be by my design.’
Ulrik saw the traitor leap through the broken window, his grisly cloak whipping about him as the polluted winds of Eyriax lashed at his body. Sathar’s lunge brought him to the wing of the Alpha Legion gunship. The Wolf Lord’s last sight of the Traitor Space Marine was of him being pulled into the aircraft as it peeled away and rose into the smoggy sky.
PART EIGHT
Wrath of the Wolf
As he accompanied Interrogator-Chaplain Balthus up into the old mausoleum above the crematorium, Ulrik considered the strange events that had brought him to this place. Every creak and groan that rattled through the elevator gnawed at him, worrying at his conscience, reminding him that it was the traitor Sathar who hid from the light of the Emperor, not Balthus. Yet circumstances had conspired to make the Wolf Priest honour his compact with the Traitor Space Marine over his alliance with the Dark Angels.
The smell of blood and battle was still in his nose. It hadn’t been so long ago that he’d stood in the halls of the corrupt House Morvane, fighting alongside Sathar against the cultists and their masters from the Thou
sand Sons. The sorcerer Medeb had been prevented from opening a doorway between Stratovass Ultra and the Eye of Terror only through the agency of Sathar and the Alpha Legion. It wasn’t recognition of that service which had moved Ulrik to forsake his agreement with Balthus and allow the traitor to escape. It had been the clue Sathar had provided the Space Wolves... a clue that might lead them to Logan Grimnar and his vanished companions.
The moment the elevator reached the traitor’s abandoned refuge, Balthus was prowling around the plinths, studying the niches in the walls. The Dark Angels had removed everything once the Space Wolves had told them about Sathar’s lair. Even so, Balthus was paranoid that they had missed something. At least, that was his excuse for bringing Ulrik back with him to the mausoleum. Now that they were alone, the Dark Angel felt at liberty to voice the suspicions that had been growing in his mind.
‘The agreement was that we should help one another in our hunts. The sons of Caliban have kept their side of the arrangement. Can the same be said of the sons of Fenris?’ Balthus asked.
The Interrogator-Chaplain stalked through Sathar’s stronghold like a predator on the prowl, studying every inch as he went. At the moment, the Dark Angel seemed more like a Space Wolf than a product of the Lion’s gene-seed. The resemblance impressed upon Ulrik that for all their differences, there were many points of kinship between the two Chapters. They fought to protect the same Imperium and their loyalty was to the same Emperor. They should be united in purpose. Instead, as had happened so often in the many millennia since the Heresy, they were at odds.
‘Be careful, Interrogator,’ Ulrik advised. ‘Calling the honour of the Space Wolves into question is a reckless thing. Such accusations are typically answered by blade and claw. You are fortunate that I’ve been around long enough to make allowances for those who speak before they think.’