by Various
Had the fiend followed them? Had the Changeling been dogging their trail from the very beginning? Ulrik wasn’t certain if that possibility was less troubling than the other: that the Changeling had been waiting for them on Dargur all this time.
The Drakeslayers were exterminating the last of the furies, Long Fangs burning them out of the sky with heavy flamers and frag missiles. The rocky shelf was stained with their odious residue, a mephitic vapour rising from the greasy stains left by their dissolution. Ulrik took a step towards the hole into which he’d seen the shape-shifter disappear. He shook his head in dismay. It was doubtful the thing had lingered, even more doubtful that it had maintained the same form. He might search for days without finding the creature’s trail. And if it truly was the Changeling, then any delay at this point would put the entire hunt in jeopardy.
‘Lord Ulrik!’
The Wolf Priest turned as he heard himself being called. He could see a pack of Blood Claws gathered around the prostrate form of a comrade, the mangled carcasses of several furies scattered around him. There was a hideous rent in the fallen Space Wolf’s chest plate, strips of meat caught in the torn ceramite. Even at a distance, Ulrik could smell the stink of death rising from the stricken Blood Claw. Already the warrior was standing before the Gates of Morkai. There was nothing that could be done for him, but by harvesting his progenoid glands, Ulrik could ensure the warrior’s legacy lived on.
Sombrely, Ulrik removed the Fang of Morkai from his belt and began to recite the prayers that would commend the fallen warrior’s spirit to the Allfather. He wondered, before the hunt was over, how many more times he would be called upon to harvest the legacy of the dead.
Hours after the attack by the furies, the Drakeslayers saw an end to the rocky flatland. The cracked shelves of stone gave way to an eerie vista – a vast forest of crystalline trees. The crimson light of Dargur’s sun sent weird reflections shimmering from the angular facets of the translucent trunks and branches, creating the mirage of a rolling sea. As soon as the forest came into view, Lopt and his scouts set out ahead of the main body, intent upon ferreting out any unseen hazards that might be lurking ahead.
They didn’t have long to discover the threat the forest posed. As Lopt drew near, the crystalline trees hurled slivers of themselves at him. The shards sheared through the rocky shelf and several stabbed their way into the scout’s armour before he could retreat back out of their range. Lopt’s comrades took hold of the old veteran, helping him reach the rest of the Drakeslayers. The ferocity with which Lopt was cursing his misfortune told Ulrik the scout was in no danger. Morkai wouldn’t allow anyone with that much anger into his halls.
Briefly, the Space Wolves considered going around the forest. Leoric consulted his runes again, but his divinations directed them through the obstacle, not around it.
Krom pulled at his beard a moment, peering into the shimmering forest. Even his vaunted stare could discern no hidden secret amidst the strange trees. ‘We’ve enough weaponry to level a few miles, but this stuff might stretch on for hundreds before we see the other side. I find myself wishing we had a psyber-raven. A view from above would be worth a gallon of mead right now.’
Ulrik studied the forest ahead of them. Everything was still, exhibiting an eerie silence. A thought occurred to him. Taking a rock from the ground, he tossed it into the trees. As it clattered against one of the crystalline stalks, it gave off a loud crack. Instantly the trees loosed a salvo of slivers. A second stone, tossed with more care, landed on the sandy soil without sound. This time there was no barrage from the trees.
Behind the lupine Helm of Russ, Ulrik smiled.
‘The trees lack eyes to see, but in some fashion they are able to hear.’ He nodded towards Lopt, who was being attended by the other scouts. ‘Lopt must have made a sound that drew their notice and so they fired upon him.’
Krom ground his fangs together.
‘Lopt is the best hunter I have,’ he said, his voice lowered so his words of praise wouldn’t reach the other Drakeslayers. ‘He can sneak into a thunderwolf’s den and steal her cubs with the mother sleeping right beside them. If he made too much noise to slip past these trees, then none of us will be equal to the task.’ The Wolf Lord paused, a toothy grin appearing on his face. ‘Maybe the answer isn’t less noise, but more.’
Without further explanation, Krom stalked towards the forest, angrily waving back his Wolf Guard when the warriors would follow him. Step by step, he approached the trees, eyes locked upon the tracks left by Lopt, judging when he’d be close to where the trees had reacted to the scout. When he reached the spot, the Wolf Lord stopped. Facing the crystal growths, Krom threw back his head and howled.
The howl Krom gave voice to didn’t sound from his own throat, or at least so it seemed to the Drakeslayers watching him anxiously from the rocks. The noise appeared to reverberate out in the midst of the forest, a trick of ventriloquism the Wolf Lord had employed to amuse his entourage many times before in the halls of the Fang. Now the trick deceived more than the ears of Space Wolves. The trees, reacting to the howl, cast splinters not towards Krom, but at the distant spot from which the howl seemed to issue.
Still throwing his howl, Krom began to walk towards the trees. He crossed the line where Lopt had aroused the forest. Steadily Krom pressed onward, still howling, still meeting no resistance to his own advance. When he’d pressed several feet past the point where Lopt was attacked, he stopped howling. Turning around, he sprinted back towards the rocks. Crystal splinters flew at him, dogging him until he was out of range.
‘There’s the riddle solved!’ Krom laughed, walking proudly before his warriors. ‘The trees can be tricked! Give them a choice of targets and they will strike at the loudest!’
‘I should think the Drakeslayers aren’t eager to lose their Wolf Lord,’ Ulrik told Krom. ‘Unless you think there’s someone louder than you.’
Krom chuckled at the Wolf Priest’s humour. ‘No, old one, we’ll not howl our way across. We’ll blast our way across.’ He pressed his hand against the grenade dispenser on his belt. ‘We toss a grenade out among the trees to either side of our path and while they’re busy shooting at the noise, we slip through.’ He shrugged as he conceded one point against his plan. ‘Might be slow going, but at least we can be sure of seeing the other side.’
As the Wolf Lord had feared, progress through the forest was a slow, tedious affair. But it was progress. Each set of grenades the vanguard threw kept the trees occupied long enough for the column to gain twenty or thirty yards at a run. Speed rather than caution dictated the pace during the brief spurts between grenades. Ulrik was impressed by the cohesion with which the warriors executed the arduous operation. The Space Wolves froze in place with an almost mechanistic precision whenever things were quiet. Beregelt had already taken the precaution of muzzling Vangandyr and the other wolves.
After several hours of the gruelling advance, one of the vanguard nudged Ulrik and nodded at the trees ahead. The crystals here had grown thinner, exhibiting a less concentrated pattern of growth. Beyond them could be seen rolling dunes of emerald sand. Krom’s ploy had worked – they were through the forest.
Ulrik started to turn, intending to signal to the rest of the company that they were almost out of the forest. As he did so, however, a dark shadow fell across him. The Wolf Priest bit down on the instinct to cry out as he felt powerful talons snatch at him and drag him up into the sky with a sickening lurch.
Craning his head back, Ulrik could see that his attacker was a giant rodent-mosquito creature. There was a monstrous impression of intelligence in its gem-like eyes, a hint of malignant mockery as it stared back at him. He was caught in the grip of a daemon.
The Wolf Priest drew his plasma pistol as the daemon-fly carried him out over the forest. A crackle of sadistic mirth oozed from the creature’s proboscis. The pincers gripping Ulrik abruptly loosened their hold, sending him crashing downwards. As he fell into the midst of the hostile forest
, he fired a shot at his foe. The ball of plasma seared upwards, but already the unnatural substance of the daemon was morphing into a new shape, shrinking and twisting into a moth-like being that darted from the path of his shot. The Changeling circled once, as though to assure itself of its victim’s distress, then sped away towards the horizon.
Crashing down through the mineral branches of the trees, the crystalline growths themselves broke the impetus of Ulrik’s fall. On their own, the spiny shards were incapable of piercing ceramite plate. It was the murderous velocity with which they were impelled towards prey by the trees that made them a threat. The violence of his descent sent a loud clamour ringing out through the forest. From every direction, trees hurled slivers at the sound.
Ulrik was shielded from the worst of their attentions. The trees he’d struck in his fall had been denuded of spines on those facets that faced him. Instead of posing a direct menace, the disarmed trees became his bastion, absorbing the impacts of the slivers flung at him from deeper in the forest. Even so, many slivers crashed against his armour and three pierced through to dig into his flesh, stabbing him in calf, thigh and forearm. Worse, the ground all around him was strewn with brittle fragments that crumbled at the slightest weight, the crackling sound drawing further salvoes from the forest.
The Changeling had flown him far from his comrades, well into the expanse of crystalline spires. Even if they picked up his trail, Ulrik doubted that there were enough grenades in the whole company to reach him and make it back out. He prayed Krom would have sense enough not to risk it. Finding Logan Grimnar was more important than rescuing a foolish old wolf who’d let himself be caught by a daemon’s wiles.
Ulrik noticed a sound in the distance. It was the slicing, rending discharge of spines from some of the trees. At intervals, the noise was repeated. He strained his ears, trying to catch the explosive clamour of grenades, but it eluded him. Instead, after a time, he began to hear a faint howl. It was a voice he recognised – that of Krom Dragongaze. Ulrik had known the Space Wolves would never leave him. At the same time, Krom wasn’t willing to put the entire hunt at risk and send the whole company back into the forest. It was typical of his pride and bravado that he’d taken it upon himself to seek his missing mentor.
The howls drew closer. Finally Ulrik could see Krom picking his way through the trees. A few spines were caught in his armour and blood dripped from a wound in his side, but the Wolf Lord still presented a miraculous sight. He scowled when he saw the litter of crystal lying all around Ulrik. With one hand he motioned for the Wolf Priest to keep still. Throwing another howl out amongst the trees, Krom brought one boot stamping down on the fallen shards. The crackle of crushed crystal wasn’t enough to distract the trees from his feral cry. Krom waved Ulrik forwards.
Tense minutes followed as the two Space Wolves started back along the trail Krom had blazed. Again and again, the crystalline trees sent their slivers knifing towards them. During a pause, Ulrik shared a worried look with Krom. They still had far to go, yet the violence of the trees was becoming more pronounced. It seemed like the things were adapting to Krom’s trick and turning their attentions to the real prey. A shake of the Wolf Lord’s head told Ulrik that his friend had reached the same conclusion. As things stood, they’d be ripped to pieces before they made it out.
Abruptly, the trees around them shivered with agitation. They began to loose their shards at some distant point. It was inexplicable, for Krom hadn’t thrown one of his howls in that direction. The two Space Wolves knew better than to question their good fortune, however. Whatever had distracted the trees, they would exploit it. Swiftly they dashed ahead, rushing through the grisly trees. Despite their reckless haste, the mineral growths continued to ignore them, firing instead on some target in the distance.
It seemed a boon from Morkai himself that the trees remained indifferent to the Space Wolves until they were clear of the forest. Among the emerald dunes beyond, Ulrik could see their comrades waiting for them. The warriors raised their arms in a silent cheer when they saw the two heroes emerge from the forest. Even with such cause for celebration, they had sense enough not to risk provoking the trees.
Turning his head, Ulrik considered the crystal trees and the peculiar agitation that had come upon them. As he looked out over the strange forest, a faint sound reached his ears. Bitterly, he dismissed it as a trick of the wind – for it seemed to Ulrik that he’d heard the howling of a wolf somewhere in the distance.
The emerald dunes fell away behind the Drakeslayers, giving way to a somehow even more desolate landscape of crumbling mesas and jagged ravines. So bleak were the surroundings that Leoric felt a sense of foreboding and paused the march so that he might consult the bones again. Once more they followed his divinations, their trail leading them through a haunted land of rock hoodoos and burbling geysers.
The march came to an abrupt halt when the land fell away into a wide canyon, stretching away as far as even the sharp eyes of Krom could follow. Lopt walked to the edge of the fissure and tossed a stone down. The rattle and clatter of the falling rock ended in a steaming sizzle. The Space Wolves peered down to watch as the rock dissolved in a mire of corrosive sludge that carpeted the bottom of the canyon.
‘Morkai take this cursed planet,’ Krom growled. ‘It seems there’s no choice but to go around this damned pit.’
Ulrik shared the disappointment and disgust of his battle-brothers. They’d come through many ordeals to reach this place, travelled far from the halls of the Fang in search of the Great Wolf. Now, when every warrior began to sense the end of their hunt, Dargur had thrown yet another obstacle in their path.
‘There’s a bridge across,’ Lopt offered. The scout indicated a narrow span some thirty yards below the rim that stretched across the middle of the canyon. It was almost ethereal in its slenderness, barely three feet across and scarcely half as thick. The winds in the canyon appeared to have eroded it down to this state and it looked like one more good gale would send the entire span crumbling into the acidic sludge below.
Yet as he studied the bridge, Ulrik was struck not by its fragile appearance but by the material from which it was made. Doubting his eyes, he turned to Leoric.
‘Isn’t that the same crystal Sathar’s prism was made from?’
Leoric was discomfited by the mention of the prism, but the Rune Priest closed his eyes and stretched out his hand. Bone fetishes and tiny runestones dangled from his fingers on leather straps, each talisman shivering in a spectral breeze as Leoric muttered an incantation. After a moment the charms grew still once more and he opened his eyes.
‘You are right,’ he told Ulrik. ‘There is a resonance between that bridge and the prism. The harmony is too distinct to be accidental. The crystal was cut from this span.’
Ulrik turned away, staring out across the expanse of the canyon. The Space Wolves would lose too much time trying to get around the obstacle. The bridge represented the only alternative, but it looked so feeble that even he was hesitant to put it to the test.
The Wolf Priest thought again of Sathar and how the traitor had insisted that he and his Alpha Legion allies remained loyal, albeit in their own deviant fashion. Something Sathar had said came back to him, an admonition that even a Space Marine needed to have faith. Advice? A challenge? Or was it the traitor’s way of testing Ulrik’s trust? Had Sathar sent them this far only to bait them into this trap? Just how far was the traitor prepared to go?
‘I’m going down,’ Ulrik told Krom.
‘It’ll never hold,’ Krom swore. ‘If you insist on testing the thing, let one of us do it. The Drakeslayers will mourn a lost comrade, but all the Fang will mourn Ulrik the Slayer.’
‘I have made my choice,’ Ulrik said. ‘Sathar knew about this place. I am certain of it. He brought us here as a test of our faith.’
Krom was unconvinced. ‘At least let us fashion a rope to haul you back if you’re wrong.’
Ulrik lowered himself over the edge of the gorge, s
inking his claws into the rock.
‘To doubt is to question your own resolve,’ he said. ‘Faith is to be without question. The bridge will hold, because I believe it will hold.’
Lining the edge of the canyon, the Space Wolves watched as Ulrik picked his way down the side. He could smell the agitation in their scent, the concern that wracked them. There wasn’t one who wouldn’t have offered himself in the Wolf Priest’s place, and there wasn’t one who lacked the respect to accept his decision to act on his own. They could only watch as he slowly descended to the crystal bridge.
When Ulrik’s boots came to rest upon the narrow span, he felt a thrill course through his body. There was an almost electric shock, a numbing surge that pulsed through his armour. He could feel a dull hum rushing up his feet. The old wolf smiled to himself. This was how the span maintained its cohesion, not through the solidity of its construction but from the magnetic flow of energy that ran through it.
‘It is stronger than it looks, brothers,’ Ulrik called up to his comrades. He actuated the mag-clamps built into his boots, finding they gripped the bridge as readily as they would the hull of a starship. ‘The clamps in your boots will hold you fast to the surface. Let me cross first, then follow one at a time.’
The excited barks and boasts of his comrades rang down from above. Ulrik couldn’t quite embrace the acclaim. The Space Wolves were celebrating his courage when it was his belief they should be praising. His faith in a traitor’s words, his trust in his own instincts to tell deceit from truth. To venture out onto the span was an act of courage, but not the kind many of his brothers would understand.
The canyon was hours behind them when the Space Wolves noticed the eerie change that had come upon the sky. Upon the purple horizon there now shone a jaundiced glow, a leprous blemish that cast its eerie rays into the atmosphere. Leoric closed his eyes and gripped his rune staff tight. The icy winds of Asaheim flowed about him as the Rune Priest drew upon the magic of his familiar spirits.