Species. Sounds like I’m classifying beasts.
After the Fangthane, they’d kept going down, climbing ever further into the deeper levels of the Aett. The Hould, the vast and teeming hive of tunnels where Freija had been born and spent her early life, was not the raucous, buzzing place she knew. The thralls went about their business with looks of tight expectation, all of them hefting arms, most led by an experienced kaerl at their head. Barricades were being erected at strategic points in the tunnel network and mobile gun platforms installed at cross-ways. The warding runes, the Eyes of Aversion which guarded every major intersection, were being re-sanctified by the Rune Priests and their leather-masked wyrd-thralls. Munitions were piled high, kept under the watchful eyes of huskaerls as more cases arrived hourly from the huge armouries.
Every so often a Sky Warrior would stalk past them on some urgent errand, streaked with fresh blood on his charred armour. They never acknowledged her, but all nodded respectfully to Arfang before striding off into the shadows. Freija could sense the heightened level of tension in their gestures – they’d already been fighting for days, and were heavily primed for coming battle, their golden eyes blazing, and that made them even more terse and inscrutable than ever.
At the base of the Hould, buried kilometres down into the rock, was Borek’s Seal, the largest of the Fang’s innumerable chambers. Even more massive than the Fangthane, the enormous cavern was a gloomy and shadow-draped place. Just as the Fangthane guarded the approaches from the Hould to the Jarlheim, Borek’s Seal warded passage to the levels below, the Hammerhold and the half-explored Underfang. It was colossal, the size of a battleship’s hull, though almost empty of decoration and devoid of the pelts, bones and carvings that adorned most chambers of the Aett. The bare rock walls were unfinished and jagged, a reminder of the primal nature of the Wolves’ ancient origins. A few fires burned low in vast circular pits, but their light was weak and the perma-chill was little disturbed by them.
Even as she marched across the yawning cavern in convoy with the chittering, limping servitors, Freija found herself gazing up at the huge columns supporting the far-off roof. Each was the width of a Rhino chassis, a shaft of naked rock that glinted with points of red from the low flames.
She’d never come down this far before. No-one she knew had. This was below the Gate level, the limit of the kaerls’ patrol circuits, and beyond it none but the Iron Priests went.
‘Frightened, huskaerl?’ asked Arfang, his staff thudding against the stone as he strode.
Frightened wasn’t a state that had much meaning on Fenris beyond a generic, abstract insult. ‘Watchful, lord,’ replied Freija, as curtly as she dared.
Arfang let slip a grating chuckle.
‘Just so. I would not want whelps down here with me. That would not do.’
Freija looked at the Iron Priest carefully. In the dark, his armour was as black as scorched metal, lined with red from the fire-pits.
‘Forgive me, lord,’ she ventured. ‘This is unusual. Kaerls do not travel to the Hammerhold.’
‘They do not,’ agreed Arfang.
They continued walking. The Iron Priest didn’t seem to feel the need to offer any further explanation.
‘So, if I may ask–’
‘You wish to know why I summoned you, what possible use a mortal could be to me down here.’
‘I cannot imagine you needing my help.’
Arfang stopped walking and turned to her. Behind the two of them, the trail of servitors clattered to a halt.
‘You think there’s no danger in the forges?’
‘We are in the Aett, lord.’
‘We are on Fenris, huskaerl. We do not eliminate the danger on this world, even though we could. We keep it close to us, learn to live with it, use it to keep us strong. The Underfang has many perils. Some are not known even to the Great Wolf.’
‘But we aren’t going to the–’
‘This is a time of danger, and there are ways from the dark places into the Hammerhold. If I could have chosen, I would have come here with a pack of Hunters. But they are all needed to cut threads, so mortals will have to do.’
He leaned forwards, and his eyes glowed like old stars.
‘Waking the dead is difficult,’ he growled, his voice low and rumbling. ‘It will devour my attention for many hours. While I am engaged, the thralls will need guarding. Can you do that, huskaerl? Or are you afraid of the deeper dark?’
Freija glared back at him, stung by the implied weakness. She felt the flare of rebellion in her breast, the always-present urge to lash out at the arrogance of the armoured demigods who dictated every aspect of her life. They only lacked fear because it had been bred out of them by the Helix, yet how quickly they learned to despise mortal emotion, the very core of the humanity they were charged with protecting.
‘I fear nothing, lord,’ she said, keeping the worst of the irritation from her voice.
The Iron Priest’s helm-face was blank, but the subtle movement of his head told Freija that, somewhere under all that battered plate, he was smiling at her.
‘We’ll see, huskaerl,’ he said, resuming his thudding stride. ‘We’ll see.’
Morek walked across the floor of the Fangthane, weaving his way between the incoming columns of wounded and returned. Most had been landed by the Thunderhawks higher up in the Valgard, but some had come in through the land gates. The massive hall was filled with sound and movement as kaerls hurried to install more gun platforms even as files of warriors brushed past them, hurrying to other deployment points.
Amid them all came the Sky Warriors. Some walked tall, bearing the mark of victory in their gold eyes, strutting and prowling among the mortals like demigods. Other packs had taken casualties, and prickled with shame and an evident desire to get back into the fray. They were all wound tight, the ones who’d suffered, burning with a sullen, dark resolve to make amends. Morek knew well enough to avoid close contact with them. When the beast was active within them, they sometimes had trouble remembering who the enemy was.
‘Rivenmaster!’ came a throaty, rattling voice.
Morek whirled round to face it, and his heart sank.
A Wolf Guard was limping toward him. The huge figure loomed out of the fire-lit dark in Terminator plate. The armour was cracked and battle-scarred, and the warrior within looked similarly damaged. He’d taken his helm off, revealing a heavily tattooed face ringed by a russet mane. Studs glinted from his temples, and his eyes betrayed a wild, destructive grief.
Beside him on a suspensor platform floated the body of a Grey Hunter, strapped to the mobile stretcher, lying totally motionless. His armour had been carved apart, and long trails of blood ran over the plate. Lights flickered along the suspensor chassis, etching out the shapes of sigils. Morek was no apothecary, but he could understand the Rune of Ending as well as any other Fenrisian.
‘I serve, lord,’ he said, bowing.
‘Get this warrior to the Lord Wyrmblade,’ the Wolf Guard growled. ‘Do it now.’
Morek hesitated, just for a moment. He’d been ordered to oversee the preparations for the Fangthane defence. There were countless thralls who could escort a wounded Sky Warrior to the Wolf Priests.
He could have protested. It would have been pointless. The Wolf Guard before him was wounded and was clearly struggling to contain a furnace of sullen, frustrated fury.
‘I will, lord,’ he said, trying not to think about the many things that would remain undone in his absence.
The Wolf Guard grunted, and shoved the suspensor toward him. It bobbed lightly as it was touched. Morek could see the extensive trauma on the ruined body, the deep sword-wounds and congealed blood. It looked like the Hunter was in what his kind called the Red Dream, the deep regenerative process triggered by the too-close embrace of Morkai.
‘Go swiftly, mortal,’ growled the Wolf Guard, turning to go back the way he’d come, then hesitating. ‘What are you called?’
Morek looked him in the eye.
Long experience had taught him that you always had to look them in the eye.
‘Morek Karekborn, lord.’
‘Guard him well, Morek Karekborn. When this is over, I will seek you out. His name is Aunir Frar, Grey Hunter of my pack. His wyrd and yours are now one. Remember it.’
Morek maintained eye contact, though it was difficult. The Wolf Guard’s amber irises seemed strangely out of focus, as if some massive assault had damaged something within him. What could not be doubted was the urgency in the words.
‘I understand,’ Morek replied, already planning the route of his ascent to the home of the fleshmakers, a place that, before that hour, would have been death for him to even approach. ‘His wyrd is mine. My life for his.’
On the eighth day since the Thousand Sons had arrived in orbit around Fenris, the assault on the gates of the Fang began.
Though each of the two land portals, Bloodfire and Sunrising, were high up the sheer sides of the mountain, they stood at the termination of massive ridges between the peaks, allowing movement up towards them from the surrounding highlands. The ridges ran up to the citadel gates like huge causeways of stone, each kilometres wide and worn smooth by the endless gnawing of the winds. In the half-forgotten millennia past, the Allfather and Leman Russ had walked on that same stone, planning the construction of the Aett together, seeing how the tortured landscape of Asaheim could be made to house the greatest fortress outside Terra. Russ had made it so that the two Gates overlooked entirely bare approaches, such that any massed advance on them would provoke a slaughter.
As Greyloc watched the massive forces under the command of the Thousand Sons begin to roll forwards, he gave silent thanks for that foresight. The host assembled by the invaders, revealed in the sharp glare of the late noon sun, was beyond anything he’d seen marching under a Traitor’s banner. The Great Scouring had devastated the Legions of the Betrayers, and Magnus’s own troops had been thinned out during the inferno on Prospero. In the intervening centuries, they had clearly been busy.
The encircling army had coalesced into two hosts, one for each Gate. In the vanguard came the heavy artillery, ranks of them, rolling on heavy treads and churning up the snow. There were big mortar launchers among them, and vehicles bearing demolisher cannons, and still more with gigantic plasma weapons mounted high on their lumbering chassis. Further back came even heavier vehicles, swaying like drunkards as they ground into firing range. There were mobile launchers with whole frames of sleek missiles hoisted into firing angles, and vast superheavy assault tanks with siege cannons protruding from bloated turrets.
Between them came the troop carriers, the Chimeras of the mortal troopers and the Rhinos and Land Raiders of the Traitor Marines. There were hundreds of the former, only a handful of the latter. Even so, the first wave of the enemy boasted more manpower than Greyloc had left in the entire fortress, and he knew there were many thousands more held in reserve.
Above the advancing ranks swooped the wings of gunships, flying low and in tight formation. There were bigger atmospheric ships hovering further out on whining engines, each packed with weaponry, poised and ready to sweep over the battlefield.
Somewhere amid that sprawling tide of men and vehicles were the sorcerers, the fallen Space Marines who commanded the whole edifice. They were the key, the handful of witches who held the corrupting power of the warp in their armoured hands.
It was an intimidating force, the last residue of one of the Emperor’s own Legions of Death, an army capable of bringing a world to its knees.
But Fenris was no ordinary world, and its denizens were incapable of being intimidated.
‘Unleash,’ ordered Greyloc.
At the Wolf Lord’s command, the flanks of the Fang erupted.
Bolts of plasma and heavy las-fire scythed out across the ice, crackling with enormous, terrible energies as they lanced to their destinations. Heavy bolters thundered out from a hundred positions on the slopes, hurling mass-reactive rounds over huge distances. Autocannons spooled up, spitting lines of armour-piercing shells deep into the enemy columns. Missiles screamed out of their silos, hurtling high into the frost-clear sky before plummeting down into the ranks of the invader.
The oncoming tanks responded as soon as they came into range, and a hail of fire returned, crashing into the walls of the mountain, showering it in an inferno of exploding promethium and detonating shells. The inferno kindled even as the rain of plasma from orbit, the steady column that had shaken the mountain for days, was intensified, and the entire summit of the Fang was bathed in a shifting curtain of flame.
Greyloc remained on the exposed platform, unmoving, watching calmly as the shields before his position absorbed the incoming punishment. An enemy missile spiralled up out of the sea of destruction, exploding only metres from him, sending rippling shockwaves across the void barrier. He stayed motionless, focused on the unfolding barrage below, looking for any sign of weakness or unbalance.
The Thousand Sons advance was neither rash nor unprotected. Even as the Wolves emptied their fury at the oncoming army, the fire was met with the glistening discharge of shields. Something, some sorcery, was warding the tanks from harm. The barrier wasn’t perfect – columns of armour were already smouldering and broken – but it was enough to prevent the annihilation of the vanguard. In their wake, the troop carriers were getting closer.
In a hail of flickering plasma-spikes and explosions, the gap between the Gates and the Thousand Sons closed. Every round of fire from the Fang destroyed a rank of heavy weaponry on the ground, but for every broken chassis another tank took its place, rolling over the burning, twisted metal. The causeways were gradually covered with a carpet of crawling ironwork, throwing fire back at the batteries mounted above them, gaining metres with each painful, wreck-strewn advance.
Then the aerial attack commenced. Wings of bombers and heavy gunships swooped in across the high faces of the Fang, strafing the gun emplacements, weaving between the lines of flak and anti-aircraft fire. With every pass, aircraft were downed by the defending guns, streaking back down to earth in trails of smoke, spinning into their own troops and carving ruin in their destruction. But with every pass, another defensive battery was reduced to ruins, or another void shield was put under critical strain, or another stream of shells was diverted from the onslaught on the land.
The air began to choke from the plumes of rolling, ink-black smoke. The view from the gates was gradually lost. The vista turned from one of cold, clear perfection into a vision of burning, charred desolation. The growing walls of smoke dimmed the light of the sun, locking the mountain in a pall of closing shadow.
Greyloc calmly checked his helm display, noting the positions of his Wolf Guard, the locations of the Rune Priests, the deployment of his key assets, the state of the defence he had designed and put in place.
And now comes the test. The Hand of Russ ward us.
Then the Wolf Lord turned from the platform, his claws bursting into whip-curling life, shimmering with twin disruptor fields, and made his descent to the Gate level, ready to meet the tide of fury as it broke.
The sound of hammers was everywhere. It ran through the chambers, resounding in the stone, vibrating in the deep shafts, echoing in the hidden vaults. Even over the aural compensators built into her helmet, Freija found the incessant, banging tumult disorientating.
‘I see why it was named this way,’ she said grimly.
The Iron Priest nodded.
‘It is glorious,’ he replied, and there was no trace of sarcasm in his vox-filtered voice.
They were standing on the edge of a precipice, far down into the Hammerhold. Ahead of them ran a single bridge of stone, flying out across the abyss, six metres wide and without a rail. It disappeared into the gloom and haze of the distance. Hundreds of metres down, in the huge cavern spanned by the bridge, a vision of Hel had unravelled. Gigantic, hulking furnaces, each the height of Warlord Titan and twice as wide, threw off clouds of blood-red light. Channels of
heat-blackened stone carried rivers of fire from one inferno to the next, passing through wheels of iron and plunging pistons. The silhouettes of servitor-thralls, their wire-studded spines curled over from hunching, crept between the colossal machinery, checking flickering pict-readouts and tending brass-lined cogitator banks. The vast space hummed with a low, rumbling activity. Along clattering conveyor belts amid the forges, Freija could just make out the embryonic shells of vehicle plating, artillery barrels, even body-armour parts.
And then there were the hammers. They were borne by rows of muscle-enhanced, metal-ribbed, faceless servitors, chained to their adamantium anvils by segmented nerve-conduits, endlessly working, endlessly beating. There were ranks upon ranks of them, more machine than human, moulded into mindless golems by the uncaring arts of the fleshmakers. They were the perfect workers: tireless, uncomplaining, hugely strong, content to hammer away in the pits of fire until death from exhaustion gave them a final release.
Not much of a life.
‘We are wasting time,’ said Arfang, prompting his personal servitor retinue to limp across the bridge. The Iron Priest strode out after them, leaving Freija and kaerls scurrying to match the pace.
‘Who supervises them?’ asked Freija, unable to take half an eye away from the toiling legions down in the haze of fire and heat below.
‘They need no supervision,’ replied Arfang coldly. ‘They only know one way to serve. Do not disdain that, huskaerl – without them our warriors go to war empty-handed.’
‘I do not disdain them, lord. I just had no idea there were... so many.’
‘And that troubles you?’
It did. It troubled her more than she would ever admit to him. It troubled her that legions of half-dead, semi-mechanised slaves had been toiling under her feet for as long as she’d been alive. It troubled her that she didn’t know where they came from, nor why she’d ended up as a huskaerl and they’d ended up as forge-meat. It troubled her that she knew so little of such things, and that the ways of the Aett were so arbitrary and clouded in a fog of tradition that only the Sky Warriors had any access to.
War of the Fang - Chris Wraight Page 25