War of the Fang - Chris Wraight

by Warhammer 40K

  Freija crouched low as she slammed the clip back in place, risking a quick look at the servitors. They were working as if nothing were going on around them, polishing and tending, bowing and chanting. The doors to the chamber beyond remained shut.

  Curse him.

  Then she was back on her feet, firing wildly. She heard another of her men being dragged back into the dark, and her fear dissolved in the face of impotent rage.

  ‘Damn you!’ she screamed, keeping the trigger depressed, hurling her abuse half at the creatures of the Underfang, half at the Iron Priest who’d dragged them down to their deaths.

  Dead for nothing. I could have fought alongside my father.

  One of the monsters, a gigantic brute looking like some tortured cross between a wolf and a grizzly bear, towered in front of her, bellowing a spittle-flailing blast of fury and challenge. The stink of animal breath washed over her, making her gag even over the rebreather.

  She fired at point-blank range, loosing everything she had left in a thudding stream of bullets. The beast recoiled, flinching from every hit, but did not withdraw. When the skjoldtar was empty, it came back at her, jaws open, eyes wide with alien hatred.

  Freija shrunk back, more out of instinct than anything else, reaching for the knife strapped to her boot.

  Look it in the eye.

  She forced herself to keep her head up, the knife held shivering in her fists, as the horrific creature leapt at her.

  Look it in the eye.

  But the impact never came. It was only then that she realised her eyes had screwed shut after all. She opened them.

  The creature was hanging, suspended by the neck, writhing in some kind of lock under its jaws. The gunfire fell silent, plunging the chamber back into utter darkness.

  Then, slowly, a red light bled into the shadow. From somewhere, illumination had come back. There were echoing yelps and growls. The creatures were all still there – they just weren’t attacking.

  Freija looked up at the beast in front of her, following the curve of its ribcage to the stretched sinews of its neck. A vast, clawed, metal fist held it tight between curving talons. Incredibly, something more powerful had emerged. She realised then that the doors had opened. Whatever was in the chamber beyond, the things Arfang had come to rouse, they had broken the threshold.

  You disturb my slumber for this, Iron Priest?

  The voice was resounding, a deep bass, and it came from over her shoulder. It reverberated through the rock around her, running down her spine and making her hair stand on end. It was far deeper than Jarl Greyloc’s, far deeper than Ironhelm’s. In that voice was an ancient dignity, a magisterial self-assurance, a profound melancholy edged with eternal bitterness. Even mediated by coils of inert machinery, it was the most powerful, most disturbing voice Freija had ever heard.

  ‘You were long in the waking, lord,’ came Arfang’s reply. It was uncharacteristically apologetic.

  Moving slowly, driven by the curiosity that was always her undoing, Freija turned her head to look at what had come through the doors.

  Long indeed, came the voice of Bjorn, called the Fell-Handed by the skjalds when declaiming the sagas, the last of the Chapter to have walked the ice with Russ, the mightiest of all the Wolves, a living link to the Time of Wonder.

  The dead had been woken.

  Bjorn cast the wolf-creature aside as if it were a pup, and the mass of fur and fang tumbled, yelping, into the shadows. With a grind of servos and a hiss of pneumatics, the huge mass of metal and weaponry took a single, heavy step into the chamber. Freija felt her jaw sagging, and snapped it shut.

  But now that I am restored, I remember what my purpose has become.

  The venerable Dreadnought strode past Freija, seemingly unaware she was there. Before his massive profile, the beasts withdrew, lowering their heads in submission. Even Arfang seemed little more than a whelp beside that figure of legend.

  I am here to kill. Show me to the enemy.

  PART III:

  THE CLOSING NOOSE

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Aphael looked up. The storm-fury hammered at the kine-shield above him. The translucent barrier buckled, flexing like fabric under the repeated impacts. The power of the Dogs’ priests was impressive, but then this was their world, and who knew what crude powers existed here, ready to be dragged up by the savages in half-understood rites. The maelstrom could cause the fringes of his army some harm, but it would do no more than slow the advance on the gates.

  A fresh wave of burning hail slammed into the shield, stressing the protective sorcery further. Aphael glanced at the position locators on his helm display. His sorcerers were evenly spaced throughout the host, feeding power to the wards across the army. Hett, the most powerful of the raptora, was nearby, working with calm expertise, maintaining the domes of warding magicks that kept the command clusters of troops safe as they crawled into range.

  Aphael turned his attention to the tactical situation. He stood deep within the ranks of his Legion, surrounded by his Terminator retinue. On either side of him were Land Raiders, each with a full complement of rubricae and grinding forwards at little more than a walking pace. Beyond them were the Chimera troop carriers, rocking from the impacts as Dog shells tore through the weaker parts of the barrier and exploded among them. Ahead were the mobile artillery pieces, still moving closer to the mountain. Larger units had settled into static ranks behind them, locking bracing arms to extend their reach and swinging their gigantic barrels into firing angles. They shuddered with every detonation, sending gouts of black smoke into the already darkening air.

  Ahead of him, the pinnacle of the Fang filled his vision. After another day of heavy, grinding battery, the high cone was now entirely covered in fire, ripped into curling fronds of plasma by the racing winds. The defensive barrage had remained strong for longer than he’d expected, sending death in raking columns from a hundred gun positions around the towering gates, but now the torrent was finally thinning out as emplacements were destroyed.

  The rest would follow, one by one. The damage they were doing had been allowed for, estimated by the corvidae months ago and put into the battle ledgers. Tanks would burn, mortals would die, but the advance would not be halted. Within hours, the gate-breakers would be in range of their target and the portals, those graceless hunks of stone and ice, would be breached.

  Then the real work would begin.

  +What progress, brother?+ Aphael sent, knowing the inquiry would irritate Temekh, hundreds of kilometres above in theHerumon.

  There was a long pause before a reply came.

  +You have just set it back. I cannot remain in communication with you, not in this state.+

  +My apologies. But you should know the assault on the gates is nigh.+

  +What for? It means nothing until the wards are down.+

  Aphael found himself stung by Temekh’s tone. The corvidae was safe from harm, surrounded by the comfort of the Herumon’svast hold. Out on the ice, things were rather less comfortable.

  +They will be down shortly. I need to know that your work is proceeding with equal speed to mine.+

  +I will send when I am ready. Until then, do not make contact again.+

  The link between the sorcerers broke off. The severance was almost painful, causing Aphael’s eyes to water.

  Why is he so hostile?

  He felt a prick of anger then, a tremor of frustration at the corvidae’s superior manner. As he did do, the itching in his neck broke out again, rippling across the skin.

  He tensed, pausing in the march toward the gates. Soundlessly, his Terminators matched the altered pace.

  The contagion was growing.

  He knows.

  Irritation was replaced by the cold vice of unease. Since Ahriman’s rubric, the threat of mutation had become the ultimate stigma, the final taboo. In a Legion that had sacrificed everything to avoid the clutches of the Changer of Ways, any sign that the magicks had been less than totally successful was somet
hing akin to heresy.

  ‘Increase speed,’ he barked over the mission channel.

  On either side of him, the Land Raiders gunned their engines and picked up the pace. More artillery pieces reached firing position and were dug into the steel-hard rock.

  So why now? Why, when my hour of victory draws close, does this... flesh-change return?

  He looked up at the gates, running his gaze over the burning stone. There were sigils carved into it, protective symbols designed to shun the mutating power of sorcery. Those were the things he had to destroy, to pave the way for the greater power to come.

  For what reason am I damned to this?

  As Aphael looked at the mighty runes carved across the towering cliffs ahead, his mood darkened further. The mystical shapes simply reminded him of what he already knew – that there was no escape from the pattern of fate. If there was salvation for him, it would not lie in the fortress of the Emperor’s Dogs.

  So be it. I will embrace it, and turn this corruption into strength.

  He resumed his march, barely noticing the Terminators shadowing him. He could feel the mutation quicken within him, boiling under his skin like a swarm of trapped insects. For a while more, his armour would hide the effects.

  Above him, fresh plasma explosions rippled across the kine-shields. A troop carrier was carved open by a hail of projectile fire, and its red-hot shell was toppled by the stormwind. Men were dying every moment, hundreds of them, all fuel for a fire that had been burning for centuries already. Their fates meant very little to him, and even less so now that his own prospects were narrowing.

  ‘Lord, gate-breakers are coming into position before both targets,’ came a Spireguard’s voice over the comm. ‘They await your orders.’

  Aphael felt his lip curl, though the movement wasn’t voluntary. The infection had reached his face.

  ‘Tell them to fire when ready,’ he replied, working hard to maintain his usual voice over the channel. Sweat broke out across his twitching skin. ‘Get us in there fast, captain. This idleness plays badly with me, and I thirst to spill blood.’

  Blackwing strode down the corridor with two dozen fully armoured kaerls marching in his wake. He was wearing his carapace armour and carried a bolt pistol out of its holster. His men went warily, their weapons poised to fire, their eyes wide behind their face-masks. Even after so many hours of searching, he still felt alert. Now that the task had moved from engine maintenance to a kill mission, his weariness had fallen from him.

  Neiman had examined the corpse of the crewman in the council chamber and told the rest of them what they knew already. The man had been a spy, altered to blend into the background, silently feeding information from his unnatural eyeballs to whomever or whatever was controlling him. Since then, Blackwing had ransacked the entire ship, moving through decks with remorseless efficiency. Other spies had been found during the search, all with the same transplanted eyeballs. Now they were all dead, their bodies hurled into the fires of the enginarium.

  Blackwing looked around him carefully. They were low in the ship, passing through regions where the light was bad and few crewmen had reason to go. The perfect place to hide.

  The Wolf Scout knew how vulnerable he was. Whatever intelligence had controlled those puppets was a master of sorcery. Blackwing had no weapons to combat such powers and his crew were even less able to defend themselves. Even if he managed to find where the stowaway was hiding, the chances were that he’d come up against something he couldn’t hope to kill.

  The prospect didn’t scare him, but it was definitely annoying. At the very least, he’d hoped to survive long enough to get his manoeuvre above Fenris into the sagas. The thought that it might all be for nothing was an irritant.

  And, of course, there was the matter of the Fang’s survival. That was important too.

  ‘Where the Hel are we?’ he voxed, looking at the dirty, dark tunnels ahead with distaste.

  ‘Beneath the aft fuel tanks, lord,’ came the voice of Raekborn, the huskaerl. His voice sounded tight. Not scared either, but definitely stressed. Blackwing occasionally forgot that mortals required a few hours’ sleep in every cycle. If they didn’t strike gold soon, he’d have to tell them to stand down for a while.

  So weak. So tediously weak.

  He glanced at his helm display. Scouts rarely wore helms into combat, which was a habit Blackwing had never understood. Risking losing your head to a stray las-beam seemed less a case of bravado and more a case of stupidity. His clear-visored unit gave him a tactical display that showed up life-signs within a range of thirty metres, as well as reporting on the status of his unit. Not as comprehensive as the Mk VII helm he’d worn as a Hunter, but not far off.

  All his visor-runes showed at the present time were the increasingly disrespectful recall requests from Neiman. The Navigator had wanted him back on the bridge for the past six hours to sign off the course vectors before he retired to his observation chamber.

  Blackwing grinned. There was no chance of him calling off the search for such mundanity. Even if the need to uncover the infiltrator hadn’t been so pressing, he enjoyed irritating the three-eyed mutant by keeping him waiting.

  ‘You getting anything down here?’ he voxed to his squad, in the probably vain hope that his men’s equipment had picked up a signal that his hadn’t.

  ‘Negative.’

  Blackwing let his photo-reactive lenses do the visual work for him. Like all his kind, he had astonishing sensitivity to movement even in near-pitch dark conditions. His nostrils could differentiate the subtlest aroma lingering under the fug of engine-oil and general bilge-grime. His tactile senses could detect movement on the floor a hundred metres away and his hearing would pick up a kaerl coughing on the command bridge.

  Still nothing.

  ‘Let’s move,’ he growled, motioning forwards. Ahead of him the tunnel narrowed, sweeping around a damaged bulkhead draped in wiring. Lights flickered erratically in the distance, briefly illuminating the outline of meshed metal barriers.

  Blackwing swerved around the bulkhead. The footfalls of the troops behind were stealthy for mortals, but still announced their presence to one who knew how to listen. The squad went forwards for about twenty metres before reaching a T-junction. The corridor running right-left was in a bad way. Clusters of cables hung from the ceiling like tufts of wild grass, fizzing and sparking. There were cracks in the floor where something had pushed the struts up, and the headroom was minimal. Even the kaerls had to duck, and Blackwing hunched down uncomfortably. The only remaining lighting was at floor-level. It seemed to be running at about quarter-intensity.

  ‘Left, or right?’ mused Blackwing, training his pistol at the shadows and sweeping it round. As he did so, he felt a slight pricking sensation in his palms. An indefinable sense of expectation caught hold of him, and he narrowed his eyes.

  A few metres down the corridor to the left was an open service hatch, its covering grate swinging lazily from a single intact bearing.

  There were times when the preternatural senses engendered by the Canis Helix trumped any technology. Blackwing looked at the hole and felt his muscles tense up of their own accord.

  ‘On my mark,’ he voxed, preparing to advance. ‘Stay–’

  That was the last word he got out before the wall exploded. A vast armoured figure with a sapphire battle-helm burst through whirling slivers of metal, its boltgun lowered and already firing.

  Blackwing hurled himself face-down to the floor, feeling the rounds whistle across his back and detonate amongst his men. The corridor behind was suddenly filled with screams, punctuated with erratic return volleys that zinged off his carapace plate.

  Ignoring the projectiles, Blackwing rolled on to his back, trying to draw a bead while avoiding the hail of incoming bolt slugs. It was then that he saw the second figure loom up out of the shadows, limping under a cobra-hood crest and wheezing like a burst bladder.

  ‘Oh, not good,’ he growled, cursing his stupidity and
scrabbling backwards. ‘Not good at all.’

  The boom of the detonations ran along the ground, shaking the roots of the mountains, shivering veins of rock that ran kilometres down. Gate-breakers, vast engines of destruction, settled into their firing formation. Single gun-barrels, mounted on immense armoured tracks, two hundred metres long, dark as the shadows of the Underfang and streaked with the smoking patina of war. They’d been hauled into position under the barrage of the lesser artillery and were now unleashed.

  Each engine was a piece of tech-sorcery in itself, a fusion of forbidden devices and proscribed mechanics from across a dozen lost worlds. Strange energies slewed across the surface of the barrels like quicksilver, shimmering with ghostly, half-seen witchlight. A low-pitched howling came from within the cavernous firing maws, a shadowy sound that echoed like the fractured sobs of great, nameless crowds. The muzzles of the cannons were ringed with the esoteric bronze shapes so favoured by their creators, each one different, each drawing on some significance long forgotten by the darkening mortal galaxy.

  They had names, those monsters. When they’d been assembled over the centuries in daemon-stalked foundries deep within the Eye of Terror, the Thousand Sons had insisted on that. So there was Pakhet, and Talamemnon, and Maahex, and the damagedGnosis, rocked by heavy fire from the defending batteries. That last one was smoking heavily, leaking rolling columns of death-black soot as it shuddered from incoming impacts.

  They fired. They all kept firing. The detonations were tremendous, scattering the ranks of troops around them, scrambling auspex readings, overloading auditory feeds, atomising the very air as huge neon-yellow beams of energy lanced to their targets. The explosions of impact were like tidal waves – huge, thundering walls of rippling flame that sluiced down the already tortured flanks of the Fang.

  Again and again the gate-breakers loosed their power, drowning out the sounds of all else, blocking the incessant rain of plasma from the orbital blockade, masking the screams of the dying and the wounded across the approaches to the gates.