War of the Fang - Chris Wraight

by Warhammer 40K

  Then he tensed, watching for the first viewer to erupt outwards. There was no hope of getting to the saviour pods now, much less the shuttle hangars. What remained was luck.

  Or, as the Rune Priests had it, wyrd.

  The first dome shattered, blowing up in a coronet of twinkling points. The gale of atmospheric expulsion clutched at him, and a maelstrom of debris flew out of the breach in the hull, whirling into space. Then another one went, pulling more loose matter into the void. As more viewers exploded open, Blackwing saw a servitor pulled free of its harness, tumbling out through the open viewers, still on fire until the frigid void extinguished it.

  Blackwing hung on to the throne, making full use of his enhanced strength to pick his moment, watching the lattice of transparent lenses above him disintegrate.

  Now.

  He pushed himself away from the throne and swept upwards.

  As soon as he left the floor of the bridge, he lost control, spinning like the rest of the jetsam toward the void-sucked realspace viewers. He had an impression of whirling chaos, of the whole ruined bridge sliding in front of his eyes, before he was sucked out, ripped into the void, and everything got very, very cold.

  His breath became deafening in the enclosed space of his helm, ragged and quick. For a moment, his disorientation was almost complete. Stars, as vivid as he’d ever seen them, swept by as he rotated, out of control and flailing.

  As he spun round again he saw the broken flanks of the Nauro drift across his vision, retreating fast into the distance. The damage was worse than he’d dared to imagine. The entire engine level was open to space, blazing away in defiance of the vacuum around it, shedding components in a spinning cloud of burn-black metal. It was a shadow of the ship he’d commandeered on Fenris, a shattered, hopeless wreck. Saviour pods spiralled away from it like seeds falling from an ekka pine.

  Something about the silence of space made everything seem to take place in a weird kind of silent slow motion. Blackwing actually saw the plasma drives explode before he felt anything of it. Bright yellow light flowered out from the darkened hull-carcass, rushing into the void in an utterly gorgeous sphere of monumentally impressive destruction. The vessel snapped clean in two, its components flying apart like a snapped femur, each spur lit up by subsidiary detonations.

  Then the impact caught up. Blackwing went from spinning aimlessly in space to being tossed around like an ice-skiff in a Hel-gale. He felt a sharp blow as something hard and metal hit his void-armour shell, then another, then many more.

  He tried, fruitlessly, to right himself, or at least to cradle himself against the rain of debris, all of it moving with incredible speed through the frictionless void. It was as he was doing this that an ancillary drive-shaft, a piece of solid metal the length of a Thunderhawk, rushed up to meet him with the remorseless inevitability of basic physics.

  Blackwing had time for three thoughts. The first was that, after all he’d survived over the past two weeks, this was a poor way to go. The second was that, when it hit, it was going to really, really hurt.

  Then the shaft slammed into him at full speed, cracking against his armour with the full momentum of the plasma-drive explosion, shattering his helm-visor and bursting the shell of his breastplate open. The void raced in, sucking both air and consciousness out.

  As he tumbled away from the impact, trailing droplets of blood and oxygen from his wounds, his eyesight blurred and slipping away, he had the third thought. A familiar shape had intruded on to the edge of his waning awareness, grey and blunt-edged, bigger by far than the Nauro and in much better shape.

  Blessed Allfather, he realised, before blood ran across his eyes and blinded him. That’s the Gotthammar.

  The bonds snapped. The old man staggered back, his staff falling from his grasp and clattering on the floor.

  Fast as a throat-cut, Ironhelm was on him. The frostblade whistled through the air, resuming its course as if no interruption had taken place. The Great Wolf adjusted the trajectory subtly, compensating instantly for the movement of his target.

  The man made no attempt to protect himself, nor to run from the blade. Freed from the crushing weight on them, Ironhelm’s muscles sprang back to life instantly, propelling the crackling edge into the kill-zone. The frostblade bit true, cleaving the man’s chest open diagonally from shoulder to waist.

  The old man looked at Ironhelm a final time, somehow hanging on to a sliver of life. His single eye remained open, staring inscrutably.

  Then he was down, his blood running across the stone freely. Ironhelm towered over him, poised to strike again, mindful of the ways of the Traitor. His newly-released Wolf Guard leapt up to join him on the platform, all eager to defend their master against the awesome power of the fallen primarch and his daemonic allies.

  But none appeared. A sigh passed through the heavy air of the chamber, making the banners rustle. The only sound was the heavy thud of power-armoured boots on the stairs, and the constant, thrumming growl of the packs.

  The man was dead. He stayed dead.

  Ironhelm looked down at the corpse, still panting from his exertion against the maleficarum. He knew he should feel elation. He knew should feel something. Instead, his entire frame felt hollow. Within him, he could sense a thin, mournful howling.

  Frei drew alongside. Like the Great Wolf, the Rune Priest emanated none of the feral exuberance he ought to have done.

  ‘What just happened?’ asked Ironhelm, as bewildered as a child. He began to feel a sickness well up within him. The quest of decades had been achieved, and there was nothing but a faint confusion and nausea to show for it.

  ‘The primarch was here,’ confirmed Frei, looking down at the body before the altar. ‘Now, he is not.’

  ‘Then I have killed him?’

  Ironhelm’s voice betrayed his desperation. He knew he hadn’t.

  ‘Something died,’ said Frei. Like his master, his voice had none of the earthy certainty it normally carried. ‘But I do not under–’

  ‘Lord!’

  The voice was Rangr’s, and it was full of alarm.

  The braziers were growing in intensity. The sapphire flames lashed up, creating columns of writhing, fluorescent energy. The light was powerful, throwing back even the darkest of the shadows in the chamber’s recesses. The banners were illuminated fully, exposing the company emblems. Ironhelm turned to look at them, finally sensing their importance. He had been wrong. They were not Thousand Sons devices. They never had been.

  ‘Adgr’s pack,’ he muttered, recognising the crossed fangs over the sickle moon. ‘And Gramm’s. And Beor’s...’

  Frei’s gaze swept across the newly lit-up emblems. Beyond them, carved into the walls of the chamber, were stone reliefs. They depicted familiar events in an angular, stylised fashion. On one frieze there were pyramids within a city, the exact dimensions of those on Gangava. The Gotthammar arriving in orbit was on another. The reinforcements from Fenris translating in-system, the destruction of the void shield generator, all the events were there. There was even a depiction of the Great Wolf hurling an autocannon mount from a burning tower.

  This has all been foreseen.

  Rangr kept his chainsword poised in the attack position. Like all the Wolves in the chamber, he was on high alert, his hackles high and his hearts beating solidly.

  ‘What is the meaning of those emblems, lord?’ the Wolf Guard asked. ‘They’re Fenryka, but no Great Companies that I know.’

  Ironhelm began to move away from the platform, lumbering down the steps heavily. Like his troops, he kept his frostblade activated. The worst of the nausea subsided, to be replaced by the cold hand of dread.

  ‘They are our cousins,’ he growled, his voice shot through with loathing. ‘The Wolf Brothers. The lost ones.’

  Frei joined the Great Wolf, and the pair of them descended the last steps from the pyramid quickly. The retinue followed in their wake.

  ‘The Brothers have been disbanded for over two hundred years,’ s
aid Frei. ‘I do not understand–’

  ‘So you have already said, Rune Priest,’ snarled Ironhelm, losing patience. All his fury, all his kill-urge, had been suddenly blunted, and the result was an almost physical pain. ‘Enough uncertainty. This place is a mockery of us. We will return to the fleet and destroy it from orbit.’

  As he neared the far side of the chamber, close to where a gilded archway marked the exit out to the halls beyond, the braziers suddenly changed colour. From blazing sapphire they switched to a sickly green, intense and overbearing. The Wolf Brothers emblems became distorted and grotesque in the shifting light.

  And then, with the sharp sound of metal grating against metal, massive blast-doors withdrew from the walls of the chamber. In every direction, huge vaults opened up, each of them bleeding more emerald sickness into the central chamber. Dark shapes emerged from the fog of green, twisted and diseased. They were Space Marine in profile, but horribly altered. Some had trailing tentacles in place of limbs, others had misshapen heads crowned with thorns. Their armour was warped and uprooted, the plate ripped by growths from below and fused with unholy flesh where it spilled into the open. Helm-lenses glowed with more sickly witchlight, piercing even the shifting miasma roiling from the vaults. They didn’t march cleanly, but limped, dragged or scuttled, hauling their broken bodies into the open, tottering on cloven hooves and clawed crow’s feet.

  As they emerged into the light of the braziers, their origins became clearer. Their battle-plate had once been grey, adorned with the totems and fetishes of the hunt. There were pelts still clinging to the corrupted ceramite, as botched and altered as the armour beneath. Images of fangs and runes were still graven into breastplates and greaves, though stretched into new and blasphemous patterns by some dark and subtle artistry. As they lumbered into view, the mutated warriors began to howl in a mockery of the battle-cries they had once roared so proudly. The sound was horrific, a chorus of fluted misery and distortion that resounded from the high walls around them and filled the chamber with perverted hatred.

  ‘The Bane of the Wolves,’ breathed Frei, finally understanding. ‘Not him. Not us. Them.’

  Rangr and the other Wolf Guard hesitated. Normally they’d have rushed into combat at the first sight of such corruption, but this time none of them moved. They could all see the runes on the armour, the withered pelts and the beast-mask helms.

  They all knew, without needing to be told, that the gene-seed in each one of those horrors was the same as the Helix that animated them.

  ‘Orders, lord?’ asked Frei, seizing his staff in both hands, as riven by indecision as those about him.

  Ironhelm raised himself to his full, terrible height then, watching the oncoming mutants with a grim horror. They were brothers in more than name. They were the only successors the Space Wolves had ever permitted to be made, the only other scions of the primarch Leman Russ that remained in the galaxy.

  They shared blood. They shared gene-memory. They shared everything.

  ‘Remember yourself, priest,’ Ironhelm growled, picking out the first of his targets from the hundreds that presented themselves. ‘These are no longer Wolf Brothers. Kill them. Kill them all, and do not cease until their abomination has been cleansed from the universe forever.’

  Jarl Arvek Kjarlskar turned away from the slab in the Gotthammar’s medi-bay. The Wolf Scout he’d dragged out of the void, Blackwing, lay on the metal, more dead than alive, though somehow still capable of disagreable amounts of sarcasm. The ship he’d arrived in was now nothing more than a ball of spinning ash, though the Gotthammar’s reclamators were still picking up saviour pods.

  ‘Do we have a comm-link?’ Kjarlskar asked. The great voice was as deep and resonant as ever, though there was a note of unusual urgency in it.

  ‘Not yet, lord,’ replied Anjarm, the ship’s Iron Priest. ‘Ironhelm is in the central pyramid, heavily engaged. There’s jamming down there.’

  Kjarlskar’s eyes blazed dangerously.

  ‘How can there be jamming? We destroyed everything.’

  He clenched his giant fists, bunching them as if he wanted to punch his way through the tiled walls of the apothecarium. Controlling his rage with difficulty, he whirled back to face Blackwing.

  ‘You’re sure, Wolf Scout?’ he asked. ‘We’ve had comms from Fenris – all of them routine.’

  Blackwing managed a weak, hacking laugh. More blood bubbled up from his throat.

  ‘Sure? No, not really, Jarl. Maybe the Skraemar wasn’t torn apart by a battleship twice its size. Maybe we didn’t lose our orbital batteries in a few hours. And maybe Jarl Greyloc didn’t really order me out here, at the expense of my ship and most of my crew. I just can’t be sure...’

  Kjarlskar swooped down on Blackwing, grabbing him by his broken void-armour and hauling him up to his face.

  ‘No more games,’ he hissed, his fangs fully exposed. ‘You ask for the recall of the entire Chapter. This is Ironhelm’s moment of triumph.’

  Blackwing’s head lolled as the Wolf Lord shook him. His eyes went glassy, and the sardonic smile left his lips.

  ‘I nearly died to bring you this message, lord,’ he drawled, on the edge of consciousness and loquacious from medication. ‘In itself, that matters not. But the fact you’re hesitating over this is now massively pissing me off. There are Thousand Sons on Fenris, a whole bloody Legion of them. Even if the fleet returns now, the odds are the Aett will still fall. So what else do you want me to say? Please?’

  Kjarlskar glared at him for another moment, as if his eyes could somehow bore into the Scout’s soul and uncover the truth. Then, with as much disgust as despair, he threw Blackwing back against the hard metal slab.

  ‘Get me a comm-link,’ he snarled to the Iron Priest. ‘Get it now. Then organise landers, and send a message to the other ships to prepare for re-translation. We’re going back.’

  Anjarm nodded.

  ‘It will be done. But we’ve had reports of Traitor Marines in the pyramid – Ironhelm will not come away from that fight easily.’

  Kjarlskar spat on the floor.

  ‘That is why they’re there. Blood of Russ, how easily we’ve been led.’ He started to stride across the medi-bay, thrusting aside the fleshmaker-thralls who got in his way. ‘I’ll make planetfall myself. By the Allfather, he’ll listen to me.’

  It was as the massive Wolf Lord neared the exit that Blackwing lifted his battered head a final time. The encounter with the drive-shaft had left him uglier and more misshapen than ever. His nose and cheekbones had been shattered, his chest driven in and both arms badly broken. Even for a Space Marine, those were serious wounds. The huge amounts of sedative in his bloodstream seemed to have finally got to him, and his bruised eyelids drooped half-closed.

  ‘You do that, Jarl,’ he slurred, drifting back into forgetfulness. ‘And don’t think I’ll hold any of this against you. I’m a generous sort, so you can thank me properly for all this when we get back.’

  PART IV:

  THE CRIMSON KING

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The lights were low in Greyloc’s chamber. None of the Jarls had ostentatious private quarters, and they were all arranged in much the same way: bare rock walls, racks of weapons taken from past encounters, totems gifted by the Wolf Priests, a hard bed layered with tough hides. Greyloc’s was perhaps a little more sparse than most, but not by much. The only item that marked his territory was the old axe Frengir, hanging over the whetstone like an amulet.

  The Wolf Lord was seated on a low three-legged wooden stool, the kind the men of the ice used for tribal councils. It was built to mortal scale, and even out of armour Greyloc looked awkward on it, all limbs and hands.

  His eyes were closed, the pale skin of his face relaxed. The sounds of the Aett – the hammering, the shouting, the grind of machinery – were muted. A fire glowed in the corner of the chamber, now little more than embers. A mortal would have struggled to see much in the gloom and would have found the cold crushing. T
he extremity of the chamber’s conditions were testament to the majesty of the Adeptus Astartes, even if the contents were not.

  Alone with his thoughts, Greyloc let his mind wander across possibilities, soaring like a gyrhawk across an open sky. He could sense the vast tide of hatred closing in on his citadel, pressing against the stone, burrowing into its roots, determined to break inside and destroy the life within. A lesser warrior might have been intimidated by that. Even a great leader might have felt a tremor of frustration, a burning sense of injustice that his time in command had been rendered so cruelly short.

  Greyloc felt none of that. His humours were balanced, and the inner wolf was at ease. It was unusual for one of his kin to be in such a state prior to the outbreak of battle, and it was a trait he never revealed. There were times, he knew, when his battle-brothers felt he had lost something essential, that he had become too much like a mortal, and there was no point in fuelling the rumours further.

  He understood why they thought such things. Greyloc was as much a gene-child of Russ as they were, but he had command of a quality that they often lacked, for all their bluster and outward confidence.

  Certainty.

  That had never wavered, not since the first implants had taken, not since he’d learned to use the new, powerful body given to him by the Helix, not since he’d risen through the orders to become Hunter, then Guard, then Lord. At every stage, he’d known what his destiny was.

  In another soul, that might have constituted arrogance. Greyloc, though, had never gloried in it, or even taken satisfaction. It was merely the way of the universe, as sacred as the balance between hunter and prey, between cause and effect.

  At every stage, I chose the path I had to. Every note of the wyrd then was true. It will be no different now. The runes guide, and they never lie.

  By the doorway, a red light briefly winked on. Greyloc’s eyelids flickered open. His pin-pupils were dilated, as if he’d been hunting. They shrunk quickly, returning to their normal state.