You come here. To my realm. To despoil my people.
More green lights emerged. The squad was drawing closer, completely unaware of the welcome that awaited them at the far end of the corridor. Sturmhjart gave out a low growl, below the hearing of any but the Wolves, working hard to maintain the protective shroud about them.
I will shatter you. I will drive your corrupted souls into damnation. I will break you open and throw the dust of your souls to the dirt.
The last of the rubricae entered the tunnel. Greyloc’s helm-display indicated eighteen targets, plus a slower-moving signal at the rear. That was the sorcerer, the one Sturmhjart would have to deal with.
Because to me you are one thing, and one thing only.
Behind him, he could sense the power weapons of his battle-brothers pre-spike. Their pheromone kill-urge became apparent, thick and pungent. After days of inactivity and sparring, the glory of war had come to them again. Greyloc felt a fierce surge of elation as the endorphins rushed into his bloodstream.
Prey.
The moment came.
‘For Russ!’
His wolfclaws blazed, sending harsh shadows leaping back along the corridor, and then he was charging, hurtling towards the lead Rubric Marine, bathed in streams of storm-fury kindled by Sturmhjart. His guard tore into battle beside him, bellowing with feral abandon, the very image of the maelstrom itself. Sturmhjart was with them too, his armour-runes exploding into angry red life, drenching the tunnel walls with the glowing stain of blood.
‘Hjolda!’ roared Greyloc, slamming into contact, scything his claws through the armour of his first victim, watching the empty plate buckle as the talons bit deep. The corridor was soon filled with the sharp crack, thud and crunch of close combat.
It had begun. The final assault. From that point on, they all knew, the fighting would not cease until the last of the Thousand Sons were killed, or the Fang was taken in flames.
First, the firestorm.
From behind his barricade, Morek watched through a handheld augur as the Thousand Sons’ attack arrived at the Fangthane stair. The volume of fire was both blinding and deafening, a mix of plasma and solid-round weaponry that leapt out of the approach tunnels and slammed into the heavy buttresses at the base of the stairway. He couldn’t see the source of it, as the invaders were still hidden by the low ceiling and curving walls of the tunnel beyond the stairs. They stayed back, remaining in cover, hurling ranged fire at the barricades from afar.
Morek slid down against the cool bulk of the three metre-high, four metre-thick adamantium bulwark he’d been stationed to hold, final-checking his skjoldtar. Around him, crouching low in cover, were the men of his riven. All of them had seen action before, and none had any problem dealing with the barrage of incoming fire. The shielding warding them had been erected over many days, constructed out of siege-grade materials, and was capable of absorbing huge amounts of punishment before failing.
But this was just the prelude, and there was a long way to go before the real fighting took place.
‘Heads down,’ he voxed automatically. It was a superfluous command – his men mostly had their helmets between their knees and were hunched at the base of the giant barricades. The rain of plasma and bolt-shells either slammed into the barriers or flew harmlessly over their heads, impacting against the roof of the huge tunnel.
The noise was the worst thing – a disorientating, devastating chorus of hammering and burning that echoed out of the enclosed corridors and bounced off into the massive space beyond. It made thinking difficult, let alone hearing orders over the vox.
Morek blink-clicked a rune on his helm display to augment his auditory feed and compensate for the thundering noise outside. It improved the situation, but only by a little.
From his tactical display, he could see the Wolves crouching down in forward positions, also using the cover of the barricades at the base of the stairway. They were the best-equipped troops to deal with the volume of devastation, but even they didn’t just walk blindly out into the torrent. Wyrmblade held them back, keeping the leash on the Blood Claws short, waiting until there were targets suited to their close-combat mastery.
Rojk and the Long Fangs remained similarly unused, perched high up at the rear of the defensive lines, surrounded by heavy shielding. They endured the firestorm, letting the barriers take the strain, waiting for the real enemy to emerge.
Only Cloudbreaker was fully active. The Rune Priest, the most potent of Sturmhjart’s acolytes, had summoned up a swirling, missile-devouring storm of turbulence over the portals, using it to misdirect incoming projectiles and explode shells before they hit their target. It was far from perfect, but it spared the barricades from the full, unadulterated force of the enemy’s bombardment.
Morek took a deep breath, tasting the metallic edge of his rebreather filter, letting his heart-rate fall as the initial aural shock of the assault wore off. He’d seen action many times, and knew how to handle himself on a battlefield. Even so, there was no escaping the initial, stomach-twisting lurch of adrenalin when the shooting started.
Then, as he always did, he saw Freija in his mind. He knew she was stationed in Borek’s Seal with the other defensive forces. It was better that way. If they’d been placed together, he’d have been distracted by the need to keep half an eye on her. As it was, he didn’t even have vox-contact. The two theatres of war were almost entirely separated, blocked by kilometres of solid rock and the comm-jamming devices of the enemy.
‘The Hand of Russ, daughter,’ he breathed, forgetting his helm-vox was still active.
‘What?’ asked the kaerl nearest him, raising his head as if he expected to be ordered over the top.
Morek smiled bleakly.
‘Not yet, lad,’ he said, feeling the tremors against the barricade as it absorbed a staccato run of heavy bolter-rounds. ‘But soon enough.’
Greyloc spun on the ball of his foot, smashing aside the Rubric Marine and jarring its sapphire armour against the tunnel wall. The Traitor slumped down the stone and the witchlight in its eyes flickered out.
Greyloc turned to his retinue, knowing the pack needed to fall back. The approach tunnels were crawling with the enemy now, and his squad had to withdraw to Borek’s Seal before it was cut off.
‘Broth–’ he started, before feeling a sharp pain in his right leg.
The Rubric Marine hadn’t been finished off. It had dragged itself to its knees and stabbed its short combat blade into Greyloc’s greaves.
Still not dead! Skítja – what do I have to do?
He raised both wolfclaws and rammed them point-down, shredding the prone Rubric Marine from shoulder to waist. The disruptor-charged talons sliced through the empty battle-plate, breaking open the carapace and exposing the empty space inside. There was a sharp hiss, like air escaping from a void-lock, and the components rocked apart. The Traitor’s helm dropped heavily on to the floor, lenses dark, and stayed motionless.
That was enough.
‘Now,’ Greyloc snarled over the mission channel, angered by the wound he’d taken, angered that his guard hadn’t been tighter. ‘Back to the Seal.’
His retinue turned instantly, cutting their way out of combat and bludgeoning their way free. The six of them, Sturmhjart included, broke out of the melee and tore down the winding corridors, leaving a score of disabled or destroyed Traitors in their wake. As he went, Greyloc felt a dragging sensation on his limbs. For a moment, he thought it was the wound. Then he recognised the true source.
‘Rune Priest,’ he ordered, giving the hand-signal for maleficarum.
Sturmhjart nodded, still running, and clenched his fist tight. The runes on his armour suddenly blazed crimson. There was a thin cry of anguish from further up the tunnels, and the dragging ceased. The Wolves sped on, running hard through the utter darkness of the corridors, flawlessly negotiating the uneven ground, navigating as much by memory as by the senses.
They went down sharply, easily leaving behind th
e slower-moving Rubric Marines. Streams of bolter fire followed them while the pursuers were in range, but it was either evaded or flew off the heavy Terminator armour and soon died out. Greyloc’s leg muscles had begun to knit before he’d gone more than a few hundred metres, testament to the astonishing recuperative power of his gene-heritage.
‘Signals ahead,’ voxed Sturmhjart as they headed toward a junction in the tunnels where several routes coincided.
‘Mortals,’ spat Greyloc contemptuously. His kill-urge hadn’t abated, and such easy kills would do nothing to assuage it. ‘Make this quick.’
Second later, and a hapless Prosperine assault squad, ranging ahead of the slower-moving rubricae vanguard, blundered into the vengeful Wolves. Greyloc tore through them like a tornado, throwing bodies against the stone with spine-ripping momentum before carving them open and moving on. Las-beams and screams flickered in the eternal night of the underground, utterly hopeless against Greyloc’s momentum and fury.
‘We need to move,’ warned Sturmhjart, grabbing a panicked trooper and breaking his neck with a single shake of his wrist. ‘More signals closing in.’
Greyloc growled in annoyance, plunging into a fresh cluster of retreating bodies and laying about them with his whip-crackling claws.
‘Let them,’ he snapped, impaling two mortals at once, one on each claw, before hurling them loose in a spray of blood. ‘I’m just getting started.’
‘There’ll be plenty of fighting at the Seal,’ insisted the Rune Priest, backhanding a mortal into the roof of the tunnel and unloading a single bolter round into the stomach of his terrified comrade. ‘Jarl, we need to move.’
Then came the familiar barking snap of bolter rounds from further up the tunnels. Only Space Marines used such weapons, and they were very close.
‘Damn them,’ cursed Greyloc, watching the few surviving mortals limp and scamper back up the way they’d come, heading for the protection of the closing Rubric Marine squads. His voice was ragged and panting, not from exhaustion, but from the fearful, murderous energy only the Wolves of Fenris could unleash.
He stayed standing for a moment longer, unwilling to cede more ground. His pack stayed with him, their massive armour humming with a latent menace. They would stand and fight, if he ordered them to.
Teeth of Russ, they’d stand against Magnus himself if I ordered them to.
‘Let’s go,’ he snarled, hearing the heavy tread of a hundred boots on the tunnel floors above. If they stayed, they’d be overwhelmed, just as Rossek had been.
The pack swept downwards again, following the swiftest route towards Borek’s Seal. As they went, they passed wards against sorcery, freshly consecrated by the Rune Priests only days earlier. There were thousands of them in the warrens of the Aett, all serving to damp down and dilute the powers of the Sons’ sorcerers. Until they were dismantled, the Fang would be a hostile, draining place for them.
As it should be, faithless witches.
The pack thundered down a long, shallow incline. Greyloc recognised the approach tunnels to the Seal as they widened. They were nearing the final chamber before the bulwark itself, a junction of several other routes running down through the mountain. As the walls opened out, he heard noises from the space ahead.
‘Targets,’ he snarled, torn between irritation at the delay and pleasure at the chance to resume killing. ‘Lots of them.’
‘What in Hel are these signals?’ asked Sturmhjart, before the pack burst out from the tunnel and into the chamber.
The space was huge after the confined spaces of the mountain routes, a hundred metres wide and roughly circular. Fires burned, but they were not the wholesome flames of hearth fires. Prosperine troops were there ahead of them, dozens preparing for the assault on Borek’s Seal – the bulwark itself was now only a few hundred metres away, down another long, straight corridor carved into the rock.
For a moment Greyloc couldn’t see any reason for the Rune Priest’s confusion.
Then he did.
Among the mortal troops hurrying away from them, desperately trying to organise some kind of defence against the Terminators suddenly arriving in their midst, were two gigantic war machines. They had the look of ancient, proscribed tech-sorcery and stood more than a head higher than even Sturmhjart. They had fearsome drills mounted on one arm and plasma cannons affixed to the other. Their movements were deliberate and methodical, and nearly as fast as his.
As Greyloc tore into the chamber, a bolt of plasma arced toward him from one of the machines. He ducked left, evading the worst of it, though the ball of energy still caught his right arm and hurled him back against the stone.
‘Fenrys!’ roared Sturmhjart, kindling energy along the length of his staff, whirling it round and throwing ball-lightning of his own into the face of the machine.
‘Hjolda!’ answered the rest of the pack, charging headlong against the other war-engine. The Prosperine mortals began to lay down a curtain of las-fire, but the flickering beams were more an annoyance than a threat.
The machines, though, were serious opponents. Greyloc, leaping back to his feet, saw one of his warriors torn apart by a plasma blast and another one thrown bodily to the ground by a punch from the drill-arm.
Thrown to the ground. In Tactical Dreadnought Armour.
Greyloc powered back towards the nearest leviathan, ignoring the second machine, now swathed in Sturmhjart’s lightning strands.
‘Cataphracts,’ growled the Rune Priest over the vox, understanding what the signals had been telling him. ‘Soulless machines.’
Greyloc leapt into contact, evading another plasma bolt in mid-air and sweeping his claws into the Cataphract’s bronze shoulder-guards.
‘They all fall the same way,’ he grunted, jabbing the talons into metal, using his falling weight to drag the Cataphract off-balance.
The massive war-engine staggered, pulled away from centre by Greyloc’s weight. As it tottered, the Wolf Lord punched up with his claws, tearing the armour-plating open and revealing intricate circuitry within. His arm reached back, ready to rip out the wiring, when a colossal blow from the drill-arm floored him.
Greyloc hit the stone hard and sprawled on his back. The Cataphract loomed over him and levelled the plasma cannon at his head. Greyloc rolled away as the sunburst blazed out, shattering the rock below.
Then he was back on his feet with a fluid, twisting movement, already anticipating the next blow from the Cataphract. He veered away, dodging a crushing blow from the drill arm, before plunging back in close, his talons shimmering from the disruptors.
‘Bite on this,’ he hissed, jabbing the edges up toward the exposed rent in the Cataphract’s armour.
As the talons connected, the war machine was lifted high and thrown through the air, its massive limbs flailing. It crashed down amid a cluster of mortal troops. Its entire breastplate had been driven in, and the ancient metal was broken and smoking.
Greyloc spun round, perfectly aware he hadn’t hit it that hard.
Bjorn was there.
The gigantic Dreadnought rose up in front of him, dominating the chamber as he dominated every chamber he entered, his massive plasma cannon arm still radiating heat from the discharge.
Feel the wrath of the ancients, abomination.
The aura of intimidation was astonishing. Even Greyloc, hardened by centuries of combat against the direst enemies of mankind, found himself awestruck in the face of that hatred. It was as if a fragment of Russ’s own destructive power had been dragged back into the world of the living, as all-consuming and devastating as it had been when first unleashed on the galaxy two thousand years ago.
The Fell-Handed is among us! Blood of Russ, I would have faced a hundred deaths just to see this.
More Rubric Marines were entering the chamber by then, lumbering down the many tunnels and opening fire as they did so. Cataphracts were among them, and sorcerers, and mortal assault squads wearing heavy blast-armour.
Bjorn waded into battle, as imp
erious and uncaring of the odds as he’d ever been. His lightning claw blazed with thrashing, curling energy, trailing electrostatic barbs along the stone as it flexed open. His plasma cannon pounded a stream of bolts into the reeling enemy, hurling even the rubricae aside as the blazing energy-pulses exploded into them.
Be unleashed! boomed the venerable Dreadnought, his growling, resonant voice rising above the growing tide of explosions and war-cries.
And in his wake came the beasts. Like a rolling wave, they leapt from his shadow and into the open. Huge, loping monsters, yellow-eyed, ribbed with metal plates and carrying outsized jaws lined with needle-sharp fangs, they tore forwards, devouring the ground between them and the enemy.
If the mortal invaders had been scared before, they panicked then. Thin-pitched screams echoed from the chamber roof as the horrors of the Underfang pounced, slamming into the enemy lines and rolling across the stone with their prey.
More Wolves Dreadnoughts strode into the chamber, their autocannons spooling up to fire. In their wake came more racing bands of Underfang creatures, and squads of Grey Hunters, their war-cries massive and echoing, and ravening packs of Blood Claws. Bolters barked out in response, and power-blades were kindled. The dark of the mountain was banished, replaced by the whirling, flashing light of muzzle-flares and plasma-bolts.
All this Greyloc saw in a single sweep of his helm. It was all the time he needed. He leapt to his feet, his claws still incandescent with killing energy.
‘For Russ!’ he roared, and the sound of the challenge shook the earth beneath his feet.
‘For Russ!’ roared the Wolves of the Fang, sweeping into combat, glorying in the savage thrust of arms.
For Russ! thundered Bjorn, the words amplified by his war-vox relays, drowning out all other sounds, rocking the walls of the chamber and cracking the stone under which he trod.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Temekh had to work hard not to give in to an unseemly excitement. He knew, as all the sorcerers did, that his emotions were entirely transparent to his gene-father. Just as they’d always been.
War of the Fang - Chris Wraight Page 39