War of the Fang - Chris Wraight

by Warhammer 40K

  ‘Welcome to Fenris, lord,’ he said, bowing low.

  ‘None of that,’ remonstrated the newcomer, waving away the ceremonial gesture. ‘You’re being misled by appearance. As I’ve surely demonstrated to you by now, that is the least important aspect of my presence here.’

  Temekh let his head rise, and smiled.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But it makes my hearts glad to see you restored.’

  The two figures stood in Temekh’s sanctum aboard the Herumon. The corvidae sorcerer-lord was wearing his usual robes, helm-less and with his violet eyes shining.

  Before him stood a primarch, one of the Emperor’s twenty favoured sons, the forgemasters of the Imperium, the demigods who had carved out the realms of men from the uncaring vastness of the void. He no longer wore the image of a child, or of an old man, but had unveiled the form that he’d taken during the long years of the Great Crusade. Tall, broad-shouldered, bronze-skinned and bronze-armoured, draped in a golden mantle stitched from shimmering feathers. He wore a golden helm crested with crimson horsehair. His own hair was thick and long, stained the deep red of cochineal. One hand rested on a leather-bound tome at his waist, chained to his immense frame by an iron chain, though not the one he’d carried before the Heresy. The other clasped the hilt of his sheathed sword.

  Magnus the Red, the Crimson King, the Cyclops of Prospero.

  The blessed, he was called, and the learned.

  The cursed, he was called, and the fool.

  Now he stood again within the ambit of realspace, fully embodied, glittering in the diffuse candlelight of the sanctum. For the coming battle he had assumed the appearance he had once worn by default, just another part of the symmetry of revenge. There was a weary, thin smile on his flawed face.

  ‘How does it feel?’ asked Temekh, emboldened by the humour his master seemed to be in.

  ‘To wear physical form again? Different to last time I did so. I will never be truly flesh and bone again. But it is good, nonetheless.’ The primarch raised a giant hand and flexed the fingers, one by one. ‘Very good.’

  ‘And do you have orders for me, lord?’

  Magnus turned away from admiring his own presence and gazed fondly at Temekh.

  ‘You have done all that has been asked, my son. The Wolves’ lair is not for you. Only I will descend, though I will hold my nose as I do so.’

  ‘Lord Aphael has penetrated the lower levels. His troops are removing the wards to allow your translation, and have penned the Dogs back to separate bulwarks within the Fang. It may still be several days before conditions permit you to enter.’

  ‘They’re still fighting? Impressive. Though perhaps I should not be surprised. It is their expertise, after all.’

  ‘They are desperate, and as savage as beasts.’

  Magnus lost his smile.

  ‘I no longer think of them as animals, Ahmuz, though I once did. I now think of them as the purest of us all. Incorruptible. Single-minded. The perfection of my father’s vision.’

  Temekh looked up at his primarch, taken aback.

  ‘You admire them.’

  ‘Admire them? Of course I do. They are unique. And even in an infinite universe, that quality is rarer than you might suppose.’

  Temekh paused before replying, weighing up whether he still risked saying something capable of damning him.

  ‘If that is so, lord, then why are we pursuing this war? The others – the raptora, the pyrae – they prosecute it for vengeance, to inflict the hurt that they inflicted on us. I cannot share that sentiment. It seems... unworthy of us. We are better than that.’

  Magnus walked up to the sorcerer-lord and placed a heavy hand on Temekh’s shoulder.

  ‘We are,’ he said. ‘We are much better than that. Let the drive for vengeance motivate the others – it will make them fight harder. This battle is about far more than the settling of scores.’

  His single eye was unwavering then, a circle of gold flecked with the full spectrum of visible light. Temekh found it impossible to look into, impossible to look away from.

  ‘We fight to prevent a possible future. A future that, even now, gestates within the mountain below us. If we succeed, the hurt we will inflict on the Wolves of Fenris will rival what they did to us. If we fail, then all we have accomplished since our arrival on the Planet of the Sorcerers will be as nothing.’

  The intensity of the first ranged attack was absorbed, contained, and blunted. There was an ebb in the pattern of gunfire from the tunnels below the Fangthane, and then the Rubric Marines stormed the lower slopes of the stairway. The Wolves leapt out to meet them, and the narrow killing ground was instantly clogged. Taking advantage of the higher ground and more established heavy fire support, the defenders initially had the better of it. The Blood Claws fought with all their customary abandon, only barely reined in by the monstrous form of Rossek. They were complemented by the more methodical Hunters under Skrieya, who’d learned over many years how to make the most of the confined spaces under the mountain.

  Even so, there were casualties. The Traitor Marines doled out pain with both hands, their killing no less effective for all its unsettling silence. When the attackers broke away at last, pulling back to regroup from their mauling on the stairway approaches, there were grey-armoured bodies lying on the stone too, shattered and bleeding.

  And so it went on. There was no sudden breakthrough, no decisive shift in the balance of power. The attacks came in waves, the Traitor Marines in the vanguard, each time attempting to bludgeon the Wolves higher up the stairway and seize the barricades. Every assault got slightly further before the unseen sorcerers called their soul-slaves back, leaving heat-reddened rock and cooling blood behind them.

  Hours passed, punctuated by an unreliable rhythm of attack and repulsion. Mortal troops were rotated from the barricades, replaced with fresh kaerls held in reserve. Magazines were replaced, armour patched up, blast-walls repaired, fresh supplies brought down from the Fangthane. Bodies were hauled away from the front line. The mortals were taken one way, the Wolves another. The Sky Warriors didn’t die easily, but with every attack from the Thousand Sons, another brace of corpses were retrieved, every one a testament to some heroic stand against the overwhelming numbers of the attacking host.

  At the forefront of every assault, and the last to withdraw to the barricades at the end of every action, was Tromm Rossek. He’d lost none of his brooding, terrifying intensity. With every defender’s death, he seemed to withdraw further inside himself, transmuting deeper into a grim leviathan of the murder-make rather than the laughing, ebullient warrior-god he’d been of old. His movements were tighter, his orders sharper, his blows heavier when they hit. The loss of his pack had done more than drive the old fire from his soul; it had made him darker, and it had made him deadlier.

  His new pack, the battle-ravaged dregs of others’ commands, had responded to that new spirit. They’d lost some of their swagger too, and there was less chat over the vox as they indulged their raw-edge talent for killing, but they hadn’t forgotten how to do it. The Blood Claws spun, kicked, punched and blasted their way into contact with their more orthodox opposite numbers, taking their lead from the glowering giant in their midst, feeding off the raw loathing that hung over him like the stench of death.

  They still died. The Claws always died, thrust as they were into the jaws of Morkai by their reckless, selfless way of war. But when they fell, there were always more broken armour-shells around them, more sighing corpses of soulless, shattered Rubric Marines, freed from their unknowable life of emptiness. Brakk would have been proud, seeing the seeds he’d planted bearing fruit at last.

  So the attacks continued, growing in ferocity as the hours, then days, blurred into one another. The Thousand Sons had the troops, and the time, and the patience. The Hunters would take over the burden, giving the Blood Claws a few hours’ rest. Then the process was reversed. And again, over and over until the blood-drenched stairway looked like a vision of Hel’
s gateway.

  The line held. Every assault was repulsed at enormous cost and with terrible sacrifice, but for as long as the barricades remained intact and the Wolves remained on their feet, the Fangthane remained unconquered.

  Bjorn waded further into combat, watching through banks of optical implants as his enemies were cut down under his blades. He barely registered the steady rain of projectiles against his armoured outline. His visual field was thick with targets, blinking red runes set against a flickering backdrop.

  He ignored them. He fought then as he always had done – on instinct. The animal-sharp reflexes he’d once enjoyed were gone, as distant a memory as his natural limbs, but he still moved far faster than looked possible from his heavy, blocky shell.

  There were privileges to being the oldest Dreadnought in the Underfang. His chassis was of incredibly ancient design, incorporating technologies that had been rare even before the conflagration of the Heresy. The centuries since then had seen further refinements by successive Iron Priests, each desperate to outdo one another in the glory they could add to the sarcophagus of the Fell-Handed.

  They think I do not know what they have done to my tomb.

  Bjorn cared nothing for the finery. He would happily have lost all the gold emblems embossed on his living coffin, would have lost every silver rune-pattern traced across the ceramite, just for the chance to come face to face with his prey again.

  He would never feel the hot splash of blood across his flesh again, the moment the blade went in and cut the thread of his prey. His nerve-lattice relays were good – much better than those fitted to any other Dreadnought in the Imperium – but they would never get the sensation quite right.

  So, to assuage their guilt, they drape my tomb with skulls and totems. Trinkets. I loathe them.

  He lowered his plasma cannon, barely registering as the orbs of sunburst-energy punched off into the dark. The screams of those he downed were just so much background static. Bjorn alone had terminated the life-signs of more enemies than some whole Chapters. With such a record, death had ceased to have much meaning. The pleasure had long gone. All that remained was the need.

  And I need to kill. By Russ, I need to share my pain.

  It had always been painful, ever since Russ had gone. There had been no explanation, no words of comfort.

  One night, one midwinter’s night of storm-fury, the primarch had gone.

  Leman Russ had left without saying why, charging into the void as he always did, heedless of the danger, heedless of those he left behind.

  Bjorn whirled on his axis, crunching a Rubric Marine in his claw and throwing it into the air. When the body landed the beasts got to work, slicing into the hollow armour with their rending claws. By then Bjorn had taken on another two targets, blasting holes in ceramite and slicing through ribs of banded steel.

  Did you know how angry that made me, that you never said why?

  He had fought differently when he’d been alive. Back then, many lifetimes ago, he’d raced into battle with Godsmote, and Oje, and Two-Blade, and their wyrds had been coiled together tighter than throttle-twine. The Wolves around him now cut threads with the same peerless majesty as those of old, but it wasn’t the same. Bjorn knew the galaxy had aged, and he had not. He had no place here, not with the hot-blooded whelps who had inherited the mantle of the Aett.

  I think you knew. You knew I would hate this. You knew every moment would be torture for me.

  A sorcerer came into cast-range, half-obscured by ranks of Traitor Marines. He began to kindle maleficarum in the palms of his hands, conjuring balls of flame, ready to hurl into combat.

  Bjorn registered the witch with contempt. Or, at least, his mind felt contempt. It was possible that the emotion translated into some physical pattern on his ruined face, submerged in fluid and withered by the pitiless weight of ages, but such subtlety certainly didn’t register on his face-guard.

  And that, above all, makes me believe you kept the truth from me for a reason.

  He took a single, bracing stride, rocked back and detonated his cannon. The sorcerer disappeared beneath a tidal wave of explosions, burning and ripping up. Bjorn kept firing, kept funnelling all his hatred and weariness and anguish at the crippled Traitor. When he finally stopped, finally turning to find more prey, his victim’s armour was little more than a super-hot puddle of sizzling hydrocarbons.

  This anger, this betrayal. It keeps me alive.

  The beasts stayed close by his heels, tearing the head off any enemy who got too close, but allowing Bjorn to bring his close-combat weapon to bear if needed. They darted and raced through the melee as they’d been designed to, matching the supernatural agility of the Wolves beside them. Bjorn knew how they were capable of such things, and why they’d been made. Very few others did.

  I loved you as none of your sons loved you. You knew this.

  Absently, Bjorn noticed one of his fellow Dreadnoughts, Hrothgar, suffering under a concerted onslaught from a whole squad of Rubric Marines, backed up by the indomitable presence of a Cataphract. Irritated by the distraction, he spun round, got a firing solution and took the war machine’s head off. Even before the bronze skull had hit the ground he was back into the attack, plunging his claw-blades into fresh meat.

  My thanks, lord, voxed Hrothgar.

  Bjorn didn’t reply. He was busy killing. That was all he ever did. It was either stasis, or killing. Unconsciousness, or fury.

  You knew I would hate you. You, who left me to this fate. I would have pierced the veils of reality with you, marched with you to destiny, stood beside you against the enemy you knew was waiting.

  His cannon bellowed out, laying waste to rows of the enemy. He was invincible, titanic, massive, far superior to any foe before him. Nothing the Thousand Sons had brought to face him had even remotely troubled him. Just as on Prospero, Bjorn was unmatched.

  Perhaps – perhaps – this was how a primarch felt in combat.

  And I know what you were doing. You birthed this hate in me, as potent as the love I still cannot shake.

  If he’d possessed tear-glands, he would have wept. If he’d possessed a jawline, it would have been clenched into an eternal grimace of horror. If he’d possessed vocal cords, they would have trembled in a howl of utter, soul-burning anguish.

  For hate is the most powerful drive in the universe, and you needed to give me such power that the Wolves would never be without a defender.

  But Bjorn had none of these things. All he had was the fury of the favoured son rejected by his father. And, as the galaxy knew from bitter experience, that fury held nothing but the promise of death, and devastation, and blood raining down like the tears of heaven.

  Another attack had been repelled. Wearily, the defenders at the Fangthane let their guns fall silent, preparing to count the dead and wounded and haul them from the front line. Though the fighting had stopped for a short while, there was no pause in their labour. Squads of kaerls were rotated in the brief respite, with those having taken the brunt of the assault for longest being withdrawn and replaced by fresher troops. As the assault had ground on, a murderous procession of attack and counter-attack, all the mortals had gone without sleep, and even those being newly drafted to take up position had the heavy-limbed gaits of weary men. The habitual swagger of the Fenrisian kaerls had long gone, replaced with a blank, dogged defiance.

  Morek had been on shift for thirteen hours by the time he was called back. A Wolf Guard gave him his orders. His armour was dented and scorched as if he’d waded through a lake of magma.

  ‘Rivenmaster,’ he’d barked, his booming voice distorted by a broken vox-unit. ‘What are you still doing on station?’

  ‘My duty,’ Morek had said, his voice trembling with fatigue, unable to think of anything else to say.

  Then the Wolf Guard had pushed him roughly up the slope of the stairway toward the rear positions, past the lines of barricades and gun emplacements towards the open hall of the Fangthane.

  ‘You
r duty is to obey the rotation patterns,’ he snarled. ‘Ensure your replacement is here before the next wave hits.’

  So Morek had stumbled away from the front lines at last, hardly able to lift his head from his armour’s neck-guard, hardly able to hold his rifle in his hands.

  He’d lost any awareness of how long the carnage had been going on for. The hours had bled into days, which had extended into a long train of horrifyingly brutal engagements and tense, exhausting waiting periods. He’d snatched some sleep where he could, but it had never been enough. He’d woken abruptly at one point during a lull in the fighting, screaming something about a horror lurking in the fleshmakers’ labs. Thankfully, fighting broke out almost immediately afterwards, dragging the exhausted kaerls’ attention to more pressing matters. Despite the lucky escape, his lack of control scared him.

  As Morek passed through the rear defences, walking in the shadow of four massive gun turrets, he was only dimly aware of the movement all around him. Kaerls were everywhere, hauling crates of ammunition, armour or rations, dragging themselves back from the front like him or preparing to take up their positions in his place. Some still moved with a steady, dependable resolve. Others staggered as they marched, exhaustion evident in their movements.

  None of them looked remotely likely to shirk their duty and seek a less dangerous station. Fenrisian rivens had no equivalent of the Imperial Guard Commissars. They weren’t needed. The very idea of trying to evade combat in order to achieve some short-lived safety was as alien to the deathworld’s psyche as charity.

  As Morek emerged from the gun-lines and into the greater space of the hall beyond, he nearly stumbled into a heavy weapons squad hurrying to the front. Mumbling a curt apology, he backpedalled away from them, only to crash into a stack of dried-meat cases waiting to be doled out to the defenders. He fell clumsily to the floor, his legs giving out just as he tried to right himself.

  For a moment, he stayed there, feeling the hard stone beneath his back, letting the temptation to rest – for a moment – sink into his bones.