Legends of the wolf the.., p.31
Legends of the Wolf: The Omnibus, page 31
‘There you are, then.’
Váltyr laughed. ‘You’re growing fast, whelp,’ he said. ‘You surprise me. Soon your hair will be as grey as ours.’
‘When Hel melts,’ muttered Hafloí, turning away and stomping up the slope towards the bridge.
He was one of the last to cross it, still limping slightly but with his shoulders back and his spine erect. He was even learning to walk like a Grey Hunter.
Váltyr smiled to himself. The new blood was welcome. Of all of them, only Hafloí still had the unconscious, arrogant assurance that a Sky Warrior ought to have. Olgeir retained much of his old bravado, and Gunnlaugur in the right mood was still an unstoppable kill-engine, but even they had learned to temper their fury as the centuries had played out. Baldr had never lost his aura of self-command, not until this mission, but that was moot now.
Váltyr himself had never possessed that innate confidence. Despite all the psycho-conditioning, all the training, all the long decades of success, he had never quite been able to convince himself that he deserved his place among the honoured of the Rout. His matchless prowess with the blade didn’t mask that. He knew he pushed his reputation too far, testing it too often, forcing others to take him on. He was aware that they resented it, thinking that he delighted in humiliating them and proving his superiority.
They were wrong about that. The duels, the tests – they were a compulsion rather than a desire. He had even begun to wonder whether he wanted to be beaten, just once, just so he could look himself in the eye in the mirror and know truly that his limits had been reached.
That was the strange thing about success. It was useless in disproving the nagging, whispering notion he’d been unable to shake ever since ascending into the Blood Claws: that he was a fraud, that he wasn’t quite as good as his results indicated, and that one day he’d be found out; that one day, when it really mattered, he’d let the pack down.
Váltyr, like all his brothers, was immune from fear in battle, but he’d never been immune from that anxiety. No matter how hard he trained, no matter how deadly he became in the practice cages, the quiet voice in his mind would never quite go away.
It is good that we are always forced to fight, he thought grimly to himself, watching the city burn below him. It prevents us spending any time with ourselves.
The last of the mortal troops, some dragging their wounded behind them, crossed the bridge. The enormous doors under the central arch slowly ground together, leaving only a narrow gap for the Wolves to slip through. After that, when they were all in, the breach would be sealed.
Váltyr walked down the shallow slope, away from where the bridge met the cleared land. Ahead of him, still a long way off and half shrouded by smoke and night shadow, lay the jagged, toothless line of buildings. Many were little more than skeletal ruins, bombed empty and glowing like angry coals. The rest were deserted, dark and hollowed out, their old inhabitants slain or cowering behind the inner walls. From beyond their see-saw profile came the dull roar of battle, a distant sighing like the surge of the ocean.
He sniffed. Something unusual laced the air, mingled amid the melange of foul smells rising from the lower city as if purposively concealed there. The hairs on his forearms rose.
He walked further down, his boots crunching through the rubble, drawing steadily closer to the line of ruins. Visibility was poor, even with his superb eyesight; the air had been turned into a miasma of spores and smoke.
‘Whelp?’ he voxed into the comm, wondering how far Hafloí had moved away.
No answer came. The Blood Claw’s channel was unobtainable. That was strange; perhaps interference from the electrostatic in the air.
Váltyr drew to a halt, sword in hand, peering into the gloom. For a few moments more he saw nothing beyond the penumbral silhouettes of the ruins backlit by a lurid red-green sky.
‘Will you stand against me, I wonder?’ came a voice from the darkness.
Váltyr tensed. The voice was astonishing – a thick, wet purr of indolent malice that seemed to rise from the ground around him. It was like Gunnlaugur’s, only deeper and more throatily resonant. After-echoes of the words hung amid the spores, whispering on in a faint chorus of weary mockery.
‘Show yourself,’ snarled Váltyr, keeping his blade raised.
‘And it is a question to be asked,’ slurred the voice, ‘what valour still resides with the Emperor’s lapdogs?’
The curtains of darkness seemed to sigh aside. A brume of ash and filth shuddered away, exposing a lone warrior standing beneath the shadow of the ruins.
As soon as Váltyr laid eyes on him his hearts started thumping. Kill-urge surged through his bloodstream, spiking his muscles. His pupils dilated under his helm and his lips pulled back in a fang-thick sneer.
‘Contact,’ he voxed over the pack-wide channel. ‘Ighala Gate. One got past you, Skullhewer.’
He had no time for any more.
The Plague Marine lumbered closer, emerging from the darkness like a sepulchral leviathan hauling clear of the deeps.
The Traitor was huge, far taller and broader even than Olgeir. His armour might once have been Terminator plate, though the centuries had ravaged, swelled and altered it. The plates had fused together and thickened, merging into a leathery hide of scaly, semi-jointed segments. Raw flesh pushed and burst through the remaining gaps, bleached and glistening like fat. A long cavity ran across the monster’s torso exposing glossy loops of entrails within. Every surface was crusted with a bizarre mix of rust patches and angry lesions, as if the substances had fused halfway between organic and inorganic matter and become prone to the infections of both.
The creature strode through the rubble on two massive cloven hooves, and each cumbersome tread sank deep into the earth below. Two immense fists carried thick-bladed cleavers. One blade ran with a constant drip-feed of blood; the other slopped viscous trails of pus. Cloaks of black-bellied insects swirled around the blades like shrouds. Two long tusks curved out from the creature’s distended jawline, each one wet with thin layers of saliva. A single eye sat amid a domed helm, glowing green through a jagged frame of broken ceramite.
Váltyr recognised the profile. This was the monster that had been in de Chatelaine’s vid-footage.
‘We had not expected Wolves here,’ the Traitor said. Just as the witch in the ravine had done, he sounded only marginally interested. ‘Your presence, though, makes this turgid exercise just a little more consequential.’
Váltyr held his ground. He wondered how long it would be before Gunnlaugur could respond to the summons. He guessed that the Death Guard champion far outmatched him. He might outmatch all of them.
‘We were fated to be here,’ said Váltyr calmly. He let his muscles fall into their habitual loose state of readiness. He would need to be as fast as he had ever been. Holdbítr trembled momentarily in his grip, like a stallion eager for the hunt. ‘We were fated to halt this.’
‘Perhaps,’ said the creature, coming to a halt a few metres before Váltyr. He loomed above him, bloated and immense. ‘You were always fatalistic souls.’
Váltyr studied his enemy closely, trying to spy weaknesses in its twisted armour.
‘Know this,’ he said proudly, seeing none. ‘I am called sverdhjera of Járnhamar. A thousand souls have been extinguished by my blade. When you greet your gods in the cold tombs of Hel, tell them Váltyr of Fenris was the one that ended you.’
The monster bowed.
‘An honour, Váltyr of Fenris,’ he said, with no obvious irony. ‘To return the courtesy, I am named Thorslax the Blighted, exalted of the plague-host of the Traveller. I have walked both mortal and immortal planes since the days when your ruddy-cheeked primarch drank oaths to the Throne of Terra and pretended to be more savage than he was. I too have killed more men than I could ever count.’ The creature chuckled mordantly. ‘It grows tedious, after a time. Everything grows tedious. That is the curse of this war. I long for it to be over.’
He raised his twin cleavers and they shed their gruesome coating like runnels in a storm.
‘And it will be over, Space Wolf,’ he said. ‘Do you not guess what is happening here? This is the beginning, the first stirrings of the plague that will consume the galaxy. You cannot stop it now. It starts here, and on a hundred other worlds, but it will all end in Cadia. All that remains for you is the slow death that follows the sickness. You have all been sick for too long. Let us end the agony.’
Váltyr allowed the abomination to speak. He had heard such screeds before and paid the detail little heed.
‘Finished?’ he asked, assuming the stance, bringing holdbítr into guard. ‘Then make the first move.’ He smiled coldly, feeling the first pulses of joy in his lethal craft. ‘I always allow my prey the first move.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Ingvar tore through the night, veering between the ruins at full tilt. Since passing under the Ighala Gate and breaking into the lower city he’d only had one destination in mind. It reared above the houses as it always had done, vast and forbidding, striking up into the roiling clouds like a three-pronged claw.
The streets belonged to the enemy now. The serried tides of the damned crawled up through the burning remnants of what had once been Hjec Aleja’s main urban zone. The main body of the enemy host marched relentlessly towards the Ighala Gate, driving in huge columns through the devastation. Fringe detachments peeled off from the main assault, loping through the wavering firelight and looking for defenders still breathing under the rubble.
Ingvar skirted around all of that, hugging the shadows and keeping to the lesser paths, breaking into combat only when he had to. When it came, his fights were quick and brutal – a dozen precision strikes from the spitting edge of dausvjer leaving the burst corpses of the damned lying face-up in the gutter.
Only as he neared the cathedral did the volume of enemy troops increase again. They had swarmed across the supplicants’ courtyards and broken through the main doorway. Most of them were glass-eyed, shabby plague-bearers, still clad in the rags of their old Shakeh uniforms, but some, the ones who had landed from the plague-ships, were more heavily mutated, their outlines now only faintly human.
They didn’t see him coming, occupied as they were with trying to push inside the cathedral to join the slaughter.
Given space in which to work, Ingvar picked up speed, leaping over the smoking remains of a gun emplacement and burning through into the courtyard beyond.
‘Fenrys!’ he roared, and his hoarse voice rang out into the night.
Taken by surprise, the enemy troops scattered before him. Only the most corrupted, those whose minds had been turned into slurry by the long, numbing years under the sway of dark gods, had the will to turn and fight.
It did them no good. Ingvar ripped through them, unleashing the full flood of his fury for the first time since boarding the plague-ship. He whirled around, punching a broad furrow into the midst of the crowds, breaking ribcages, cutting through paunches and snapping scrawny necks. Dausvjer’s energy field blazed, throwing electric-blue sparks dancing across the morass of slack-skinned, pox-gnawed bodies.
He hewed a bloody path towards the gates, his progress barely slowed by the knots of fighters around him. More of them ran, scampering back into the shadows to huddle out of sight of his wrath; those that remained died quickly. As he passed under the shadow of the cathedral’s ornate frontage, Ingvar kicked the last of them aside and crashed headlong through what remained of the doors.
The scene inside the nave was one of rampant desecration. Sacred icons had been ripped down and trampled over. Graven images of primarchs and cardinals had been cast to the floor, shattering against the marble. Smears of vomit and excreta were strewn over the walls, belched up by obscene, obese mutants with tiny piggish eyes and orbicular bellies. Shakeh’s regimental standards had all been shredded and fires had been started all along the aisles, kindled on the flesh and fabric of the slain and catching on the timber of candle-racks and portrait frames.
Mutants ran amok, careening over upturned fonts and altars, shrieking, spitting and laughing in high, gurgling voices. Insects swarmed noisily over the growing pits of filth, scuttling freely across the stone, spilling from the eye-sockets of corpses and bursting from their stomachs.
Only at the high altar was there still a flicker of resistance. The banner of the Wounded Heart had been nailed to the pillar behind the dais, just under the baroque sculpture of the Emperor defeating Horus. It was riddled with bullet-holes and charred around the edges, but the black and red sigil could still be made out. Heaps of bodies, the majority of them mutated or swollen with disease, piled up high on every side, a testament to the tenacity of the defenders’ last stand.
‘For the Allfather!’ Ingvar bellowed. His voice surged up into the vaults, echoing in the dark spaces and resounding down the long aisles.
The mutants turned from their slaughter. When they saw him coming – crackling with the tight burn of his energy weapon, his lenses blazing red like fresh-cut heartsblood, his massive armour plates smeared with the liquid remains of their fallen comrades – they broke into a feral mass of shrieking. They surged towards him in a tumbling, crashing wave, ignited into sudden terror, hatred and bloodlust.
Ingvar thundered into them, his blade whipping around him in wide sweeps. His body arched and swayed as he moved, thrown into a whirl of power and poise. Dausvjer ceased to be a weapon and became a part of him, an extension of the killing potential he’d unleashed. It rose and fell, danced and flickered, tearing up rotten flesh and carving through atrophied bones. He crunched, stabbed, crushed and shattered, throwing the tattered remains of the slain away before piling into the wavering throngs that remained.
The gangs of mutants and cultists held firm while their numbers remained, but as he sliced through their ranks their green eyes began to waver. Fear shuddered through them like a wave, and the weakest began to peel away and slink back down the long nave.
‘Flee while you can!’ cried Ingvar, cutting more down with every two-handed swipe of his rune-sword. ‘Death has come among you!’
The rump of the horde broke then, finally giving up on the prize of the altar and scampering away from the unleashed kill-machine in their midst. Ingvar pursued the greatest of them, a needle-toothed monster with oyster-grey skin and flapping, barbed hands, plunging dausvjer into its neck and ripping it out in a grisly flourish. He spun round, primed for more slaying, only to see the rest racing away from him.
He switched weapons, pulling his bolter from its holster and firing one-handed. Shells sprayed across the nave, exploding and splintering against pillars and thudding wetly into the backs of the retreating horrors. Dozens fell under that ear-splitting barrage, adding to the heaps of mouldering bodies already staining the floor.
The barrage only stopped when the last of them had fallen. Ingvar released the trigger and the cathedral slowly fell silent. The results of his epic butchery stretched away from him – rank upon rank of twitching limbs, carpeting the marble in a melange of sagging, clotting meat.
By then he was close to the altar. He strode slowly towards it, scanning the corpses at his feet for any yet living. He saw the bloodied uniforms of Shakeh Guardsmen mingled among the sore-raddled limbs of the damned, locked together in death as they had been in combat. It looked like they had held their positions until their ammunition had run out, resorting at the last to their knives, their lasgun-butts, their fists.
The bodies of five Battle Sisters were slumped amongst the slain, each one lying a little further up the steps of the dais. They had fallen back as far as they could, their empty flamers and bolters discarded on the way. Each of them was surrounded by a knot of corpses. They had killed dozens upon dozens; an honourable tally, one that reflected credit to their order.
Ingvar waded grimly onwards, seeking the one he knew would be there, whose fate it had been to defend her domain to the last. When he saw her at last, half buried under the grey hands of a fly-masked mutant, he thought she was dead. Her helm was gone and her dark skin was a mess of lacerations.
Ingvar crouched down, lifting the weight of her dead assailant from her and pushing it away. It was then that she drew in a faint breath. Her eyes flickered open, bleary at first but then clarifying.
Bajola looked up at him. She smiled.
‘Your fate,’ she croaked. ‘To be here.’
Ingvar nodded, clearing more space around them, assessing the damage. Her breastplate had been punctured in three places. A jagged shard of iron protruded from a gash under her ribcage. Blood still oozed from the wound, pooling on the stone in thick dark slops. She didn’t have long.
‘As it was yours,’ he replied, but his voice was bleak.
Hafloí descended into the bowels of the Halicon, his limbs throbbing. The pain still radiating across his body was an embarrassment, a constant reminder of the dark power that had shut him down so contemptuously. Even after his return to combat he knew he was not yet himself again. The weight of the witch’s magick still plagued him, needling away at him like the memory of failure.
As he passed through the long trains of tunnels and twisting corridors, the ceiling-mounted lumens flickering as the big wall guns boomed, he was struck by the almost complete emptiness inside the citadel. The few remaining civilians too old or young to fight huddled inside bunkers dotted around the upper city. Everyone else manned the inner walls or the snaking battlements of the citadel. He’d walked past teenagers tottering under the weight of bolt-round cases, old women working in gangs to carry the bodies of the wounded to the field hospitals set up in chapels.
Once Hafloí might have felt contempt for that effort, but no longer. The mortals were making as much of a fight of it as they could. He’d seen the respect that Olgeir had for them and that had rubbed off on him a little. Perhaps he was growing up at last.
