‘The Wolf King arrived during Helwinter and survived as an infant,’ said Ullr. ‘The first to pass the Test. He walked with Morkai at his side, it is said, and when even his strength failed he rode upon her back.’

  ‘No, you have it wrong,’ said Garnr. ‘It was in the lair of Morkai that he found refuge, curling among the bloodstained hairs that fell from her back, on the threshold of Hel.’

  The Firstborn started arguing, each according to their own upbringing and belief. After some time, it was agreed that perhaps the Wolf King had ridden Morkai back to her lair and there he had slept in her bloody fur, where he was discovered by the folk of Fenris after Helwinter had passed.

  Again Gaius was reminded of Drogr’s words. He could never know what it was like to be raised with those stories, to have them encapsulate the universe for him. He could act the skjald and learn every single one, word-perfect, but he would never experience them as a truth the way Ullr and his companions did. Cawl had filled his head with lore, so that he had facts about Fenris and its people, even before the nuance of the guidebook, but he was not part of it.

  Lost in his melancholy for some time, it was a jolt when the battle siren sounded and Sáthor spoke over the vox.

  ‘We’ve got trouble. Augurs detect multiple life signals and the station point defences have just locked onto us.’

  ‘Crash assault,’ said Ullr. ‘Sáthor, circle and support if you can when we’re down, but don’t damage the station or risk the gunship.’

  ‘I’ll sweep the surrounding area.’

  ‘Crash assault?’ The lights went out as they approached and Gaius could feel the gunship rolling and pitching steeply now, trying to break the target lock of the defence systems. ‘That sounds dangerous.’

  ‘That’s because it is,’ said Forskad.

  ‘Not as dangerous as getting shot down,’ snarled Ullr. ‘Just stay on our heels.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Gaius, releasing his harness to stand up, boots mag-locked to the deck. ‘Firstwolves, prepare for assault.’

  They were allowed back in to the skjaldhalle but no further, and spent the day collating notes and devising questions they hoped to ask, to clarify certain points about the string of names and ancestry, or the titles of the involved parties. Njal returned as he had said, accompanied by serfs and food, and after they had dined once more and drunk enough fyrkaf to set Mudire’s ears buzzing, the Stormcaller launched into the meat of his tale.

  He spoke of the armies of the apostate cardinal and the fleet that brought them, of heroes that fought in the void and upon the mountain slopes, of bombardments and boarding actions. Not a warrior’s name was missed, so that soon Mudire gave Eliptyka the sole duty of recording them, and their positions and relationships, so that they might be properly investigated later.

  Njal had spoken eloquently before, but now his gift as an orator shone brighter than the flames of the fire stoked by the serfs. Perhaps it was a subtle form of his powers at work, but Mudire could picture the attacks through heart-stopping blizzards and the countless waves of the cardinal’s frenzied terror-troops. Strange machines looted from a conquered forge world left alchemical fires burning Asaheim while the sons of Fenris raced back from their distant wars to protect their home against former allies.

  There was a moment when Ullr was sure that his thread had been cut.

  The Thunder­hawk dropped like a stone, breaking from the low cloud with the Greypelts already arrayed on the lowered assault ramp. From this precarious vantage point Ullr saw the sparks of two launching missiles and watched the dark blur of the incoming projectiles, perfectly silhouetted against their own engine flare.

  ‘Pitching,’ announced Sáthor with the same tone as he might tell them the mjod had been brought. A second later, the Thunder­hawk’s nose dropped, pointing almost vertically as the pilot aimed towards the metallic gleam of the defence station a mile below. The clamp in Ullr’s left boot was not secure and he fell forward, foot slipping away as the gunship dived, twisting as he did so.

  Just a moment before the weight became too much for his remaining clamp and he plunged over the edge, Dethar was next to him, arm wrapped about his own. For two seconds he dangled in the half-embrace of his brother, both legs swinging freely as the Thunder­hawk nosedived. The first missile hissed close, passing Ullr less than a yard away over the top of the gunship.

  The second missile’s spirit tracked the change, a small jet of course-correction swinging its warhead back towards Ullr. The ground rushed at him almost as fast as the missile, one from directly ahead, the other at head height.

  ‘Rolling left.’

  This time Ullr was better prepared, using Dethar as leverage to clamp both feet midway along the ramp even as the gunship spun violently about its axis, wind screaming past, attitude jets screeching. Something – someone – crashed across the opening of the assault ramp, and he heard an impressive chain of curses in Juvjk from one of the Firstwolves.

  There was no time to wonder who it was; the other missile was seconds away from impact, twisting tightly to follow the turning gunship. Ullr unslung his bolter and took aim with one hand. He opened fire, his bolt accompanied by the flicker of half a dozen more from around him. Sparks awoke briefly across the casing of the missile but nothing penetrated.

  ‘Impact!’ snarled the pack leader, swaying sideways as best he could, warning indicators blaring and flashing as the missile streaked past and hit the underside of the assault hatch. The Thunder­hawk lurched as fire swept over the pack, heat indicators spiking across Ullr’s vision. Metal shrapnel and pieces of ceramite struck his armour, chipping away slivers of blue-grey.

  ‘Sáthor!’ he bellowed, the tops of the trees no more than two hundred yards away, snow cascading from them in the shockwave of the missile’s detonation.

  The pilot made no reply but hit the retro thrusters while he pulled the nose up sharply. Even with his armour Ullr felt like a forge hammer had hit him in the chest, almost throwing him from the ramp again. Part of the hull was on fire and flame licked over Ullr in the sudden backwash of the gunship’s hard brake.

  The defence station was a jutting structure of ferrocrete and plasteel set into the side of a steep mound nearly eight hundred yards from the top, clear of the surrounding forest by a belt of rockcrete about two hundred yards wide. The great pines were scores of feet tall, too high even for a Space Marine to leap clear without risk. Sáthor guided the Thunder­hawk between the wind-bent tops and turned to the right, bringing the craft almost sideways down into the barren area.

  There were figures on the array gantry – metal steps and walkways about a dish-like communications link pointing north – and more emerged from a door in the flat roof of the complex built into the ground. Blue las-bolts zipped towards the Wolves of Fenris as the Thunder­hawk roared to a hover just ten feet up.

  Though the men and women at the station were clad in furs and hides like natives, Ullr could see blue and purple beneath, and no Fenrisian tribe had las weaponry.

  ‘Prosperines!’ growled Garnr behind him.

  ‘How can they be here?’ said Forskad, but Ullr did not care. Memories of Fenris ablaze with war and the servants of the Cyclops laying waste burned through his thoughts.

  ‘Redden the snow!’ The pack leader leapt from the gunship, sinking to his thighs in the snow as he landed, bolter aimed at the figures around the station. ‘Send them back through the gates of Hel!’

  Chapter Fifteen

  TARGET ACQUIRED

  DEADLOCK

  IMMINENT LAUNCH

  Surveyor Accordant-Minor Maqoma suppressed a yawn and looked around the quiet strategium. At standard alert half the stations were still monitored, but three days since moving into low orbit for a shuttle run the routine was very ordinary. Lieutenant Carmaichaz was on watch, youngest of the officers, and was standing beside the command throne inspecting his fingernails. The servitors continued their usual subdued burbles and murmurs, regurgitating reports that nobody but the stenograph-servitors would read.

  She eased her weight from foot to foot. Still two hours until the end of the watch. She glanced sideways, enviously looking at Ensign Sebrez’s empty stool just a few yards away. A privilege of rank denied a petty officer like Maqoma.

  The surveyor screen was a blank slate of grey, crossed by three almost-straight red lines. She checked the chronometer. Four more minutes until she had to conduct the next active pulse check. Maqoma looked around again as she slipped a hand into the pocket of her jacket and surreptitiously pulled out a small, round piece of sweetloaf. Crumbs fell on the plasteel of her station and she briskly swept them away with her other hand, keeping the contraband biscuit close to her body.

  She could feel the crumb texture between her fingers and gave herself the thrill of anticipation for a few seconds more – she had been delaying gratification since coming on watch four hours earlier. Imagining the honey-sweet taste was too much and her hand crept up her body, staying close like a gunship hugging hills and ridges on a surprise attack run. The illicit nature of the treat was even sweeter than the biscuit itself, and Maqoma had to take a slow, quiet breath just before her hand made the final leap from chest to mouth.

  An alarm sounded just as she bit off a nibble of grainy sweetloaf, causing Maqoma to flinch and spit soggy pieces of biscuit on her screen.

  The middle line had turned into a bifurcated squiggle, almost symmetrical as it split nearly halfway across the screen and reconnected at the right-hand edge. A flashing amber light drew further attention to her station and she rammed her hand into her trouser pocket, feeling the biscuit crumbling to pieces within.

  ‘Report, surveyor four.’ Lieutenant Carmaichaz had a deep voice despite his youth and slight body, and it carried across the strategium without visible effort.

  Maqoma drew her hand out of her pocket, rubbing greasy crumbs from her fingertips, and then keyed in a code using the runepad next to her slate. The middle line wavered and disappeared, but next to her a servitor scribbled the readings on a ribbon of paper issuing from a slot in the console.

  Referring to the paper, she made some adjustments to her display, while half a mile away on the underside of the ship a scanning array turned seven degrees outwards. The line ­reappeared briefly, more dramatic in its spike, then disappeared.

  ‘Calibrating, sir,’ she told the officer of the watch, cursing the deposits on her fingertips that left fatty spots on the keypad.

  Another surveyor pulse brought the signal back onto the screen for a second, slightly flatter again. Even so, there was no mistaking the artificial nature of the signal intercept.

  Maqoma turned to the lieutenant, heart racing and not from the illicit snack lingering in her pocket.

  ‘Sir, I am detecting an attempted weapons lock-on,’ she announced. Carmaichaz stiffened as he moved towards the command throne. ‘The source is on Fenris!’

  Njal spoke as in a trance, recalling not the words like a skjald, but reliving the shared memories passed to him by previous loremasters. He did not remember the tale as much as relate it, feeling the bite of the wind on his face, hearing the snap of lasguns as soldiers of the Astra Militarum, corrupted by Bucharis’ words, spilled from immense landers onto the snow and ice of Asaheim while starships burned in orbit. He heard the roar of the guns as the defences of the Aett opened fire and felt the heat of missile detonation and shell explosion.

  All of this he shared from tongue and mind, though the ironclad thought of the Custodian was like an annoying barb in the corner of his awareness. He led the historitors down the valley of the Grey King, as Blood Claws with jump packs sprung down from the rocky cliffs onto the roofs of heretic tanks driving in column. The belch of smoke from their engines polluted the crisp Fenrisian air, but soon it was the smog of their burning wrecks that choked the sky. Dreadnoughts waded through deep snowdrifts, their mechanical bodies guarded by native oils and special insulation against the extreme weather, while the far larger gun walkers of Bucharis foundered and froze, easy prey for the ancient veterans of the Great Wolf.

  Njal felt the prayers of hate as though he had been there, his mind battered by irrational faith, just as Runethegn Mathin Firefist had felt it. To the Rune Priest his predecessor was at his shoulder, a ghostly figure whispering in his ear, his words taking form on Njal’s breath. Mathin told the tale of how a village shrine to the Allfather was toppled and a golden statue of Bucharis as a living saint was raised in its place. This affront stirred the wrath of not only the people of Fenris but its spirit, and quakes shook the hillsides where usually there were no such tremors. Raised to the wayward moods of their world, the Fenrisians fell upon the idol worshippers amid the ground movements and butchered them with axe, arrow and spear while Firefist and another rune-brother rained down lightning from dark clouds above.

  A small settlement of hide tents and leaf-roofed bivouacs had been erected under the trees that split the defence station from the missile silo half a mile away at the top of the peak. It was empty but smoke drifted lazily from old fires, indicating it had not long ago been occupied.

  ‘Here!’ Doro called their attention to tracks through the snow, made by frequent passage winding back and forth up the mountainside. There were footsteps in the fresh fall.

  ‘If we had one of the Firstborn with us, I bet he’d know how long ago these were made,’ said Neiflur.

  ‘We don’t, and it doesn’t matter,’ replied Gaius. ‘They head up the hill, it makes no difference if it was two hours ago or thirty minutes. We kill any enemy and seize control of the launch silo, just as agreed.’

  They set off directly towards the summit, long legs and powered armour easily coping with the steep slope that had forced the humans to zigzag their path. They had covered two hundred yards from the camp when the vox chimed a warning of an incoming transmission on the command channel.

  ‘This is Lord Krom,’ the Company Master snarled across the link. ‘By the ghost of Russ, what’s happening out there?’

  ‘Prosperine survivors, my lord,’ replied Ullr. ‘They’ve been here for some time, and now they’ve managed to break the security ciphers and get in.’

  ‘They’ve activated orbital targeting,’ Krom told them. ‘And it happens that the vessel they are attempting to lock onto is the Imperial envoy ship.’

  ‘Our battle-brothers are aboard the Enduring Hate.’ Gaius pictured dozens of his fellow Sons of Russ, shut away for the last months, now about to be blown into the void by servants of the Dark Powers before they even set foot on Fenris. ‘We have to prevent the launch.’

  ‘Next you’ll tell me how to track a mammophant,’ snapped Krom. ‘Your previous commander is threatening to fire bombardment cannons at the site if it locks on. Can’t say I blame him. And the Great Wolf says if the Enduring Hate opens fire on our world, we will retaliate.’

  ‘How long until the ship moves out of range?’ asked Ullr.

  ‘I can see the silo ahead of us,’ Gaius said, spying two vast ferrocrete walls beyond the trees. ‘We’ll be there in seconds.’

  ‘The Enduring Hate was under orders to power down after reaching low orbit for a shuttle launch,’ said Krom. ‘It’ll be some time before they can get the engines fired and start pushing out of the gravity well. You have to stop the launch.’

  ‘What about evacuation?’ said Gaius.

  ‘The Great Wolf isn’t going to let hundreds of Guilliman’s followers drop all over the Hearthworld,’ said Krom.

  ‘It’s just some cultists,’ said Gaius. ‘We found a camp. Maybe thirty people, no more.’

  ‘We found a camp too, another forty or fifty,’ said Ullr. ‘And we’ve fought Prosperines before. They’ll not be so zealous without their sorcerous masters, but watch out for maleficarum and special weaponry.’

  ‘I’m going to see if I can get the Great Wolf to calm down. Keep the channel open.’ Krom’s link became a buzz before it fell silent.

  ‘We’ve secured the outside and have got them pinned down, but we’ll need to get to the control room to shut off the launch unless you secure the missiles,’ said Ullr.

  ‘No sign of the enemy here, they must all be skulking in…’

  Gaius was interrupted by a drawn-out rumble that shook snow from the branches and caused a minor avalanche to flow past the ascending Space Marines. Ahead, the pale sky darkened as four massive slabs of ferrocrete angled upwards from the mountain summit.

  ‘Ullr, we have a problem.’

  Although she had duties to occupy her, Maqoma was close enough to the upper part of the strategium to hear the exchange between Lieutenant Castallor and the Chapter Master of the Space Wolves. Even if she could not, the anger on the face of the normally passive Space Marine was warning enough that all was not well.

  ‘I have no option but to defend my ship and crew,’ Castallor said, not for the first time since he had arrived a few minutes earlier. ‘It does not matter whether the source of the threat is deliberate action, a faulty targeting system or, as you claim, insurgents dedicated to the service of the Traitor Astartes.’

  ‘This is senseless,’ the Great Wolf replied, his voice a bass rumble through the vox-speakers. ‘You have to know that I’m equally bound to respond to any attack on the world under my protection. I am Imperial commander here, and I will respond with force if you open fire.’

  ‘We are attempting to power up reactors for void shields and manoeuvring, but we are vulnerable, due to your insistence that we cut power to minimal output. I know I cannot hope to defeat the might of the Fenrisian fleet, but I will survive long enough to inform the Lord Commander of your betrayal.’

  ‘I’ve had weeks to blow you out of the stars, why would I wait until now?’

 

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