The wolftime, p.8
The Wolftime, page 8
Having established a foothold in the fortress’ surrounds, the Great Wolf brought forth the strongest of his battle-brothers. Their tread pulverising ferrocrete spoil, resounding from exposed plasteel deck-beams, a trio of Dreadnoughts took the point of the attack. The fortress space rang with their war shouts, edged with the metal voice of their voxmitters.
‘Let the battle-reckoning be counted by the score!’ Skvald Warbringer led the charge, the thick plates of his war machine shrugging off hits with splinters of ceramite. As he passed close by, Njal caught the thoughts of the old warrior within the sigil-sealed machine: flashes of tossing waves and a sprawling battle across a wooden deck. Whatever foe the old Dreadnought believed he faced, it was not green-skinned xenos. ‘Ruddy your blades and work up a thirst fit to drink dry the king’s hall!’
The crashing guns of Svard Bloodfang and Ancient Kryll tore along the much-battered rampart, forcing the orks back while Skvald approached the gate. The veteran war engine lifted its helfrost cannon. Chilled mist churned around the weapon. A single blast like the icy howl of Morkai struck the metal gates, covering them in rime and cracking the rusted metal. Roaring a battle cry Skvald launched himself at the frosted barrier, his claws carving apart the fractured structure with a single blow.
Cheering praises to the venerable warriors and the glories of the Wolf King, Grimnar and his troops pushed towards the gate, the Great Wolf close on the heels of the Dreadnoughts, the Stormcaller not far behind.
The ork fortress had a greater defence than battlements and guns. Njal could feel that same wyrd energy that had brought him here coursing through the minds of the ork horde that thronged the vast space. The power to change the future by belief alone.
The storm of blood will break the stars.
Everything was closer, heavier, since the Everdusk had fractured the void. It had been coming for some time, building for many days, and Njal – like so many other psykers – had been helpless to stop it. Fenris sailed the cosmos with the Gannstrom, what the Imperials called the Eye of Terror, staring down upon its people from the heavens. Always a bad star had been a tiding for ill, foretelling of invasion or calamity. When the forces of the Underverse spewed forth, the Gannstrom waxed bright and fearsome, surrounded by a halo of bad stars. In the time before the breaking of the void the sky had been alight day and night with such portent.
Charging towards the gate behind Logan and Ulrik, flanked by other great fighters, Njal should have felt confident of victory. He felt apprehension. It was not a pleasant feeling, snagging against his pyscho-conditioning like a thorn beneath a fingernail, stinging and impossible to remove.
Njal’s staff flared with power, the runes hammered into its length flickering with blue fire, those set within his Terminator plate likewise agleam. While around him the Wolves of Fenris fought with bolter and plasma, blade and chainsword, he waged a different battle. To him the scene was bathed in ruddy hues, where spears of gold and a fog of green thrashed and pulsed from the minds of the combatants. On the edge of his othersense was the deep thrum of the Everdusk: a gut-churning bass presence of death and misery fuelled by the torment of countless billions sacrificed to its creation. The raucous storm of pure orkish violence swayed and billowed around the aliens, swelling where the fighting was fiercest, empowered by the exuberance of conflict. Here and there it channelled into vortices of wild energy, sparking and spinning, drawn to the crude minds of ork wyrd-chanters.
‘All is not as it seems,’ Njal warned.
Logan, always mindful of his war council’s advice, slowed his pace, those close by following suit.
‘You scry something, Runelord?’ asked the Great Wolf.
‘Can you not feel it? The air is awash with orkish power, hammering at my thoughts, choking my mind with its brute alien presence.’
‘It will lose its potency when we have thinned the horde,’ said Aldacrel, Iron Priest to the company. He raised an axe that was half long-bearded blade and half a cog sigil of the Adeptus Mechanicus. ‘That’s how it works, yes?’
Ahead of them, two squads of Wolf Guard Terminators had reached the wall and were tearing at it with power fists and lightning claws while their brothers provided covering fire. From the left another squad arrived, one of the flanking forces. Arjac Rockfist led them, his armour showing much damage, pauldrons and breastplate coated with his blood and alien filth.
‘What of the threat?’ Logan demanded of Njal. They were twenty yards from the broken gate, the Dreadnoughts a vanguard just beyond, their weapons in constant ire against unseen foes. ‘Speak plainly.’
‘No specific threat,’ Njal admitted, unable to share anything but vague foreboding. ‘Just wyrdsign.’
‘There are plenty enough foes to fight without imagining new ones,’ grunted Ulrik.
The moment passed as Arjac and his warriors met with Logan’s a dozen yards from the fortress.
‘You’re alive,’ said Arjac, raising his hammer haft to his chest in salute as he fell into step beside his lord.
‘Of course,’ grunted Grimnar. ‘We’ve only just got started on the real fight. You look like you’ve had your fair share already, though.’
‘Like a battering ram, he was,’ said Torfin Daggerfist from behind. ‘Couldn’t hold him back.’
‘I see,’ said Logan. ‘Well, no need for battering rams here, we’ve broken the gate already.’
Njal increased his stride to join Arjac. ‘Stay close, Champion, I have ill feeling about this place,’ he told the hearthegn, but knew his words were unnecessary. Arjac’s thoughts burned like a ward around the Great Wolf, greater than the glow of his shield.
‘Time to loosen your arms,’ said Grimnar as they came upon the gateway.
The ork town within was a shamble of basic buildings much like any other Arjac had seen: one and two storeys high, linked with crude cable bridges, rope ladders and metal walkways, graffiti and banners proclaiming ownership and dominance everywhere. The footing was treacherous, pounded rubble broken up by the remnants of the original walls and bulkheads. Orks fired and hollered from the rooftops, laying down fusillades into the breaches made by the Wolf Guard. Those that had been at the gate were all dead, slain by the Dreadnoughts, their bodies dangling over the improvised ramparts above or heaped in the streets at the feet of the war machines.
Sensorium readings were patchy, broken up by flares of static.
‘Unshielded reactors,’ warned Aldacrel. ‘Shut down your sensorium links to reduce feedback.’
Arjac cut off the invisible connection with his squad-brothers. It was startling at first to look upon a view that was just his own, without the tracery of data from his companions and the ghost images of the secondary feeds. The sensation of clarity was quickly replaced by wariness. Without the scanning function of the Terminator suits they had to fall back on their own senses – eyes, ears and nose.
The latter was hard-pressed to determine anything out of the stink of the orks. The stench was on everything as the Fenrisian warriors entered the town, undisturbed by any filtration or artificial circulation. Having grown used to hunting with the aid of his enhanced olfactory sense, it felt to Arjac as bad as being blinded in one eye. Worse still, after the blow to his helm, he almost was: blood crusted the brow and no amount of blinking or grimacing could remove the scab that impeded his peripheral vision to the right.
Without any comment, he eased himself across behind the Great Wolf so that his lord was on his left-hand side where he could fully see him. The rest of the squad fanned out ahead, watching for ambush.
Barely a hundred yards further on, the buildings gave way to a vast space, bringing the attackers to an abrupt halt at its perimeter. Here the orks had not built, but mined. Deck after deck, far past the extent of the bulk hauler and into its compacted neighbour, at least half a mile almost straight down. The delving formed a vertiginous semicircle criss-crossed with pulleys and ladders, wires and pipes. As with the decks open to the fortress hall, so the lower levels were plain to see, as though some mighty hand had torn out a chunk of both ships.
The floor resumed some two hundred yards away on the far side of the broken chasm. Here a construction that was part keep and part immense statue rose almost to the distant ceiling, its foundations lost in darkness below. The effigy was of a squatting orkish figure, made of chunks of rockcrete and dung, so that it had a grey-green hue. Upon this were fashioned plates of armour from corroded metal and bent plasteel, garbing the bestial warrior in breastplate, shoulder guards and vambraces. Slit-like windows pierced much of the construction, lit from chambers within, and from these orks started to shoot, though with poor fields of fire and even worse aim. Arjac’s gaze continued higher and higher to the summit, where a broad-jawed head sat. The eyes and open mouth were alight with a green glow.
‘They’ve built around the reactor!’ said Aldacrel, looking at his auspex-piece. ‘They took the shielding off…’
Hundreds of smaller thrall-greenskins swarmed over the edifice, many still building and patching, though others were now staring at the Space Marine intruders or scrambling to safety. In the decks below, thousands more laboured, carrying baskets and crates filled to spilling with broken rubble, broken stanchions and shards of plasteel. Lines and pulleys swayed across the gorge to carry their loads to the base of the idol. Among them were much larger figures, orks that were pushing their way upwards to join the fight, snarling and shouting.
Thousands of orks. Tens of thousands.
The emerald giant shall seize the wolf’s jaws and silence its ire.
Stormcaller could not wrench his gaze from the immense orkish effigy. It looked nothing like the green giant of his visions, and yet in the flickering of muzzle flare and the fire of the ork town, alight from promethium, there was something primal and alive about it.
Around him a firefight erupted, the Dreadnoughts and Terminators blasting down into the depths of the delved city, targeted in return by the orks. He barely registered the renewal of the fighting, his thoughts drawn to the beastly god set upon its dais of broken starship. Advancing around the gap, Logan and his varangard seemed small against its bulk.
The wolf before the green giant.
The ork counter-attack was gaining numbers and momentum. The psychic field generated by the aliens thickened and hardened. In the swirl of power, shadows cast the impression of brutish faces and clawing hands, accumulating and combining into one monstrous being. The Stormcaller felt the growling of the wolf that lived in his soul, its fierce nature pushing to be released. Across the stars, light years from Fenris, he still felt the fires of the deephearth burning brightly, filling him with its energy. Wyrdfir streamed from his runes, swathing him with a blue-and-purple flame, while in the plane beyond mortal sight he sent bolts of power snaking through the growing apparitions, shattering them with his mind.
Lord of Runes!+ The thoughts of Walks-the-Sky, named Engillr at birth, speared into the Stormcaller’s thoughts, full of urgency. +Look upon the idol’s face.+
Casting his gaze towards the height of the monstrous effigy, the runethegn could not at first find that which Walks-the-Sky wished him to see. Torrents of ork wyrd power streamed up the idol like waterfalls reversed, coalescing into a tumult of crashing power.
A figure, within the jaws.+
The mouth of the false god was wide open, the lower jaw projecting from a large archway like a balcony. Now prompted, Stormcaller saw a strange figure capering upon what would have been the deity’s tongue. Like other ork shamans it was clad in bands of copper and stone, and ork psychic energy fizzed from its eyes as visible sparks. It was around this alien psyker that the orkish manifestation was gathering, channelled into its growing form by the shaman’s will. Usually such accumulations of orkish power were released in barely controlled explosive bursts, but somehow this xenos was able to shape the wyrd with far greater focus.
When Njal’s gaze took in the other orks around the platform, this control was not the only thing that marked the psyker as different.
‘Great Wolf,’ he said, pointing with his staff. ‘Their wyrdkast is larger than its companions by some margin. I have never seen a shaman as large as a warlord. Something strange stirs the wyrd of this place.’
‘Good, I was starting to think this battle might be too easy,’ snapped the High King of Fenris. He lifted the storm bolter built into the vambrace of his armour and fired across the chasm. Njal saw the fusillade cut down a pair of orks clambering up the opposite side, their bloodied remains spinning into the depths, accompanied by fragments of ladder.
‘The wyrd is yours to rule, Runelord,’ said Ulrik, standing beside Logan. ‘We cannot aid you.’
Njal gritted his teeth at their misapprehension while he struggled to contain the surging wyrd force that circled around the base of the effigy. He could feel the spirits of the runejarls trying their best to drag the power away from the ork shamans but the bestial wyrd-lord at the statue’s summit was irresistible.
‘The Everdusk, it is giving them more power than can be undone,’ the Runelord explained. He gripped his staff in both hands, its haft and head blazing with immaterial fire that streamed up towards the distant ork leader. Following its spiralling path his eye came upon another staff, held in the clawed grip of the shaman-lord. It was topped by a crudely carved skull of dark stone, surrounded by a nimbus of jade energy. ‘The more the orks fight, the stronger it will get. We must withdraw, Great Wolf.’
‘Withdraw?’ said Ulrik, turning his skull-clad helm towards the Stormcaller. ‘The fight is as fresh as a newborn. We will swiftly thin their numbers.’
‘Logan!’ Using the Great Wolf’s given name drew his attention sharply. The strain of maintaining any kind of balance in the wyrd was agony but Njal managed to spit out the words. ‘We cannot win this battle.’
‘Listen to your runejarl, Great Wolf,’ said Arjac. ‘There might be a victory yet, but not this way.’
To the left and right the warriors of the Chapter held their ground, pounding fire down into the ork horde. Though the xenos dead carpeted the broken decks and walkways it was nothing compared to the greater mass surging upwards. Grimnar moved his eyes from Njal to the depths and then up to the head of the effigy. The Stormcaller followed his gaze to see the shaman-lord at the extent of the balcony, standing between two massive stalagmite-like fangs built from faceted steel.
The alien’s eyes were deep pits of green fire, like holes into a burning realm. The ork pointed a claw downward, staff raised in the other hand. Emerald power swirled in Njal’s othersight, forming a monstrous fist that swung down towards the Wolf Guard to his right.
A swirling rune sprang up to meet it, becoming the boss of an immense, insubstantial shield centred on Engillr Walks-the-Sky. The fist struck the wyrd barrier with explosive force, hurling the Rune Priest like a missile through his Wolf Guard protectors. Though dissipated, the godly hand continued its blow, crushing the armour of a Terminator as though it were a tin tankard. Engillr’s spirit barely flickered through the Stormcaller’s wyrdsense and the other Rune Priest, Hrolf War-Tongue, was almost lost in the gale of psychic energy. The wolf howl of Fenris was drowned in Njal’s ears, swallowed by the alien bellow of the orks. The flash of power was almost blinding and Stormcaller was forced to pull back from the wyrd before an inferno was set in his thoughts.
The looming shadow of orkish destruction grew again each moment, flowing over the dung-clad effigy like a skin of half-seen green fire. Even without his wyrdsight Njal could see the power gathering, as could those around him.
‘Fall back by squads, cover your flanks,’ bellowed the Great Wolf, needing no further persuasion. ‘Runelord, can you take back our wyrd?’
Despite the thought of opening himself up again to the raging torrent of raw orkishness, Njal’s reply was immediate and emphatic. Sparks of gold crackled along his red hair and beard, earthing through his staff.
‘They’ll hear our howl on the Hearthworld, even if it is our last.’
Chapter Five
RUNELORD
STRATEGIC REASSESSMENT
OATHS SWORN
For a few seconds more the warriors of Fenris poured fire down into the chasm as a single concerted volley, clearing the uppermost walkways, bridges and ladders. Orks and lesser creatures on the temple statue continued to shoot with desultory effect. The break in the counter-attack gave Grimnar opportunity to signal for the withdrawal to begin, starting with his own council, who were closest to the orkish effigy.
Njal withdrew with them for a few yards and then stopped, planting his runestaff before him. Though the gouged ravine was broad, it was not so vast that it did not create a bottleneck for the orks’ swelling attack. However, the psychic gestalt generated by their thirst for battle suffered no such physical constraint, bubbling ahead of the surging horde.
Through the tide of alien power Njal felt the approaching presence of Hrolf War-Tongue. The Stormcaller did not need to turn his eye from the idol to know that his fellow Rune Priest had arrived at his side.
‘You are the Stormcaller but I fear there is no tempest to match this foul beast,’ said Hrolf.
Njal glanced to where the unmoving form of Walks-the-Sky was being carried from the battlefield. He was not alone: more than a dozen other sons of Fenris limped back or were borne by their brothers. Those that could still fire their weapons did so, proud to fight on for their king.
