Leman Russ: The Great Wolf Read online

  THE HORUS HERESY®

  The Primarchs

  LEMAN RUSS: THE GREAT WOLF

  Chris Wraight

  ROBOUTE GUILLIMAN: LORD OF ULTRAMAR

  David Annandale

  More Space Wolves from Black Library

  WOLF KING

  Chris Wraight

  PROSPERO BURNS

  Dan Abnett

  RAPTOR

  Gav Thorpe (audio drama)

  ECHOES OF RUIN

  Various authors (audio drama)

  WOLF'S CLAW

  Chris Wraight (audio drama)

  More Dark Angels from Black Library

  THE LION

  Gav Thorpe

  ANGELS OF CALIBAN

  Gav Thorpe

  DECENT OF ANGELS

  Mitchel Scanlon

  MASTER OF THE FIRST

  Gav Thorpe (audio drama)

  Contents

  Cover

  Backlist

  Title Page

  The Horus Heresy

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  About the Author

  A Black Library Publication

  eBook license

  The Horus Heresy ®

  It is a time of legend.

  Mighty heroes battle for the right to rule the galaxy. The vast armies of the Emperor of Mankind conquer the stars in a Great Crusade – the myriad alien races are to be smashed by his elite warriors and wiped from the face of history.

  The dawn of a new age of supremacy for humanity beckons. Gleaming citadels of marble and gold celebrate the many victories of the Emperor, as system after system is brought back under his control. Triumphs are raised on a million worlds to record the epic deeds of his most powerful champions.

  First and foremost amongst these are the primarchs, superhuman beings who have led the Space Marine Legions in campaign after campaign. They are unstoppable and magnificent, the pinnacle of the Emperor’s genetic experimentation, while the Space Marines themselves are the mightiest human warriors the galaxy has ever known, each capable of besting a hundred normal men or more in combat.

  Many are the tales told of these legendary beings. From the halls of the Imperial Palace on Terra to the outermost reaches of Ultima Segmentum, their deeds are known to be shaping the very future of the galaxy. But can such souls remain free of doubt and corruption forever? Or will the temptation of greater power prove too much for even the most loyal sons of the Emperor?

  The seeds of heresy have already been sown, and the start of the greatest war in the history of mankind is but a few years away...

  I

  The night was clear of cloud, lit only by a scatter of blue-white stars above the towering flanks of Krakgard. Fenris could be starkly beautiful when the mood took it, perhaps as beautiful as any world in the Imperium.

  But Ove-Thost did not know of any other worlds. All he had known from birth was the bone-cracking cold, the sudden fire of the world's erupting heart, the surge and crash of ice-studded oceans, and until three days ago he had forgotten even that.

  Three days ago he had been a beast, his jawline frothy with saliva. He had loped on all fours, slouching amid the grey drifts, howling his agony out into the empty skies. He had fought other beasts in that time - huge, fur-clad monsters of cave and gorge. They had ripped at his back with their claws, and he had tom at their throats with his teeth.

  Ove-Thost had only blurred memories of those fights now, but retained the wounds to show for them. Bloodstains lay, speckled and frozen, across his naked muscle-mass. When he looked at those muscles now with his returning human senses, he saw hair, thick-rooted, red-crowned, thrusting out across the backs of his arms, his chest his legs. He ran his hands, now long-nailed, over the russet mane of his neck and felt the coarse strands fight back against his fingers' tug.

  Now he ran again like a man should run - two-legged, though hunched and panting. He waded in the snow, sinking knee deep, kicking it up in flurries. His breath came in wet gasps, dragged up from lungs swollen with blood, and it felt to him like burning oil.

  Ove-Thost half stood. Krakgard's eastern shoulder loomed up into the night glowing pale blue under Valdrmani's light. The mountain edge was spiky with the black outlines of pine woods, each one thick, clinging and home to a thousand more ways to die. He peered ahead into the murk, using eyes that now saw more sharply than he could had dreamed of before taking the draught from the chalice. He sniffed, dragging air up into his nasal cavity, and identified the many separate strands of danger clustering on a raging wind.

  Beyond the tree line and the pass' crown was the greatest peak of all, the Mountain, the place where he had been taken, tested and changed. All he clearly remembered of that place was the Gate, licked by fire, and then the dreams, the ones that had made him scream into the dark, all the while watched by faces, hidden faces, swathed in leather masks, their golden eyes pinning him.

  He had to get back there now, out of the eternal cold, back to the fires that burned under the earth. Even in the midst of his bestial madness he had known that.

  Get back.

  He moved again, ignoring the jabs of pain in his calves, keeping low to the crusted snow. The pass was up above him, a soaring mass of cliffs and defiles, latticed with false trails and crevasses. The fatigue was crushing now, but he kept going, forcing cramp-tight sinews to function.

  It took hours to reach the first ridge, after which he picked up speed, pushing the drifts apart with chapped hands. Valdrmani had almost set by the time he reached the apex of the pass and clapped weary eyes on the Mountain itself.

  Amid the night-shadows it seemed vaster than before - an engorged outcropping of the planet's core, thrusting up, higher and higher, cloaked in ever-steepening terraces of dirty snow. The summit glowed, set against the star-flung sky with distant points of red, and the earth beneath shuddered faintly from the deep-bored action of its immense under-engines.

  The causeways were below him, driving up from the base of the valleys ahead, straight and wide. At the end of them were the Gates, crowned with stone and barred with weather-blackened iron.

  But first he had to get to them. He broke into a run again, sliding and skidding amid the rime and slush. His breath came faster, his heartbeat heavy.

  He smelt the pungent note of predator a microsecond too late, hidden by the gale at his face. He veered suddenly, dropping to his knees, but not fast enough, and a living wall of fur and sinew hit him from the side.

  Ove-Thost crashed through the snow, tumbling. Claws raked across his back, digging in deep, and he roared with pain. He pushed back, trying to hurl the creature from him, but it was on top now, heavier than him, shaggy with a grey-flecked pelt as stiff as iron.

  It went for him, opening jaws as wide as his chest Ove-Thost caught a glimpse of three rows of teeth, then a blast of foul breath and a splatter of yellow saliva. He jerked his head to one side, heaving with his arms to push the creature off balance.

  It was just enough, and the jaws snapped closed over his shoulder, not his neck. Blood fountained, gushing over both of them, drenching Ove-Thost's cheeks and mouth.

  The copper stink wakened the animal rage within him again, the one that had kept him alive in the deep waste, and he roared with fury. He shoved harder; pushing the creature away and into a roll. He pushed with his cramped legs, straightening them and hauling himself over on top of the hunter.

  His hands were still locked in the clawed grasp of the beast's, his body sunk into its furs, so all he had were his teeth, longer and sharper since taking the draught.

  He bit down, ripping through flesh and hair, shaking his head from side to side; bathi
ng in the hot black rivers of blood. The thing beneath him howled, arched its back and tried to pull clear, but Ove-Thost was no longer the hunted.

  The kill was made. He pulled himself up from the carcass, threw his bloody head back and howled into the night. He threw out his triumph, arms back, chest shaking from exertion, his naked flesh streaked with long lines of steaming liquid.

  for a moment, he almost lost himself. Visions flashed across his fevered mind - he saw himself loping back into the woods, hunting more of the creatures that lurked there. He could join the chase forever, running under moonlight-barred snow, letting the amber-eyed presence now locked in his breast go free.

  Then his kill-howl guttered out, and he toppled, dizzy from blood loss. On his knees now, he felt the animal retreat and the man return. His shoulder was a raw mass of chewed tissue - a wound he would have died from before his body had been changed, and which even now threatened to end him.

  He reached out, back into the hot maw of the dead beast, and wrenched out two of its fangs, each as long as his hand, slender and wickedly curved. Grunting, he pushed them both through the lips of his wound, pinning the edges closer.

  Then he stood and staggered away, leaving pooling footprints behind. His vision was edged with blurs now, shaking even as he moved. He shuddered from the cold, enduring the come-down from his animal frenzy, impelled only by the mantra he had repeated over and over in the bleak hours.

  Get back.

  As more hours passed, he lost the ability to guide himself. His feet dragged, his head hung low. At some point the thick carpet of snow began to feel firmer underfoot, as if stone lay beneath it, but he did not stop to check.

  He fell to his knees again, shivering, and crawled. It felt like he was going up, climbing steeply, pulling himself into the heavens themselves, where the stars wheeled and the Allfather welcomed the best fighters to His halls.

  He only stopped when the night melted away before him, broken by a thin line of pearl-grey in the east, and the blue shadows shrank back. The wind fell, and the hard light of Fenris' sun bled like water into an empty sky.

  He looked up and saw the Mountain before him, rising into the frigid air, immense beyond reckoning. The Gate stood just a few hundred metres distant, itself vast, many-storeyed, flanked by columns of hewn rock and surmounted by a mighty stone wolfs-head that snarled out across the causeway's approaches. Tiny-looking figures clustered at its base, each clad in battle-armour and wearing metal masks.

  Ove-Thost crawled towards them, his left leg now numb and dragging, his shoulder leaking blood. They made no move to come to his aid, but watched as the distance closed. As they neared, Ove-Thost saw their pitiless faces gaze at him, their metal hands resting on the hilts of great swords and axes. Some were dad in blue-grey, others the dull sheen of bare iron, some in blackest pitch.

  Each exertion was more painful than the last. The blurring of his vision grew more severe, and soon all he saw was a fog of grey. When he reached the threshold, his fingers closed over it, weakly gripping at wind-scoured stone. Only then did the giants move, reaching down to drag him to his feet, to pour hot liquid down his throat, to rip the fangs from his wound, preparing to throw them back into the wilderness.

  'No,' blurted Ove-Thost, reaching out for the teeth of the beast he had slain.

  He heard laughter, coarse, deeper than a man's. One of the figures, black-armoured, his eyes glowing a dull red like heart's-blood, took the two fangs back and pressed them into Ove-Thost's calloused palms.

  'Fair enough,' he said. 'You earned them.

  That was the beginning.

  Years passed, and his body underwent further changes. The draught he had taken out on the eternal ice, the Canis Helix, proved to be the first of many trials. Each one that came afterwards brought fresh agony as his limbs flexed and his blood thickened, but it also made him stronger, faster, deadlier. He learned to fight in new ways, and with new weapons. Before, he might have been proud to boast of killing a man; now, he was being taught to kill hundreds, thousands, whole worlds.

  He was no longer Ove-Thost but Haldor Twinfeng, and he took to the name as he took to everything in that place. He was a Blooded Claw, the rawest of the Rout and he trained and sparred with others like him, all pulled from the tribes of the frozen seas and wrought into gods.

  He saw no difference between himself and the others. He laughed with them and brawled with them, and learned which of the great weapons - axe, blade, boltgun, claws - would be his favoured. His pack formed up around him as more survived the trials: Valgam, Eiryk, Yellowtooth, Sventr and others, all young, their skin smooth and their eyes shining. They looked up into the storm-wracked skies of the death world and saw the ships power from the landing stages at the Mountain's summit; they knew that they would be on those ships when all was done, and they yearned for it.

  Brannak was Wolf Priest of Brokenlip's Great Company, and drove them all hard. At every test, at every hurdle, he was watching, arms folded, his long-handled axe, Frost, balanced under the weight of his wrists. It was he who had given Haldor the fangs back, and they now hung on cured leather strips from the Blooded Claw's neck, jangling against the smooth grey of his armour's breastplate.

  Haldor believed that Brannak paid him special attention. In times of fatigue, when he had been driven almost beyond endurance, he resented that. In other times, it fuelled a deep-set confidence, bordering on arrogance. That brought retribution from his pack-mates, who fought as hard among one another as they did with any sent against them. After the long spars, their flesh bloody, their bones cracked, they would slump around the firepits, hair lank with sweat, and forget what had started it.

  'He watches everyone,' said Eiryk, grinning through a bruised mouth.

  'Me more than you,' Haldor muttered. 'Me more than anyone.'

  So the days passed, a procession of ice and fire, out under the sky, down in the caverns, and they grew, and they earned their scars, and the bond of the pack formed tighter.

  Sventr was the first to die. Three others followed him, destroyed by the agonies of implantation failure or death in trial-combat. When the final day came, the pack was nine strong, all with the carapace in place and the link with power armour established. They were complete then, in body if not yet fully in mind. They donned helms and saw the world dissolve into runic overlays of electronic targets. They were taken to the forges of the Iron Priests and given their blades - chainswords, mostly.

  When Haldor stood to receive his, Brannak handed him an axe, shorter of haft than Frost, twin-bladed and forged from a dark metal. It had no runes on the face, but two austere lines of tracery cut along the outer edges.

  Haldor hefted it, finding the weight unfamiliar but agreeable. He would use it, he thought, to carve the galaxy apart.

  'You know what this is named?' Brannak asked him.

  Haldor looked up at him. 'Should I?'

  Brannak cuffed him across the jawline, the hard crack of a warrior's fist, and Haldol's neck snapped back. 'Learn it.'

  Then he moved down the line. Haldor rubbed his already-swelling cheek and looked down at the metal. It had no name that he knew of. Perhaps he would have to steal one for it.

  He snatched a look at Eiryk, who was already studying his chainsword with relish.

  'What now?' Haldor whispered.

  Eiryk did not look at him, but ran a finger, clattering, over the honed teeth. 'We are Sky Warriors, brother,' he replied absently. 'We do what they do. We drink.'

  The hall rang with voices. Some were human, though those voices were pale and thin beside the guttural roars of the transhumans, the Ascended, the demigods. Braziers glowed with coals, flaring up into blazes as the alcohol-rich mjod was flung across them. The air was rich, a stink of sweat and cooked meats and trodden straw.

  This was deep in the Fang, enveloped within its iron-dark innards, lit from within by writhing flame, a place of snaking shadows and blood-red hearth-heat. The entire brotherhood was there, brawling and gorging unde
r the sight of their jarl, Aeska Brokenlip, once warrior of Tra of the VI Legion, now Wolf Lord of the Third Great Company of the Space Wolves Chapter. The galaxy had changed since the breaking of the Siege, even in the halls of Fenris, but much remained the same.

  Aeska's Wolf Guard sat with him at the stone-hewn high table, scrabbling across food boards for fat-rich intestines. They raised gold-chased drinking horns, chucking oily liquid down hoarse throats. They chanted the old songs of the Legion, the ones that had been sung on the ice world since before the Allfather had come, and which would be sung there after the last star was extinguished.

  They wore armour, for this was a day of marking, of celebrating the raw strength of what had been dragged out of the galactic cataclysm and which now had borne fresh shoots, green like spear-thorns after the winter. They also wore furs, sticky with spillage, the trophies of the slain taken out in the wilderlands.

  Haldor sat with his pack of Blooded Claws, the neophytes of the company, though on this day they had been given the place of honour below the high table. Eiryk was on his left, his face flushed, Valgam on his right It might have been any feast on any wood-built jarl's-hall in the midst of the high summer, with horns raised to honour the slain and goad the living.

  Only after many hours did Brokenlip at last rise from his throne, shaking rust-brown hides from his shoulders, and the tide of noise shuddered into silence.

  Aeska's face was scarred down the right-hand side, making the skin pale and puckered. One eye was augmetic, a ring of scratched metal bolted onto his skull; one hand was bionic. There were rumours that he had been taken from Yarant barely alive, his thread a second from being cut clean. He was one of the few, the ones who had stood beside Russ in the Age of Wonder, when all was new and the towers of the Imperium were first raised, and so when he spoke, even the Claws listened.

  The Wolf Lord lifted a drinking-horn clutched in a gnarled, ring-studded fist.