Leman Russ: The Great Wolf Read online

'Heilir, Fenryka,' he growled, and his voice ran across the stone flags like wildfire kindling. 'Come in peace to this hearth.'

  The greeting was as old as the bones of the world, and all raised their own drinks in response, saluting their warlord.

  'We have come here under stone since Ogvai was jarl,' Aeska said, 'to mark victory, to mark defeat, to blood the newcomers, to let our long-fangs beckon death a little closer.'

  Coarse chuckles ran around the room.

  'Yet this is the first night of a new age. These Claws who take their step into the Rout are the first to know nothing but new ways.

  'All others here joined a Legion. They join a Chapter. They are our future.' Brokenlip switched his heavy gaze to Haldor's table, where it alighted on him above all. 'Allfather preserve us.'

  Haldor held that gaze, not even acknowledging to himself how hard it was to meet the eyes of one who had fought for so long, so hard, against an enemy that even all these years after his final defeat still seemed as present as the dark on a fire's edge.

  Brokenlip drew his blade - a great broadsword with a dragon's neck snaking along the serrated edge. He angled it towards the Claws, dipping it in salute. 'The enemy will return,' he said, his voice a low snarl that snagged like claws across hide 'Fight it Throttle it Cast it down, just like we made you to do.'

  The company clambered to their feet, shoving aside heavy wooden boards and reaching for chainswords, axes, longswords, mauls. All were held aloft, casting shadows of murder across the feces of the new recruits.

  'When you came here, this was my hearth,' said Aeska, his pitted lips cracking into a fang-bared grimace, or perhaps a smile. 'Now it is yours. Defend it with your lives.'

  They all cried aloud then, a fierce wall of sound that made the stone shiver and the flames shake.

  'Vlka Fenryka!'

  Before he knew what he was doing, Haldor had seized his axe His pack had taken their own weapons, and they slid from battle-worn scabbards in a ripple of dry hisses.

  'Fenrys!'

  All of them were shouting now, summoning up spirits of war and rage; fuelled by the punishing quantities of mjod coursing around their genhanced systems. The fires seemed to rear up, swelling within iron cages, pushing back the Mountain's eternal gloom. Haldor was no different 'Fenrys hjolda!'

  The massed roars echoed back from the high chamber roof. Long Fang and Blooded Claw, Grey Hunter and Wolf Guard, the old names and the new, all became one voice amid the flames and the war-cries, bonded by the shared howl like the wolf packs of the outer wilds.

  And then the thunder broke, replaced by the hard-edged, deep-timbre laughter of warriors. The weapons were stowed, the drinking-horns reached for. Brannak swaggered over to the Claws' table, his thick voice blurred by mjod, starting to tell the tales that would carry on far into the night. They would recite sagas now, all the grizzled warlords, reciting old records of old wars scattered far across the sea of stars. Every feast ended with this, the skjalds and the jarls remembering, for this was how annals were made on Fenris.

  Throughout it all, Aeska kept his eyes fixed on Haldor. Once the last of the war-cries had faded, the Blooded Claw looked away from the high table, suddenly uncomfortable. He pushed his way from the bench, sending boards laden with raw meat thudding to the floor.

  Eiryk looked back at him, his face mottled, eyes narrow with mirth. 'Too rich for you, brother?' he asked.

  Haldor spat on the floor. He was fine. He was more than fine - he was bursting with life, his every muscle burning for the coming test of true combat.

  Aeska's words echoed in his mind, though. They are our future.

  'Listen to the old man's stories,' Haldor told him, holding up his empty drinking-horn. 'I thirst.'

  He strode off, hearing Brannak's voice raised in declamation behind him.

  'And the sky cracked, and the ice broke, and the Allfather came to Fenris, and Russ, war-girt, went to meet Him, and they fought, and the earth was lain waste, and the stars shivered out..'

  Haldor shoved through the press of bodies, making his way towards the far gates of the hall. As he neared the great vats of heated mjod, as thick and viscous as unrefined promethium, a dull wind sighed through the open arches. Beyond those arches, empty corridors snaked away into the heart of the Mountain, unlit and cold, burrowing ever deeper. He looked at them, and they looked back at him.

  Haldor turned on the threshold and saw his battle-brothers celebrating. Thralls scuttled across the floor, veering around the giants with silent skill, carrying more fuel for the revels.

  This was his world now, his hearth to guard.

  He slipped out under the nearest arch. The air temperature soon dropped away to the hellish default, and the last of the firelight flickered into nothing.

  Haldor pressed himself against frigid stone, rough-cut and slick with ice. He took in a deep breath, enjoying the searing cold in his lungs. The dark pressed around him, just as it had in the forests of Asaheim, blue-black, vengeful.

  Then he was moving again, loping like he had done before, deeper down. He did not know all the ways of the Mountain yet Perhaps no Sky Warrior did, for the fortress was never more than a fraction full. The great bulk of the Chapter was forever at war, coming back to the home world only for feasts or councils, and in any case the place had been intended for a Legion.

  He went on, further away, deeper down. The echoes of mortal voices died away entirely, replaced by the almost imperceptible rhythm of the deep earth. Ice cracked endlessly, ticking like a chrono in the dark. Meltwater, formed over buried power lines, trickled across broken stone before freezing again in swirling patterns below. From the great shafts came the half-audible growls of the massive reactors tended by the Iron Priests, and the eternal forges that created the Chapter's weapons of war, and, so he had heard tell the forgotten halls where the eldest of all dwelt, their hearts locked in ice and their mind, kept in a stasis of dreams.

  By then he had no idea where he was going, nor why, only that the shadows were welcome, and for the moment he had no need of fire to warm his hearts nor more flesh to fill his innards. He had been changed, and his body embraced the crippling cold where once it would have killed him, and he welcomed it Then he froze, and the hairs on the back of his arms lifted. Soundlessly, swift as a thought, he reached for the haft of the axe bound at his belt.

  The corridor ahead was as dark and empty as all the others, rising slightly and curving to the left Haldor narrowed his gaze, but the shadow lay heavy, and nothing broke the gloom.

  Something was there, up ahead, out of visual range but detectable all the same. A pheromone, perhaps, or the ghost of a scent Haldor dropped low and crept forwards, keeping the haft gripped loose The tunnels of the Fang were full of dangers, all knew that. He became painfully aware of how noisy his armour was, and how much stealthier he could be without it. He reached the curve ahead and passed around it. The change in the air told him the corridor had opened out, but the dark was now unbroken. He could hear something out there - breathing, like an animal's, soft and low - but could not pin it down. He crouched, shifting the weight of the axe, readying to move. Before he could do anything more, a voice came out of the darkness, deeper than any animal's, rimed with age. 'Put the axe down, lad.'

  Haldor had obeyed before he even knew it, bound by a gene-heritage that was older than he was. Suddenly, the pall seemed to shift, and a figure loomed up through the Fang's under-murk. For a moment, all Haldor saw was a figment of old race-nightmares — a daemon of the darkling woods, crowned with branches, eyes as blue as sea-ice and hands like the gnarled roots of trees.

  But then he was looking into features he knew as well as his own, despite never having seen them in flesh and blood. The face was smeared with ashes, a daub-pattern of black on pale skin. A heavy mantle of furs hung over hunched shoulders, and a gunmetal-grey gauntlet clutched at the hilt of a heavy, rune-encrusted longsword. Instantly, without being bidden, Haldor dropped to one knee. 'Enough of that,' said his primarch,
testily. 'Why are you here?' Haldor didn't know. Aeska's words had driven him out, and the cold had sucked him in, but that was all he understood. Perhaps it had been the drink, or perhaps the last chance to walk the silent depths before war called, or maybe the tug of fete.

  Now he stood, alone, in the presence of the Lord of Winter and War.

  'One of Aeska's whelps,' said Leman Russ, drawing closer, his strange eyes shining in the dark. 'No wonder you left the hall. Bloody sagas. I've heard them all.'

  Haldor couldn't tell if he was jesting. 'They told of the Allfather,' he said, hesitantly, wary of the danger in the primarch's every move. Russ was like a blackmane, huge, unpredictable; bleeding with danger. 'They said you fought Him. The only time you lost.'

  Russ barked out a laugh, and the fur mantle shook. 'Not the only time.' He shrank back into the shadows then, seeming to diminish a fraction, but the danger remained.

  Haldor caught snatched glimpses of his master's garb. Not the heavy armour plate of the warrior-king, but layers of hard-spun wool, streaked with the charcoal of spent embers. They were the clothes of death rites, of mourning. Some warrior of the Aett, perhaps even the Einherjar, must have been slain, though it was unusual for the Wolf Priests not to have called out the names of the dead through the Chapter.

  Russ noticed the weapon Haldor had placed back at his belt, and looked at it strangely. 'You know what blade that is?' he asked. Haldor shook his head, and Russ snorted in disgust.

  'The gaps grow, holes in the ice; greater with every summer-melt,' the primarch said. 'You know nothing. They remember nothing.'

  Russ trailed off, half turning back towards the dark. Haldor said nothing. His hearts were both bearing, a low thud, an instinctive threat-response even when no blades were raised.

  'I know not whether you were sent to mock me or bring me comfort,' Russ said at last, 'but sent you were. So listen. Listen and remember.'

  Haldor stayed where he was, not daring to move, watching the huge, fur-dad outline under the Mountain's heart Russ was speaking like a skjald.

  'I fought the Allfather, that is true, and He bested me, for the gods themselves fear Him, mightiest of men. But that was not the only time.'

  The eyes shone, points of sapphire, lost in the grip of ice-shadow.

  'There was another.'

  II

  The last Faash hunter-killer ran out into open void, pirouetting through exploding outrigger spokes before ducking under the reeling shadow of the bastion station. Free of the tumbling debris, it straightened, firing thrusters to align with the Ynniu System's solar plane, then boosted clear towards the heliopause.

  Behind it, the orbital bastion imploded and crumpled, smashed in on itself by the hammering thunder of void-launched mass drivers. Surrounding warships pulled steadily clear of the gathering cataclysm, all liveried in the dark grey of the VI Legion, all maintaining their fire as they moved in concert.

  The station had once been massive, a huge dagger-edged column of steel and carbon synthate orbiting Ynniu III, stocked with gunnery bays filled with interference weaponry and nine battalions of Faash Scarabines. Such concentrated power did not fall into ruin lightly - it had taken two weeks for the Wolves of Dekk-Tra to clear the void-runs to Ynniu III, a further six days to deplete the reactor-backed aegis shield, and only then had the killers of the Rout gone in. Six hours they had taken to reach the bastion's inner command coil, two more to destroy the residual Scarabine suicide guard units, and then another two to sequence the plasma charges before lifting out.

  The Rout had been thorough, as ever, enacting a tactical sequence drawn up while in the warp from Galamandro, but even then the losses had been significant Now the lone hunter-killer was running ahead of them, powering up its macrospeed drives amid a flurry of pursuing las-fire. It was fast powered by elaborate fusion technology the Mechanicum had yet to fully understand, and would hit Mandeville range long before the larger VI Legion battleships were able to come about.

  Which was why the Haukr, one of six sub-warp interceptors, had been placed beyond the perimeter of the bastion's effective fire zone; powered-down, silent 'Bring us to full speed,' ordered the interceptor's commander, a Legion warrior named Othgar. 'Weapons powered, but keep the shields down - he'll want to—'

  Before he had finished speaking, the bridge's teleport station blazed with snarling warp light, and five hulking VI Legion warriors materialised on the dais. Four were slant-helmed in dun-grey Mark II plate; their armour piebald with burn marks and bloodstains. Their leader towered over them, and wrenched his helm off as he strode clear of the frost-crunched teleport locus.

  'You can raise them now, commander,' ordered Jorin, called Bloodhowl, mag-locking his helm and shaking clear a long mane of jet-black hair. The jarl of Dekk-Tra had a face seemingly carved from wind-blasted bedrock, long and lean and riven with scars. His skin looked ancient, harrowed over a lifetime of combat in the steel-sharp storm winds. 'Now run it down.'

  Othgar shouted fresh orders, vacating the command throne, and void shields shimmered over the forward viewports. The Haukr leapt forwards, its plasma drives ramping up to full acceleration.

  Jorin joined Othgar on the command platform, his black-rimmed eyes staring out at the void ahead. He did not have the amber irises usual among the Legion, but almost human eyes, barely tinged by the mutating effects of the Canis Helix. Bloodhowl had been old before the Helix had been applied, just as all the commanders of his Great Company had been old. It was said that only a handful had survived the implantation process, being far from the optimal age for such rigours, but they had all dared it anyway, for they had been Russ' own brotherhood, the ones who had guarded him during the mortal years under Fenris' cruel gaze. To them was given the last of the great companies, the 13th, which was the most honourable and the closest to the primarch.

  The hunter-killer was still ahead, racing hard, but its lurid green backwash was already growing larger in the forward viewports. Like all Faash war machines, it was heavy-set and bulky, built to contain the reactor technology that underpinned everything made on Dulan. It was larger than the Haukr, armed with the interference guns that caused so much havoc at medium range, and no doubt crawling inside with Scarabine mechanised infantry.

  Jorin's mortal eyes narrowed, watching pursuit metrics flicker over the translucent visual feed lenses. His thin lips barely twitched.

  If he felt anything other than a kind of flint-edged certainty, he did not show it. He never had, not even as a mortal fighting through the bloody snows of Fenris.

  'All is ready?' he asked Othgar.

  The Haukr's commander nodded. 'For the last six hours.'

  Jorin almost smiled. Six hours was a long time to keep forty warriors of the Rout cooped up in cramped crew bays. They would be slavering by now, clawing at the Haukr's airlocks to get at the enemy, which was just as he wanted them to be.

  'Prepare the hull-rams,' he ordered, pushing his black hair into a topknot and shackling it. 'I want this done right.'

  Then the helm went on again, with a last twist at the gorget-seal.

  Othgar issued new orders as the company's jarl joined his retinue and made for the bridge's exit doors.

  As he came among them, his huscarl, Bulveye; fell in alongside. 'Think they've got the timings sorted?' Bulveye asked.

  By then Jorin's expression was hidden behind his wolfs-head death mask, as black as his mane and painted with finger-width streaks of old blood.

  'Only one way to find out,' he said, heading towards the conveyors that took them down into the Haukr's hold.

  Bitter experience had taught Imperial commanders the power of Dulanian ship shielding. Their Faash military cadre used technology roughly equivalent to the void generators deployed on Imperial vehicles, or so Mechanicum adepts theorised, but the energy levels needed to penetrate its protective aegis were uncomfortably high, and previously destroyed arrays had an unwelcome habit of reviving after just a few moments of inactivity. Boarding parties had been dispa
tched to shield-down target ships, only for their incoming torpedoes to be ripped apart by reconstituting energy fields before they could reach the hull-plates. It had become necessary to physically destroy virtually everything the Wolves came across lest it revive; which had a punishing effect on ammunition levels and survival rates, and deprived the strategos of much-needed intelligence.

  The Scarabine mechanised troops were almost as bad, being encased in a form of reactor-driven power armour complete with its own personal shielding. Destroying one was a brutal business of relentless, sustained violence; requiring the complete annihilation of spine-implanted generators before a kill could be claimed with certainty. Ranged fire was less effective than the close application of bladed power weapons. After a series of heavy defeats for Imperial Army front-line divisions, it was this factor that had led to the VI Legion being assigned to finish off the Dulan campaign. Only the Legiones Astartes had the firepower, the endurance and - most importantly - the mentality to be truly effective against such enemies. In the early months, even the Wolves of Fenris had struggled to get to grips with the range of archeotech on display, necessitating the rapid adoption of new tactics, some of which took time to perfect.

  Jorin didn't reflect on that as he entered the crew bay of the Haukr, some hundred metres below the command bridge. It wasn't worth thinking too closely about the margins, not least as most of them were now totally out of his control.

  'Hjà, jarl!' his warriors shouted as he joined them, and the barely shackled enthusiasm for slaying was audible in every vox-filtered voice.

  Jorin nodded curtly, pushing his way to the front of the assault group and taking up his power axe. The interior of the crew bay was lit only by red strips of combat lumens, and crammed with jostling shells of Legion battleplate. The ceiling was low and buttressed, the walls given an inner brace-lattice of adamantium. That would all be needed.

  Bulveye crouched down beside his jarl, one gauntlet pressed against the floor. All across the space, other warriors were doing the same, readying like sprinters before the mark.