Battle Of The Fang Read online

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The pyramid reared, vast and dark, into the fire-torn sky. Its flanks were dull, caked in the red dust that covered all of Gangava. Huge holes had been punched in its sides by heavy weapons, and the edges of the rents were still licked with flame.

  What resistance there was had been swept aside by the Wolves, wiped out with sharp-edged disdain. The entire city was burning, and those few defenders who had not perished in the assault now faced a lingering death by fire. The scale of the violence was overwhelming. There had been no respite, no quarter, no mercy. Another Chapter, the Salamanders perhaps, might have made some provision for civilian evacuation, or paused in the attack to assess the possibility of asset recovery for the greater good of the Imperium.

  Not the Wolves of Fenris. The task had been set before them, and they had brought it to completion. Gangava was destroyed, rendered down to ash and molten iron. Nothing was left to preserve, nothing to remember. The city had been scoured from the face of the galaxy as completely as Prospero had been.

  Almost.

  The pyramids still remained, insolently defiant, still free of the horrifying presence of the Vlka Fenryka. Ironhelm had insisted on that. No battle-brother would assault the central bastions until the ruin of the city had been compassed.

  I want you to see the failure of your dreams, Traitor, before I come for you. I want to hear you weep, just as you wept before.

  Now the time had come. The spearhead had assembled in a huge courtyard before the main pyramid, out in the open, careless of the lack of cover, bristling with desire to go for the throat. Fully three hundred battle-brothers were there: all of Harek Ironhelm’s Great Company, other packs who’d arrived at the muster ahead of their brothers, plus the twelve Rune Priests who’d accompanied the forward assault squads. The wyrd-masters stood with Ironhelm’s command brotherhood, their glyph-inscribed armour blazing arterial red.

  Ironhelm turned to Frei, the one who’d brought them to Gangava in the first place.

  ‘There is no doubt?’ he asked a final time.

  By way of answer, the Rune Priest drew a bag of bone-fragments from a capsule at his belt. The pieces looked insignificantly small as he tipped the contents into the palm of his gauntlet. Reverently, he cast them on the ground, and they clattered against the broken stone.

  For a moment, Frei said nothing, gazing at the patterns on the bones. Each piece was inscribed with a single rune. Trysk, Gmorl, Adjarr, Ragnarok, Ymir. The sigils had an individual meaning – Ice, Fate, Blood, Ending – as well as a collective one. For a master of scrying the mysterious power of Fenris, they could reveal hidden facets of the present, or secrets of the past, or portents of the future. In their presence, all brutal laughter was silenced, all weapons lowered. The Wolves venerated the runes, just as their gene-father had done.

  It was long before Frei spoke. When he did, his voice was hoarse from days of shouted orders and storm-summoning.

  ‘The runes tell me he is in there,’ Frei said. ‘His spoor reeks, trapped in the heart of the pyramid. But there is something else.’

  Ironhelm waited patiently. All around him, his battle-brothers did the same.

  ‘I see another presence. The Bane of the Wolves.’

  Ironhelm snorted.

  ‘That’s what he’s calling himself. This we already know.’

  Frei shook his head.

  ‘No, lord. That is not his name. It is another power, locked in the walls with him. If we enter, we will face it.’

  ‘And that troubles you, priest? You think any power in the galaxy can face our fury? Even a primarch cannot stand against our combined blades.’

  Frei stooped to collect the bone fragments. As his fingers reached for the oldest device – Fengr, the Wolf Within – the piece broke cleanly, separating into two down the middle.

  Frei froze for a second, staring at the broken rune. Ironhelm could sense his shock. He hadn’t touched the bone fragment – it had just shattered.

  From the pyramid ahead of them, a faint boom like distant rolling thunder rocked the ground. The sky above them shuddered, and the flames around them guttered.

  Then the moment passed. Ironhelm shook his head, shaking off the flicker of dread that had briefly latched on to his soul. Uncertainty was replaced by anger.

  Still you taunt me. Even now, you cannot resist the cheap trick.

  ‘Arvek,’ he voxed. ‘Are the voids down?’

  ‘They are, lord,’ came the rolling voice of Kjarlskar over the comm. ‘The fleet has a firing solution and awaits your orders.’

  Ironhelm looked up at the pyramid before him. Its very vastness was like an invitation. It could be atomised from orbit whenever he chose.

  The retinue around him waited for his response. He sensed their eagerness. Like hounds straining at the leash, their kill-urge tugged at them. From all over the city, more Wolves were arriving every moment, their claws dripping with the blood of recent slaying, ready to make the push to completion.

  ‘Lord...’ came the voice of Frei, oddly shaken.

  Ironhelm gestured for him to remain silent.

  ‘This is the moment the wyrd turns, brothers,’ he announced, speaking softly but firmly over the mission channel. ‘This is what we came to do. There will be no bombardment from orbit. We will enter the den of the Traitor, and kill him as we look into his eye.’

  He unlocked his frostblade and thumbed the power weapon into activation.

  ‘That is the way of us. We keep the danger close. Take up your weapons, and stay hard on my heels.’

  The fires had reached the service levels below the command bridge of the Nauro. They now raged out of control across eighty per cent of the ship, and had long since made the task of salvaging her impossible. Georyth had given up trying to fight the blaze conventionally and had resorted to constructing two-metre-thick firebreaks at the major intersections, surrendering huge areas of the warship to immolation.

  Now those bulwarks had failed. The temperature on the habitable levels had reached the upper limits of survivability, even in the environment suits that all the remaining crew now wore. The ship was in the final stages of collapse, its engines ready to explode, its Geller field near cracking, its void shields unable to activate.

  We did well to get this far. Russ’s teeth, just a little further.

  Blackwing sat on the command throne, overlooking the bustling bridge below impassively. All the survivors, two hundred or so, milled about on the platforms and gantries, getting in each others’ way and gumming up the necessary business of running the ship’s few remaining functions.

  They had nowhere else to go. Barely three hundred metres down, the corridors were red-hot from the fires and the air was unbreathable. Only the bridge and some other ancillary chambers remained, pockets of habitation amid a hurtling mountain of burning space-junk. How long those pockets would remain intact was hard to predict. Minutes, certainly. Hours, hopefully.

  ‘In range yet, Navigator?’ Blackwing asked over the comm.

  Neiman was a dead man. His observatory cell was cut off, separated from the command bridge by corridors of slowly melting metal. He’d had the chance to withdraw to safety but had chosen not to take it. That action alone had given the Nauro her best chance of reaching its destination, since the Navigator could only make the difficult transition to realspace accurately from within his sanctum.

  ‘The more you keep asking, lord,’ he replied irritably, ‘the longer it will take to make the calculations.’

  For someone doomed to an agonising death under the flames, Neiman sounded remarkably phlegmatic. Blackwing had noticed this trait in Navigators before. Something in their mutant genetic makeup seemed to invoke a kind of fatalism. Perhaps they saw things in the warp, things that made them somehow less concerned about their own particular fate. Or maybe they were just cold fish.

  ‘We don’t have long, Djulian,’ Blackwing replied, watching on the auspex read-out as another bulkhead failed. He used the Navigato
r’s first name as a courtesy, which seemed the least he could do. ‘Give me an estimate.’

  ‘An hour, perhaps. Less, if you let me get on with things.’

  ‘Thank you. Report as soon as you can.’

  Blackwing shut off the comm-link. There was a commotion ahead of him. One of the realspace viewers over the command bridge, a huge dome of plexiglass a metre thick and several wide, was cracking. The line of stress snaked its way from the adamantium frame, breaking into rivulets at it reached the centre of the curve.

  There were no void shields active. When the physical hull went, the whole bridge would be open to space.

  Blackwing stood up.

  ‘That’s enough,’ he announced over the ship’s open channel. ‘We’ve done all we can. To the saviour pods. Now.’

  Some of the crew looked up at him, hope suddenly kindling on their faces. Others, the kaerls mostly, looked appalled.

  ‘We have not yet translated, lord,’ came Georyth’s voice.

  The Master was standing on the stairway immediately below Blackwing, slumped with fatigue. His voice was thick and slow, betraying the liberal use of stimms to keep him on his feet.

  Blackwing had to smile. Georyth had been a pain in the arse – a pernickety, officious pain in the arse – but he’d also been a fine Master and had earned himself a place in any sagas that came out of this sorry episode.

  ‘I had noticed that, Master,’ said Blackwing. ‘Our trajectory is fixed, and only Neiman can pull us out of the warp. As soon as the Geller field’s down, I’ve triggered the saviour pods to eject. Much as I find each and every one of you personally objectionable, it seems a waste to let them go empty.’

  Georyth swallowed.

  ‘And you, lord?’

  Blackwing picked up a helm from the floor beside him. He was in Scout-pattern void-armour, the last suit he’d managed to salvage from the ship’s armoury before the fires had engulfed it. An extension of his usual carapace plate, it did little more than keep the vacuum out and the temperature at survivable levels. Not for the first time on this mission, he missed his old Hunter plate.

  ‘Your concern is touching,’ he said, clamping the helm in place and feeling the seals hiss closed. ‘Patronise me with it again and I’ll shoot your pod down myself.’

  Georyth nodded, responding to the sarcasm with a weary resignation. He’d learned how to cope with it over the past seventeen days.

  Seventeen days. Four fewer than the estimate. Blood of Russ, I love this ship. When she’s gone, I shall weep for her.

  ‘Very well, lord,’ said Georyth, clenching his fist against his breastplate in the Fenrisian style and making to leave. ‘The hand of Russ ward you.’

  ‘That would be nice,’ agreed Blackwing.

  Already, the mortals were streaming down from their stations and making for the service corridors leading to the saviour pod bays. The bridge emptied quickly. All the crew knew how precarious the situation was, and getting out of the path of the breaking realspace viewer was simply good sense.

  With their departure, the bridge looked vast. Vast, and fragile. The cracks in the viewers continued to grow. They looked out on to nothing but blackness, but it wasn’t the dark of the void. If the chromo filters were removed from the plexiglass, the view would be of the immaterium, a mad whirl of colour and movement. No human wished to look out onto that, and so the viewers were made permanently blank while in warp-transit.

  For a moment, Blackwing pondered opening them, revealing the true substance of the matter through which the doomed ship plunged. It was a tempting prospect, and one he’d never indulged before. Would he go mad, just by looking at it? Or would it leave him indifferent, just as so much else in the galaxy did?

  His thoughts were interrupted by a crack far below him. Something big and heavy had given way. Despite himself, despite all his conditioning, Blackwing felt a tremor of alarm pass through him. Standing on the bridge of a ship that was literally falling to pieces as it hurtled out of the warp and into a planetary war-zone was about as insane as it got.

  And once he thought about it in those terms, the situation made a whole lot more sense.

  I am a son of Russ. Not a good example, to be sure, but one of his mad progeny nonetheless, and this is the kind of thing the Blood Claws dream of doing.

  He strode forwards to the railing around the command platform, as if by getting closer to the prow he could ride the coming inferno better.

  Something else broke then, a strut or a bracing rod, far back in the spine of the vessel. The echoes of its demise filtered through the burning corridors, prompting more muffled crashes from down below.

  The Nauro was dying under his feet, component by component, rivet by rivet.

  ‘Come on, Neiman,’ Blackwing hissed, his pulse pumping, watching the cracks in the plexiglass above him grow. ‘Come on...’

  The Long Fangs unleashed their cargo of destruction and the gates to the pyramid dissolved into piles of smoking slag. Huge bronze lintels crashed the ground, brought down by toppling Corinthian pillars. Images of zodiacal beasts were blasted apart, masterpieces of depiction destroyed in a few moments of concentrated fire.

  The Eye was the last to go. The beaten metal, hung over the main entrance gates, took more punishment than the rest before it finally caved in, raining broken chunks on to the burning detritus below. As it broke open, a sigh seemed to pass through the air, as if some warding presence had been withdrawn. The giant pyramid shuddered, and fragments of iron and stone tumbled down its sheer sides. The mighty gates had been reduced a gaping, jagged-edged mouth, utterly dark and forbidding.

  Ironhelm didn’t hesitate. He was first in, leaping over the tangled ruins at the base of the breach and barging aside metal struts the size of a Rhino’s flank. The Wolf Guard came with him, crashing through the devastation in their Terminator plate, loping fast and low across the uneven terrain. In their wake came the rest of the Great Company, a whole host of gunmetal-grey warriors thirsting for combat.

  ‘The vengeance of Russ,’ hissed Ironhelm over the mission channel.

  Every pore in his body oozed with kill-urge. He could feel the Wolf within uncurl again, stretching its limbs in the dark, stirred by the prospect of fresh blood. Yellow eyes opened in his mind, red-rimmed and intense.

  The breach opened out into an inner hall. Its roof disappeared into the gloom above, supported by gigantic pillars of obsidian. The air was hot and dusty, thick with red motes thrown up by the explosions. Giant sigils of the Thousand Sons had been engraved into the stone, dim and half-seen in the shadows. The place was thick with the sweet smell of corruption, as if some ancient wrong had sunk into the stone and remained there, dormant and deadly.

  The Wolves swept onwards, surging through the echoing hall, their armour black in the darkness and their helm lenses glowing. All carried their weapons ready, some with bolters, others with blades. There was no whooping or bellowing, just a low, murmured snarling. The Great Company had been unleashed on the pursuit, and every mind within it was focused with remorseless purpose on the task at hand. Like blood running down an axe-edge, the Wolves raced straight into the heart of the pyramid.

  They were met by no enemies. The first hall led to another, even vaster, laid out in the same fashion. The Wolves’ footfalls echoed into the shadows, rebounding back from the dark.

  Ironhelm felt no lessening of his vengeful fury in the eerie silence. Mortal enemies would have been an irrelevance in such a place – they would simply have delayed the encounter that he yearned for, the one that he’d yearned for ever since the dreams had started.

  As he ran, he found he recognised the stonework around him. He recalled the sigils, looming out of the gloom and passing in the shadows. Their patterns had walked in his mind for decades. He had run this path before, over and over again.

  I am meant to be here. This place, this kill, has been ordained for me, locked in the wyrd. I am ready for it. By the Allfather, I am ready for it.

  The
second hall gave way to a third, then a fourth, each one larger than the last. The sheer scale of the pyramid began to become apparent. In its sullen, shrouded majesty it was the equal at least of those glass-faced edifices destroyed in Tizca. There were no libraries here, though, no repositories of learning and scholarship. This was a poor imitation, an empty copy of that which had once existed, for the original was impossible to replicate. What was destroyed by the Wolves remained destroyed.

  The packs passed through a final gateway, soaring high beyond imagining. A central chamber yawned away from them in all directions, gigantic under the apex of the pyramid. The air felt even thicker, as if something massive pressed down heavily on it. Great braziers, each the size of Imperial Guard Sentinel walkers, sent sapphire light bleeding across the marble floor. Banners, hundreds of metres long, hung heavily from chains suspended in the distant roof, all inscribed with dimly-lit devices.

  They were company emblems. Ironhelm didn’t look at them. He had no wish to be reminded of what the Thousand Sons had once been.

  In the centre of the chamber was a raised platform reached by steep stairways extending in four directions. It was the pyramid in miniature, crowned by a flat space little more than a hundred metres across.

  On the platform was an altar.

  Before the altar stood a man.

  Ironhelm increased his pace as he saw his target. His helm display didn’t pick up anything, but his eyes didn’t deceive him. A hunched figure was there, slightly under standard mortal human height, waiting for them. Even from far away, Ironhelm’s keen vision picked out the details on the man’s face.

  The skin was lined and ancient, puckered like leather and festooned with age-spots. He wore wine-red robes that clung to a slender frame, and leaned against a long wooden staff. His hands were like claws, scrawny with uncut nails. His hair must once had been long and full, but now hung from a balding pate in silvery straggles.