Battle Of The Fang Read online

  He stayed standing for a moment longer, unwilling to cede more ground. His pack stayed with him, their massive armour humming with a latent menace. They would stand and fight, if he ordered them to.

  Teeth of Russ, they’d stand against Magnus himself if I ordered them to.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he snarled, hearing the heavy tread of a hundred boots on the tunnel floors above. If they stayed, they’d be overwhelmed, just as Rossek had been.

  The pack swept downwards again, following the swiftest route towards Borek’s Seal. As they went, they passed wards against sorcery, freshly consecrated by the Rune Priests only days earlier. There were thousands of them in the warrens of the Aett, all serving to damp down and dilute the powers of the Sons’ sorcerers. Until they were dismantled, the Fang would be a hostile, draining place for them.

  As it should be, faithless witches.

  The pack thundered down a long, shallow incline. Greyloc recognised the approach tunnels to the Seal as they widened. They were nearing the final chamber before the bulwark itself, a junction of several other routes running down through the mountain. As the walls opened out, he heard noises from the space ahead.

  ‘Targets,’ he snarled, torn between irritation at the delay and pleasure at the chance to resume killing. ‘Lots of them.’

  ‘What in Hel are these signals?’ asked Sturmhjart, before the pack burst out from the tunnel and into the chamber.

  The space was huge after the confined spaces of the mountain routes, a hundred metres wide and roughly circular. Fires burned, but they were not the wholesome flames of hearth fires. Prosperine troops were there ahead of them, dozens preparing for the assault on Borek’s Seal – the bulwark itself was now only a few hundred metres away, down another long, straight corridor carved into the rock.

  For a moment Greyloc couldn’t see any reason for the Rune Priest’s confusion.

  Then he did.

  Among the mortal troops hurrying away from them, desperately trying to organise some kind of defence against the Terminators suddenly arriving in their midst, were two gigantic war machines. They had the look of ancient, proscribed tech-sorcery and stood more than a head higher than even Sturmhjart. They had fearsome drills mounted on one arm and plasma cannons affixed to the other. Their movements were deliberate and methodical, and nearly as fast as his.

  As Greyloc tore into the chamber, a bolt of plasma arced toward him from one of the machines. He ducked left, evading the worst of it, though the ball of energy still caught his right arm and hurled him back against the stone.

  ‘Fenrys!’ roared Sturmhjart, kindling energy along the length of his staff, whirling it round and throwing ball-lightning of his own into the face of the machine.

  ‘Hjolda!’ answered the rest of the pack, charging headlong against the other war-engine. The Prosperine mortals began to lay down a curtain of las-fire, but the flickering beams were more an annoyance than a threat.

  The machines, though, were serious opponents. Greyloc, leaping back to his feet, saw one of his warriors torn apart by a plasma blast and another one thrown bodily to the ground by a punch from the drill-arm.

  Thrown to the ground. In Tactical Dreadnought Armour.

  Greyloc powered back towards the nearest leviathan, ignoring the second machine, now swathed in Sturmhjart’s lightning strands.

  ‘Cataphracts,’ growled the Rune Priest over the vox, understanding what the signals had been telling him. ‘Soulless machines.’

  Greyloc leapt into contact, evading another plasma bolt in mid-air and sweeping his claws into the Cataphract’s bronze shoulder-guards.

  ‘They all fall the same way,’ he grunted, jabbing the talons into metal, using his falling weight to drag the Cataphract off-balance.

  The massive war-engine staggered, pulled away from centre by Greyloc’s weight. As it tottered, the Wolf Lord punched up with his claws, tearing the armour-plating open and revealing intricate circuitry within. His arm reached back, ready to rip out the wiring, when a colossal blow from the drill-arm floored him.

  Greyloc hit the stone hard and sprawled on his back. The Cataphract loomed over him and levelled the plasma cannon at his head. Greyloc rolled away as the sunburst blazed out, shattering the rock below.

  Then he was back on his feet with a fluid, twisting movement, already anticipating the next blow from the Cataphract. He veered away, dodging a crushing blow from the drill arm, before plunging back in close, his talons shimmering from the disruptors.

  ‘Bite on this,’ he hissed, jabbing the edges up toward the exposed rent in the Cataphract’s armour.

  As the talons connected, the war machine was lifted high and thrown through the air, its massive limbs flailing. It crashed down amid a cluster of mortal troops. Its entire breastplate had been driven in, and the ancient metal was broken and smoking.

  Greyloc spun round, perfectly aware he hadn’t hit it that hard.

  Bjorn was there.

  The gigantic Dreadnought rose up in front of him, dominating the chamber as he dominated every chamber he entered, his massive plasma cannon arm still radiating heat from the discharge.

  Feel the wrath of the ancients, abomination.

  The aura of intimidation was astonishing. Even Greyloc, hardened by centuries of combat against the direst enemies of mankind, found himself awestruck in the face of that hatred. It was as if a fragment of Russ’s own destructive power had been dragged back into the world of the living, as all-consuming and devastating as it had been when first unleashed on the galaxy two thousand years ago.

  The Fell-Handed is among us! Blood of Russ, I would have faced a hundred deaths just to see this.

  More Rubric Marines were entering the chamber by then, lumbering down the many tunnels and opening fire as they did so. Cataphracts were among them, and sorcerers, and mortal assault squads wearing heavy blast-armour.

  Bjorn waded into battle, as imperious and uncaring of the odds as he’d ever been. His lightning claw blazed with thrashing, curling energy, trailing electrostatic barbs along the stone as it flexed open. His plasma cannon pounded a stream of bolts into the reeling enemy, hurling even the rubricae aside as the blazing energy-pulses exploded into them.

  Be unleashed! boomed the venerable Dreadnought, his growling, resonant voice rising above the growing tide of explosions and war-cries.

  And in his wake came the beasts. Like a rolling wave, they leapt from his shadow and into the open. Huge, loping monsters, yellow-eyed, ribbed with metal plates and carrying outsized jaws lined with needle-sharp fangs, they tore forwards, devouring the ground between them and the enemy.

  If the mortal invaders had been scared before, they panicked then. Thin-pitched screams echoed from the chamber roof as the horrors of the Underfang pounced, slamming into the enemy lines and rolling across the stone with their prey.

  More Wolves Dreadnoughts strode into the chamber, their autocannons spooling up to fire. In their wake came more racing bands of Underfang creatures, and squads of Grey Hunters, their war-cries massive and echoing, and ravening packs of Blood Claws. Bolters barked out in response, and power-blades were kindled. The dark of the mountain was banished, replaced by the whirling, flashing light of muzzle-flares and plasma-bolts.

  All this Greyloc saw in a single sweep of his helm. It was all the time he needed. He leapt to his feet, his claws still incandescent with killing energy.

  ‘For Russ!’ he roared, and the sound of the challenge shook the earth beneath his feet.

  ‘For Russ!’ roared the Wolves of the Fang, sweeping into combat, glorying in the savage thrust of arms.

  For Russ! thundered Bjorn, the words amplified by his war-vox relays, drowning out all other sounds, rocking the walls of the chamber and cracking the stone under which he trod.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Temekh had to work hard not to give in to an unseemly excitement. He knew, as all the sorcerers did, that his emotions were entirely transparent to his gene-father. Just as they’d always been.
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  ‘Welcome to Fenris, lord,’ he said, bowing low.

  ‘None of that,’ remonstrated the newcomer, waving away the ceremonial gesture. ‘You’re being misled by appearance. As I’ve surely demonstrated to you by now, that is the least important aspect of my presence here.’

  Temekh let his head rise, and smiled.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘But it makes my hearts glad to see you restored.’

  The two figures stood in Temekh’s sanctum aboard the Herumon. The corvidae sorcerer-lord was wearing his usual robes, helm-less and with his violet eyes shining.

  Before him stood a primarch, one of the Emperor’s twenty favoured sons, the forgemasters of the Imperium, the demigods who had carved out the realms of men from the uncaring vastness of the void. He no longer wore the image of a child, or of an old man, but had unveiled the form that he’d taken during the long years of the Great Crusade. Tall, broad-shouldered, bronze-skinned and bronze-armoured, draped in a golden mantle stitched from shimmering feathers. He wore a golden helm crested with crimson horsehair. His own hair was thick and long, stained the deep red of cochineal. One hand rested on a leather-bound tome at his waist, chained to his immense frame by an iron chain, though not the one he’d carried before the Heresy. The other clasped the hilt of his sheathed sword.

  Magnus the Red, the Crimson King, the Cyclops of Prospero.

  The blessed, he was called, and the learned.

  The cursed, he was called, and the fool.

  Now he stood again within the ambit of realspace, fully embodied, glittering in the diffuse candlelight of the sanctum. For the coming battle he had assumed the appearance he had once worn by default, just another part of the symmetry of revenge. There was a weary, thin smile on his flawed face.

  ‘How does it feel?’ asked Temekh, emboldened by the humour his master seemed to be in.

  ‘To wear physical form again? Different to last time I did so. I will never be truly flesh and bone again. But it is good, nonetheless.’ The primarch raised a giant hand and flexed the fingers, one by one. ‘Very good.’

  ‘And do you have orders for me, lord?’

  Magnus turned away from admiring his own presence and gazed fondly at Temekh.

  ‘You have done all that has been asked, my son. The Wolves’ lair is not for you. Only I will descend, though I will hold my nose as I do so.’

  ‘Lord Aphael has penetrated the lower levels. His troops are removing the wards to allow your translation, and have penned the Dogs back to separate bulwarks within the Fang. It may still be several days before conditions permit you to enter.’

  ‘They’re still fighting? Impressive. Though perhaps I should not be surprised. It is their expertise, after all.’

  ‘They are desperate, and as savage as beasts.’

  Magnus lost his smile.

  ‘I no longer think of them as animals, Ahmuz, though I once did. I now think of them as the purest of us all. Incorruptible. Single-minded. The perfection of my father’s vision.’

  Temekh looked up at his primarch, taken aback.

  ‘You admire them.’

  ‘Admire them? Of course I do. They are unique. And even in an infinite universe, that quality is rarer than you might suppose.’

  Temekh paused before replying, weighing up whether he still risked saying something capable of damning him.

  ‘If that is so, lord, then why are we pursuing this war? The others – the raptora, the pyrae – they prosecute it for vengeance, to inflict the hurt that they inflicted on us. I cannot share that sentiment. It seems... unworthy of us. We are better than that.’

  Magnus walked up to the sorcerer-lord and placed a heavy hand on Temekh’s shoulder.

  ‘We are,’ he said. ‘We are much better than that. Let the drive for vengeance motivate the others – it will make them fight harder. This battle is about far more than the settling of scores.’

  His single eye was unwavering then, a circle of gold flecked with the full spectrum of visible light. Temekh found it impossible to look into, impossible to look away from.

  ‘We fight to prevent a possible future. A future that, even now, gestates within the mountain below us. If we succeed, the hurt we will inflict on the Wolves of Fenris will rival what they did to us. If we fail, then all we have accomplished since our arrival on the Planet of the Sorcerers will be as nothing.’

  The intensity of the first ranged attack was absorbed, contained, and blunted. There was an ebb in the pattern of gunfire from the tunnels below the Fangthane, and then the Rubric Marines stormed the lower slopes of the stairway. The Wolves leapt out to meet them, and the narrow killing ground was instantly clogged. Taking advantage of the higher ground and more established heavy fire support, the defenders initially had the better of it. The Blood Claws fought with all their customary abandon, only barely reined in by the monstrous form of Rossek. They were complemented by the more methodical Hunters under Skrieya, who’d learned over many years how to make the most of the confined spaces under the mountain.

  Even so, there were casualties. The Traitor Marines doled out pain with both hands, their killing no less effective for all its unsettling silence. When the attackers broke away at last, pulling back to regroup from their mauling on the stairway approaches, there were grey-armoured bodies lying on the stone too, shattered and bleeding.

  And so it went on. There was no sudden breakthrough, no decisive shift in the balance of power. The attacks came in waves, the Traitor Marines in the vanguard, each time attempting to bludgeon the Wolves higher up the stairway and seize the barricades. Every assault got slightly further before the unseen sorcerers called their soul-slaves back, leaving heat-reddened rock and cooling blood behind them.

  Hours passed, punctuated by an unreliable rhythm of attack and repulsion. Mortal troops were rotated from the barricades, replaced with fresh kaerls held in reserve. Magazines were replaced, armour patched up, blast-walls repaired, fresh supplies brought down from the Fangthane. Bodies were hauled away from the front line. The mortals were taken one way, the Wolves another. The Sky Warriors didn’t die easily, but with every attack from the Thousand Sons, another brace of corpses were retrieved, every one a testament to some heroic stand against the overwhelming numbers of the attacking host.

  At the forefront of every assault, and the last to withdraw to the barricades at the end of every action, was Tromm Rossek. He’d lost none of his brooding, terrifying intensity. With every defender’s death, he seemed to withdraw further inside himself, transmuting deeper into a grim leviathan of the murder-make rather than the laughing, ebullient warrior-god he’d been of old. His movements were tighter, his orders sharper, his blows heavier when they hit. The loss of his pack had done more than drive the old fire from his soul; it had made him darker, and it had made him deadlier.

  His new pack, the battle-ravaged dregs of others’ commands, had responded to that new spirit. They’d lost some of their swagger too, and there was less chat over the vox as they indulged their raw-edge talent for killing, but they hadn’t forgotten how to do it. The Blood Claws spun, kicked, punched and blasted their way into contact with their more orthodox opposite numbers, taking their lead from the glowering giant in their midst, feeding off the raw loathing that hung over him like the stench of death.

  They still died. The Claws always died, thrust as they were into the jaws of Morkai by their reckless, selfless way of war. But when they fell, there were always more broken armour-shells around them, more sighing corpses of soulless, shattered Rubric Marines, freed from their unknowable life of emptiness. Brakk would have been proud, seeing the seeds he’d planted bearing fruit at last.

  So the attacks continued, growing in ferocity as the hours, then days, blurred into one another. The Thousand Sons had the troops, and the time, and the patience. The Hunters would take over the burden, giving the Blood Claws a few hours’ rest. Then the process was reversed. And again, over and over until the blood-drenched stairway looked like a vision of Hel’s gat
eway.

  The line held. Every assault was repulsed at enormous cost and with terrible sacrifice, but for as long as the barricades remained intact and the Wolves remained on their feet, the Fangthane remained unconquered.

  Bjorn waded further into combat, watching through banks of optical implants as his enemies were cut down under his blades. He barely registered the steady rain of projectiles against his armoured outline. His visual field was thick with targets, blinking red runes set against a flickering backdrop.

  He ignored them. He fought then as he always had done – on instinct. The animal-sharp reflexes he’d once enjoyed were gone, as distant a memory as his natural limbs, but he still moved far faster than looked possible from his heavy, blocky shell.

  There were privileges to being the oldest Dreadnought in the Underfang. His chassis was of incredibly ancient design, incorporating technologies that had been rare even before the conflagration of the Heresy. The centuries since then had seen further refinements by successive Iron Priests, each desperate to outdo one another in the glory they could add to the sarcophagus of the Fell-Handed.

  They think I do not know what they have done to my tomb.

  Bjorn cared nothing for the finery. He would happily have lost all the gold emblems embossed on his living coffin, would have lost every silver rune-pattern traced across the ceramite, just for the chance to come face to face with his prey again.

  He would never feel the hot splash of blood across his flesh again, the moment the blade went in and cut the thread of his prey. His nerve-lattice relays were good – much better than those fitted to any other Dreadnought in the Imperium – but they would never get the sensation quite right.

  So, to assuage their guilt, they drape my tomb with skulls and totems. Trinkets. I loathe them.

  He lowered his plasma cannon, barely registering as the orbs of sunburst-energy punched off into the dark. The screams of those he downed were just so much background static. Bjorn alone had terminated the life-signs of more enemies than some whole Chapters. With such a record, death had ceased to have much meaning. The pleasure had long gone. All that remained was the need.