Two Metaphysical Blades Read online

  The machine chugged past, and Loken set foot upon oily deck plating. The place was so gloomy he thought there was a malfunction in the lighting circuits, but as he looked into the cathedral spaces of the deck he saw chandeliers with every lumen globe intact. It was purposefully dim.

  As his eyes adjusted he saw how badly damaged the Hrafnkel was. Repair gangs and heavy plant took the place of gunships and drop pods in the landing circles. Men shouted. Metal scaffold poles were dumped by a hauler, clanging to the deck in a raucous bell peal. Since his return to Terra, Russ had not been idle. He had been out patrolling the Solar reaches beyond the outermost defence sphere. He had ventured beyond the system and fought the campaign at Daverant Reach and the battle at Vanaheim. If he did those things in this wreck, thought Loken, he must be as reckless as they say.

  A cohort of dry dock workers jogged in front of him, faceplates misted with breath, brass boots thudding on metal. When they had passed Loken saw a savage figure staring at him across the main roadway of the embarkation deck. He had not been there before.

  He was a legionary, that much was certain, but so barbarously dressed only his size and his bearing separated him from the lesser men in their furs and leathers labouring alongside the Terran work gangs. A wolf pelt hung from heavy silver brooches set at his shoulders. The skin lay over a full suit of close-fitting leather that covered him head to toe. The dozens of expertly cut panels mimicked the exposed musculature of a flayed man. It was the brown of flesh left to desiccate in dry highlands. Armour was a generous word for it. The leather was hard, but too full of joins and easy holes for swords to find to offer real protection, and would give none at all against more advanced weapons. But it was impressive. Firelight caught on the edges, gleaming off the involute knotwork covering every part. A mask fashioned into a bestial muzzle hid the warrior’s face. Eyes glinted in the darkness beneath. The flash of a hunting beast’s eyes from the thicket before a furred weight bears you to the ground and hot breath heralds death.

  The figure approached. Loken instinctively braced for combat.

  The warrior’s red beard parted to show fanged teeth, and he laughed.

  ‘My friend!’ said the warrior. ‘You are a little edgy today. I bid you welcome to the Hrafnkel, flagship and domain of Leman Russ, the Great Wolf, the Wolf King, the Lord of Winter and War!’

  Confusion overtook Loken.

  ‘Bror Tyrfingr, is that you?’

  ‘Aye, who did you expect?’ Bror slapped Loken hard on his ­pauldron. ‘The Allfather Himself?’ Bror held out his hand. Loken took his forearm. Leather glove gripped ceramite plate. ‘It is good to see you, Loken.’

  ‘When you left Titan, I thought you might never come back. I see I was right.’ Loken gestured at Tyrfingr’s leather suit. ‘You are leaving us then,’ he said. ‘To rejoin your master.’

  ‘No, no, my friend,’ said Bror. ‘I was commanded by my king to join Malcador’s private army, and there I will remain until told ­otherwise. My loyalty is to the regent now. He is my jarl,’ he said, the foreign word a wet, guttural growl in his throat. ‘But Leman of the Russ will forever be my primarch. He is my father. I visit with him to renew bonds of kinship and fealty, and to discuss the coming attack upon the Warmaster. I will return to Malcador’s side soon enough. We shall fight together again, you and I, I swear it.’

  Loken suspected Bror had returned to report on his new master to his old. Russ had a hunger for intelligence that matched Malcador’s. He refrained from saying so.

  ‘Why are you dressed in that way?’

  ‘Ha!’ Bror slapped the leather panels covering his iron-hard stomach. ‘Like a member of the Vlka Fenryka you mean?’

  ‘This is what Space Wolves wear?’

  ‘When we are among our own, aye.’ Tyrfingr glanced up. ‘My friend, I advise you, only those not of Fenris use the term “Space Wolf”.’

  ‘I apologise if I disrespect you,’ said Loken.

  There had always been bonds of brotherhood between the different Legions. The Space Wolves defied them in their oddness. They were a breed apart, as isolated as the Khan’s White Scars, and more savage. They were made of the same raw matter, Loken and Tyrfingr, but the mould they were stamped from was so very different.

  ‘If I took offence at that,’ said Bror, ‘I would have to commit to feud with the entire galaxy. Just try not to say “Space Wolf” aboard this ship. You will seem ignorant. The Rout does not take kindly to ignorance, and they will not take you seriously.’

  They left the embarkation deck by a set of large doors and headed upwards into the ship. Loken had been aboard many Gloriana-class vessels. They were all of a pattern, but the Space Wolves had made the ship their own as much as they possibly could, tearing it bloodily from the grasp of reason and refashioning it in their own, superstitious tribal image. Other Legions favoured polished stone, gleaming metal and glass to line their halls. The Space Wolves covered the metal walls with carved wood and bone sheets so large they could only have been harvested from monsters. The greater halls had elaborate interiors of wolf-headed posts and panelling decorated with entwined beasts whose contortions inevitably ended in the fanged mouths of their fellows. Even lesser ways too unimportant for wholesale decoration acknowledged the character of the Legion: mossy rocks in bubbling pools of water, bunches of dried herbs tied up in bundles hanging from the ceiling, primitive weapons chained to the walls, as if imprisoned.

  For all its size, the Hrafnkel had the atmosphere of a chieftain’s hall. The air was scented with smoke and poorly preserved meat, herbs, burned fat, wet fur, and the hot, musky smell of animals sleeping in their dens.

  Its corridors were as likely to be lit by flickering torches as they were lumen strips or biolume panels. Fire bowls guttered in the suction winds of atmospheric recyc units, the walls behind them furred with soot.

  ‘You like it dark,’ said Loken.

  ‘Too much light dulls the senses,’ said Bror. ‘If you think this is dark, you would hate the Aett.’ Another phlegm-rich word, more growled than spoken. If the Fenrisian language had a relationship to Imperial Gothic, it was obscure.

  ‘The what?’

  Tyrfingr chuckled throatily. ‘The Fang. They call it the Fang. Only don’t say that either. It’s the Aett, or nothing.’

  The illusion of a savage king’s demesne would have been total had it not broken in many places, showing the technology beneath. Patchwork repairs made after Alaxxes had been undone by the ship’s recent forays beyond the Solar perimeter. New scars piled atop old wounds; the ship was damaged through and through. Whole sections were sealed off. Drifts of wood ash intermingled with mortals’ bones where fires had broken through bulkheads and torched compartments. In other sections, the Space Wolves’ primitive cladding had been ripped out to enable access to the guts of the ship. Beating hammers had the Hrafnkel shivering with a fever’s trembles. It was a giant beast, wounded close to death. It would be decades before it was brought back to its full capabilities.

  Loken had heard Leman Russ intended to leave within the week.

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