War of the Fang - Chris Wraight Read online

  Kjarlskar didn’t look like he was listening. He was tensing up.

  ‘Frei,’ said Kjarlskar. ‘Are you getting anything?’

  The planet continued to grow as the probes took up geostationary positions. Angry swirls of cloud shifted across the surface. As the Rune Priest looked at the probe-relays, veins began to pulse at his shaven temples. His mouth tightened, as if some pungent aroma had risen, stinking, from the screens.

  ‘Blood of Russ,’ he swore.

  ‘What do you sense?’ asked Kjarlskar.

  ‘Spoor. His spoor.’

  The clouds were breaking open. Beneath them were lights, laid out in geometric shapes, revealing a city, vast beyond imagining. The shapes were deliberate. They hurt the eyes.

  Kjarlskar let slip a low growl of pleasure, mixed with anger. His gauntlets clenched into fists.

  ‘You’re sure?’ he demanded.

  The Rune Priest’s armour had started glowing, lit up by the angular shapes carved into the plate. For the first time in months, the wyrd-summoner looked excited. Probe-auspexes continued to zoom in, revealing pyramids in the heart of the city.

  Vast pyramids.

  ‘There can be no doubt, lord.’

  Kjarlskar let slip a savage, barking laugh.

  ‘Then summon the star-speakers,’ he snarled. ‘We’ve done it.’

  He looked from Anjarm to Frei, and his bestial eyes shone.

  ‘We’ve found the bastard. Magnus the Red is on Gangava.’

  PART I:

  OLD SCORES

  CHAPTER ONE

  Greyloc hunched down, keeping upwind, letting his naked fingers graze against the packed snow. Ahead of him, the plain stretched away north, bleached white, ringed by the vast peaks beyond.

  He sniffed, pulling the frigid air in deep. The prey had sensed something, and there was fear carrying on the wind. He tensed, feeling his muscles tighten with readiness. His pin-sharp pupils dilated slightly, lost in their near-white irises.

  Not yet.

  Down below him, a few hundred yards away, the herd huddled against the wind, stepping nervously despite their size.Konungur, a rare breed. Everything on Fenris was bred to grip on to survival, and these creatures were no different. Four lungs to scrape the thin air of Asaheim of every last molecule of oxygen, huge rib-cages of semi-fused bone, hind-legs the width of a man’s waist, twin twisted horns and a spiked spine-ridge. A kick from a konungur could take the head off a man.

  Greyloc stayed tense, watching them move across the plain. He judged the distance, still down against the snow. He had no weapon in his hands.

  I am the weapon.

  He wore no armour either, and the metal-lined carapace nodes chafed against the leather of his jerkin. His mouth stayed shut, and only a thin trail of vapour escaped from his nostrils. Asaheim was punishingly cold, even for one with his enhanced physiology, and there were a thousand mutually supportive ways to die.

  The konungur paused. The bull at the herd-head stopped rigid, its majestic horned profile raised against the screen of white beyond.

  Now.

  Greyloc burst from cover. His legs pumped, throwing snow up behind in powdered blooms. His nostrils flared, pulling air into his taut, lean frame.

  The konungur bolted instantly, rearing away from the sprinting predator. Greyloc closed fast, his thighs already burning. His secondary heart kicked in, flooding his system with adrenaline-thick blood. There was no mjod in it – he’d been fasting for days, purging the battle-stimulant from his frame.

  My pure state.

  The konungur galloped powerfully, leaping high through the wind-smoothed drifts, but Greyloc was faster. His white hair streamed out over his rippling shoulders. He outpaced the slowest, tearing alongside the herd, fuelling its panic. The group broke formation, scattering from the bringer of terror in their midst.

  Greyloc fixed his eyes on the bull. The beast was two metres high at the shoulder, over four tons of pure muscle moving at speed. He plunged after it, feeling his legs sear with the sharp pain of exertion. The fear of the beast clogged in his nostrils, fuelling the blood-frenzy pumping through his system.

  It veered suddenly, trying to shake him off. Greyloc leapt, catching the creature’s neck with his outstretched hand and swinging round to grapple it. The bull bucked, trying to break the hold, kicking out with spiked hooves and bellowing a series of echoing, coughing distress calls.

  Greyloc pulled back his free fist and sent a punch flying at the konungur’s skull. He heard bone crack, and the creature staggered sideways. Greyloc dug his claws into the ice-hard flesh, pulling at the cords within and dragging the beast to the ground.

  The konungur screamed, collapsing in a flurry of limbs. Greyloc bared his fangs and buried his face in the animal’s throat. His bit down, once, twice, ripping and shaking like a dog. He sucked in the hot blood, feeling it wash over his teeth, and the kill-pleasure poured into him. The body beneath him spasmed, kicked a final time, then shuddered still.

  Greyloc flung the limp head of the bull aside and let his own fall back.

  ‘Hjolda!’

  Still pumped from the chase, Vaer Greyloc roared his triumph into the empty air, spitting out flecks of blood and hair. The rest of the herd were far away by then, bolting across the ice for higher ground.

  ‘Fenrys hjolda!’

  His cry echoing around the plain, Greyloc looked down and grinned. Endorphins raged through his bloodstream and his hearts hammered in a heavy, thrilling unison.

  My pure state.

  The carcass began to steam as blood welled up from its flank. Greyloc ripped the shoulder open with his bare hands, feeling the hot, wet slabs slap apart. He ignored the bull’s glassy eye, now vacant and cooling fast. He tore strips of flesh free and gorged on them, replenishing the energy expended during the chase. Konungur meat was rich, rich enough even to satisfy the demands of his predator’s frame.

  It was only as Greyloc ate that he saw the snow ahead of him disturbed. He looked up from his feast, blood running down his chin. Something was coming.

  He snarled with displeasure, and stood. The beast within him was still roused and alert, still running with the kill-pleasure. In the distance, dark against the pale sky, a flyer was approaching. It came quickly, wheeling across the plain and descending sharply.

  Greyloc wiped his jaw, which did nothing but spread gore across his white hair. Every sinew was still tight, every follicle erect. He growled with frustration.

  This had better be good.

  The blunt, snub-nosed flyer came closer, skirting the drifts. It was a four-man skarr gunship, open-sided and armed with twin-linked bolters under the wings. A single figure stood in the exposed crew bay, hands free and long red hair streaming out from the turbulence of the descent.

  ‘Jarl!’ the newcomer bellowed over the roar as the flyer came to rest, bobbing a metre from the ground. The tilted engines thundered deep wells into the snow, melting and evaporating it and turning the drifts into slush.

  ‘Tromm,’ snarled Greyloc, not bothering to hide his anger. He was still pumped.

  The Wolf Guard Tromm Rossek was in full battle-plate. He looked as bulky and ebullient as ever, and there was something joyous in his eyes.

  ‘News from Kjarlskar! Ironhelm summons you!’

  Greyloc spat a mix of blood and saliva on to the snow.

  ‘Now?’

  Rossek shrugged, still braced against the swaying movement of the gunship.

  ‘That’s what he said.’

  Greyloc shook his head and shot a rueful glance at the mauled corpse of the konungur. Kill-pleasure was replaced with a numbness, the dull pain of frustration. With difficulty, he reeled in his hunt-state. He felt the hairs on his forearms relax even as he took a running leap and hauled himself on to the crew bay of the hovering gunship.

  ‘Good kill?’ enquired Rossek, a broad smile across his expansive, tattoo-laced face.

  ‘Get me back to the Aett,’ muttered Greyloc, slumping to the me
tal floor as the kaerls in the cockpit fed power to the burners.

  It had been.

  The gunship went north-east, banking between the ever-rising peaks. All of the Asaheim plateau was high, thousands of metres up, and even down on the prey-plains the air was perilously thin for mortals without rebreathers. Ahead of the flyer, fresh mountains were piled on top of one another, massive shoulders of ice-locked rock jumbled in a climbing pattern, ever higher, ever steeper. The engines of the gunship whined as they powered it upwards.

  Greyloc hung on to the edge of the exposed platform casually. He could feel the blood on his face begin to crystallise. He was near-naked and the chill would immobilise even his body soon, but still he stayed on the edge, letting the frigid air tear at his death-white mane.

  ‘So what’s got him roused?’ he asked at last, adjusting easily as the gunship banked sharply.

  Rossek shrugged.

  ‘Jarls are in the chamber. Something big.’

  Greyloc grunted, and shook his head. The subsidence of the kill-pleasure was like a drug withdrawal. He felt surly and blunted.

  The two figures on the gunship platform were physical opposites. Rossek was huge, red-haired, bearded, thick of limb and with a heavy-set face. His nose was flat and broken, his neck broad and banded with muscle. A dragon tattoo snaked across his left cheek, terminating at his temple where six metal studs protruded from the bone. In another Chapter that might have indicated six centuries of service. Rossek wasn’t that old – he just liked studs in his skull.

  His lord was hewn from different stone. Greyloc was lean, rangy, and his flesh clung tight to the bone. The Wolf Lord’s face was drawn, as if preserved and stiffened by the ice-dry winds. Out of his armour, the tautness in his frame was evident. He was a prey-stalker, a plains-killer, fast, pale, and deadly. The brutish camaraderie of the Vlka Fenryka, the superhuman warriors of Fenris, sat uneasily with him. All the Aett knew his prowess in the hunt, but they didn’t trust his brooding, and they didn’t trust the shade of his hide. He was white, and his eyes were the colour of steel.

  Like a ghost, they said. Snow on snow.

  ‘Are all the others there?’ Greyloc asked, still standing in the face of the wind. He could feel ice creep across his exposed forearms and ignored it.

  ‘Three Great Companies are off-world still, but Kjarlskar’s one of them.’

  Greyloc nodded. Ironhelm had been mustering his forces on Fenris for a long time, and the endless expeditions to hunt down his old adversary had seemed – at last – to be in abeyance. The Great Wolf’s passion for finding Magnus had become an obsession, one Greyloc had argued against before. There were a thousand other enemies to hunt, and many of them would stand up and fight rather than shrink away into the aether when the noose closed.

  ‘We’ll see, then,’ Greyloc said, watching as the mountains loomed.

  The massive precipices were coming to a head. Vast beyond imagining, a single peak was rearing up on the horizon. As if the core of Fenris had been shoved through its mantle into a terrifying, unmatched pinnacle, a conical mountain-mass soared up into the darkening sky. Its flanks were sheer, snow-clad on jagged shelves of rock, glossy with ancient, undisturbed ice. In every direction, lesser summits crowded the view, clustering close to the broken skyline in the shadow of the Great One, the Shoulder of the Allfather; the volda hamarrki, the World Spine.

  Against the gathering dark of the dwindling atmosphere, tiny lights shone at the distant summit. They marked the habitation of the Sky Warriors, the abode of the demigods, itself a tiny fraction of the bulk of that vast peak. The inhabitants of that place, whether kaerl or Space Marine, called it the Aett.

  To the rest of the galaxy, awe-struck by half-snatched legends of Russ’s fortress and never likely to see it, it was just the Fang.

  Greyloc looked at the approaching lights impassively. There were other flyers coming in, at least three of them. Ironhelm was pulling all his forces back to the hearth.

  ‘Perhaps he’s given up at last,’ said Greyloc, watching the flickering lights of the docking platform draw closer. ‘Can that be too much to hope?’

  ‘Wyrmblade! Enough splicing.’

  Odain Sturmhjart strode into the laboratorium, pushing aside fleshmaker-thralls impatiently. The huge Rune Priest, clad in sigil-encrusted armour, slammed his staff on the ground and ripples of excess power discharged against the stone.

  Thar Ariak Hraldir, bearer of the Wyrmblade that gave him his name, looked up from his work. The low light made his eyes look like pools of resin-rich amber. The Wolf Priest was irritated, and his ragged, ugly face twisted into a scowl. A pair of curved fangs snagged his lips as he exhaled loudly. Slowly, aching from the hunched pose he’d held for so long, Wyrmblade straightened.

  ‘Bone-rattler,’ came the caustic reply. ‘This, especially, is not a good time.’

  Ahead of him, vials containing clear fluid were arranged in long rows on a metal table. Each was labelled with a single rune. Some stood alone, some were connected to one another by microfilament, others were linked together with strands of conductive plasfibre.

  Wyrmblade gestured with a finger, and the lights in the chamber rose. Strip lumens exposed white-tiled rooms, surgically clean, each leading off from the other like chambers in a den. Blast doors to the inner rooms closed, obscuring the view of what lay beyond. Before they snapped shut, there was a fleeting view of banks of equipment humming around glistening centrifuges, of picts updating steadily with rows of runes, and of man-sized tanks of translucent fluid against the walls. There were dark shadows suspended within those tanks, motionless and silent.

  ‘You tell iron-arse that,’ said Sturmhjart, and his ruddy cheeks glowed with mirth. ‘He’ll flay your skin off to cover what he’s missing. I’ve come to save you from that.’

  The Rune Priest was built like all the Adeptus Astartes – solid, heavily muscled, broad and stocky. He had a circuit of augmentics around his left eye and a thick grey beard, stiff and matted from age. Talismanic bones hung in chains from his breastplate, carefully arranged to channel his power over the elements. The pattern of runes on his armour might have looked random, but it was nothing of the sort, and every carving and incision had been made after days of scrying and casting. His cheerfulness was misleading too – Sturmhjart was the Chapter’s High Rune Priest, and wielded power of a terrifying magnitude.

  ‘He could try,’ muttered Wyrmblade, casting a final look over the vials before leaving them. As he walked from the long table, a drawer full of steel instruments closed with a smooth click. ‘Then he’d remember who pulled him off the ice, and who gave him his first scars.’

  The Wolf Priest moved silently and slowly, carrying his bulk with an accomplished ease. He was old, and the centuries hung heavily on his ravaged features. Black, straggling hair framed his long face, and the tattoos on the flesh had turned scab-brown with age. His skin looked as tough as plascrete, weathered and beaten down by over five hundred years of ceaseless combat. Though ancient, his eyes were still keen and his grip still strong. His armour was as black as his hide, hung with ancient bones and covered in a second skin of gouges, plasma burns and blade-scores. Every one of his movements radiated a deep, old power, tested and tempered in the fires of war.

  Two Priests. So opposite, so alike.

  Sturmhjart cast a sceptical eye over the ranks of vials.

  ‘Making progress?’

  ‘You’ve never understood the importance of this. If I failed to convince you a decade ago, I won’t do so now – you’re both older and more foolish.’

  Sturmhjart snorted a laugh, and it echoed from his chest like an erupting krakken. ‘Older, yes, though there’s more than one way to be foolish.’

  ‘You seem to know them all.’

  The two Priests strode out of the laboratorium. As they turned down the long corridor leading to the transit-shafts, lit only by flame torches against the polished rock, black-robed fleshmaker-thralls shrank back respectfully and inclined thei
r heads.

  ‘I don’t know how long Ironhelm’s going to tolerate this research,’ said Sturmhjart. ‘You haven’t been off-world for a year.’

  ‘He’ll tolerate it until it’s done.’ Wyrmblade turned his dour, sunken-eyed face to the Rune Priest. ‘You’ll tolerate it too. The work’s essential.’

  Sturmhjart shrugged.

  ‘Don’t interfere with the wyrd, brother,’ he said. ‘I’ve warned you before. If the fates permitted it, it would have been done already.’

  Wyrmblade snarled, and the hairs on the back of his arms rose. Deep within him, he could feel his animal spirit glide to the surface. If Sturmhjart noticed that, he showed no sign.

  ‘Do not presume to give me an order, brother,’ he responded, coming to a halt. ‘You’re not the only one who can see the future.’

  Heartbeats passed, and neither figure moved. Then Sturmhjart backed down.

  ‘Stubborn old bastard,’ he muttered, turning back down the corridor, shaking his ragged head as he stalked between the torches.

  ‘Never forget it,’ said Wyrmblade drily, following closely. ‘It’s why we get on so well.’

  The Chamber of the Annulus was high up in the pinnacle of the Fang, in the Valgard near the very summit of the vast fortress, surrounded by a seam of pure granite. It had been one of the first halls to be delved from the living rock by the Terran geomancers brought to Fenris to establish the VI Legion in the time of legends. In that age, tech-adepts had been able to level the very mountains and raise them up again, to shape the continents and quell the tumults of the deathworld’s seasonal upheavals. They could have made Fenris a paradise if they’d chosen, and it was only on the primarch’s orders that the planet was never altered from its fearsome character. Russ wished for his homeworld to remain the great proving ground of warriors, a crucible in which its humanity would be tested and honed forever.

  So, as it had happened, only one mountain out of the hundreds on Asaheim had been changed from its primeval form, its chambers hollowed out and wrought by ancient devices of forgotten, terrible power. Now the knowledge brought by those long-dead artificers was fading fast, and no citadel of comparable strength and majesty would ever be built again. The Fang was unique in the Imperium, the product of a genius that was slowly bleeding out of the galaxy as humanity stumbled and unlearned the lessons of the past.