War of the Fang - Chris Wraight Read online

  He sensed the change before he crossed the final threshold. The atmosphere was still clogged with dust and smoke, funnelled from a thousand pipes snaking over every iron surface, but the alteration in air density was palpable. As he ran, he felt a tremor in his secondary heart – a shiver, as if in recognition of something long forgotten. A vision flitted across his helm-lenses: a world, scoured black, with glass pyramids in ruins, and the ghosts of a slain Legion shimmered amid a starless sky.

  Then he was inside. A huge central chamber yawned away from him, roofless, its walls glowing as silhouetted grilles contained seething plasma energy plates. The hexagonal column he had seen from the courtyard’s edge soared up from the iron-plate floor, ten metres in diameter and hundreds tall, slotted with cogitator vaults and intakes up its entire expanse. Cables were strung from the column to the walls like the strands of a demented web, some dark and segmented, and others pulsing with violent energies.

  Here, at the heart of things, the fighting was the most feverish, the most frantic. Tech-priests grappled with skitarii, gun servitors, auxilia troops in crimson tabards, massive war-walkers with shoulder-mounted launchers and metal-plated power fists. Bolt-rounds, las-beams, solid shells, energy-spears – all spat and pinged across the open space, cracking and snapping into the grilled walls.

  The struggle was over the pillar – whether for what it represented, its function or what it contained. Even as Ironhelm entered combat, cracking his blade into the torso of a looming automaton before barrelling into a cluster of mesh-faced skitarii, he saw the shape of the entire battle unfurl. The insurgents had staged the huge assault across the courtyard, creating havoc all across the face of Arvion’s command districts, just to get in here.

  His Wolves had already reacted. Trask led the Wolf Guard into the thick of the fighting, crunching their way into the heaviest formations of insurgent Mechanicus fighters. The Grey Hunters split their forces, some packs racing to secure the base of the pillar, others falling back to the margins and opening up ranged fire to take out heavy weapons squads. Loyal skitarii poured into the chamber in Ironhelm’s wake, fresh from the fighting in the precincts and ready to take the fight to their fallen kindred.

  Ironhelm hammered his way through the melee in order to get close to the pillar. His bloodied arms swung harder, dragging the frostblade in biting arcs, taking out two, three, four enemies with every massive blow. He was almost there, almost at the end of the hunt, the prize within his grasp. It was then, half-lost in the mania of murder and the euphoria of imminent completion, that he saw them for the first time.

  Space Marines stood among the ranks of the enemy. They were decked in sapphire armour-plate, rimmed with gold and bronze, bearing arcane crests and flutes across their pauldrons and helms. For an instant, Ironhelm thought they were Ultramarines, but a second glance confirmed that they were no sons of Guilliman. They were already engaged, and fought like every Space Marine he had ever encountered – fast, expert, brutal, coordinated – with one exception: they made no sound whatsoever.

  The shock of discovery faded, replaced by the fury of encountering the worst of all enemies of mankind – Traitor Space Marines, the ones who had fallen furthest and from the greatest height.

  ‘Ótrúin!’ Ironhelm cried, his voice cracking with its fervour.

  Every Wolf in the chamber immediately switched from whatever combat he was engaged in – summoned by the word, the mark that had echoed down the centuries since the unimaginable had first happened and loyal Legions had turned from the Emperor’s light.

  Faithless. Betrayers. Kinslayers.

  Since the days of the Scouring, the Imperium had learned with pain that the Traitor Legions had never been destroyed, but merely banished into realms of madness that suffered no pursuit. Ever and anon, warbands would raid the sanctuaries of mankind, striking out from hell-fortresses before melting back into the warp. As far as the great mass of the Imperial populace were aware, those who had fought with Horus were now all destroyed and the blight of Chaos among the Chapters Astartes was no more. The Wolves, like all the loyal Chapters in the new Imperium, knew better and had fought traitors where they had emerged, slowly learning their ways, mutations and shifting allegiances. No enmity was harder, no hatred purer.

  These ones, though, were new. They smelled uncanny, more like the automata they fought with than flesh and blood, and their silence was unnerving. All across the chamber, the Wolves ignored all else to meet them in combat, knowing that there would never be more lethal foes and relishing both the vengeance and the battle honour.

  Ironhelm smashed aside renegade skitarii, breaking into a charge towards the nearest of the traitors. Three of them were fighting before him, and they were already turning to meet him. Something about their movements was strange – jerky, like interference on a vid-pict.

  He thundered into them, his frostblade whistling down on to the neck of the first. The traitor span away from the blow, just as his battle-brothers opened fire. The Great Wolf’s Terminator-plate absorbed the impacts, but he was cracked backwards, the energy of the charge blunted.

  They piled into him, switching smoothly to their blades. Ironhelm lashed out viciously, catching one in the arm, the burning sword-edge biting deep. Even as he twisted it deeper he felt the hot stab of an energy-blade punching through his battleplate, and pulled away from contact, swinging the blade defensively now, countering the blows that came in with unnerving accuracy.

  Not one of them uttered a word; it was something that began to enrage him.

  ‘Fenrys hjolda!’ he bellowed into their silent faces. ‘Death to the faithless!’

  All across the chamber, his brothers were doing the same, hitting them hard, roaring out their fury and contempt.

  There were only a few traitors in the chamber, perhaps twenty amid an enemy force over a hundred times as big, but they held the whole mass together. They were as fast as the Wolves, and just as deadly, matching them for every blow, every punch and claw-rake.

  It was their endurance, though, that was truly phenomenal. Ironhelm towered over his opponents in his Tactical Dreadnought armour, but still they came at him. He smashed them with his fists and slashed out with his crackling frostblade. Their bodies became encircled in disruptor-sparks, but when they were hurled back they moved straight into the fight.

  ‘Enough!’ Ironhelm bellowed, charging into them one last time. He dragged his blade a fraction faster and harder, putting every last scrap of strength into the movements to eke out just a sliver of extra force.

  At last the edge connected true, annihilating the gorget of the closest traitor. His body went rigid, impaled on the energy-blade, before falling away.

  The other two struck back, one firing at close range, the other whirling a chainsword. Ironhelm was cracked aside, his left thigh punctured from bolt-impacts. A hot slick of pain swelled up from the shredded muscle, and he staggered away from the incoming sword-strike. Even as he gathered strength to hit back, something struck him about the traitor he had just downed.

  No blood.

  Then the swords clashed again, snarling and fizzing as their energy fields grated up against one another. Ironhelm thrust his enemy’s sword aside with a savage shove, swinging the tip around and pushing forward two-handed. The point of the frostblade punctured the traitor square in the chest, breaking the ceramite in two and driving deeper. Ironhelm tried to wrench it out again, but the edge jammed against what felt like a hollow cavity, held fast by the narrow entry aperture.

  He was hit again, a bolt-round striking his left pauldron, hurling him backwards and loosening his grip on the sword-hilt. The impaled Traitor Space Marine reached out to him, locking fingers around his neck and striving to gain a grip. The enemy should have been dead – he had a gaping wound running down the length of his breastplate – but somehow he retained the strength to reach out and aim for the throttle-hold.

  What keeps them on their feet?

  Ironhelm prepared to release the hilt, to fal
l back and reach for his storm bolter, when a sudden surge of ice-cold raced across the chamber. A boom rang out, followed by the sharp snap of lightning whipping between the walls.

  Frei.

  The Traitor Space Marines stumbled, both of them, as if caught by invisible hands. Ironhelm seized the opportunity, hauling his blade clear of the traitor’s severed breastplate. He swung again, wider this time, and connected with the second of them. The frostblade’s edge clanged against the sapphire helm, gouging the ceramite in a blaze of disruptor-flare.

  More storm-lightning danced across the chamber, licking up the central column and coiling around the feeder cables. Ironhelm heard Frei’s voice rising over the maelstrom, summoning and augmenting the savage energies of the ice-world. Though none of his wyrd-lightning came close, the effect on the traitors did not let up – they were rigid now, barely moving, and the witchlight in their helm-lenses had dulled down to a sickly green.

  ‘For Russ!’ roared Ironhelm, smashing into them with full force. This time the sapphire armour did not protect them, and the frostblade carved itself deep into the protective shells. Ironhelm pressed the attack, poised to thrust the killing-edge deep into the flesh beneath, but then he suddenly pulled up, struck by the impossibility of what he was seeing.

  Both suits of armour fell clean apart, collapsing from where the sword had severed the joints. Breastplates and pauldrons clanged to the ground, revealing a void within. Wisps of something similar to vapour rose from the hollow innards, and the heavy segments rolled to a rest on the marble.

  Ironhelm stood over the remnants, his blade still raised, unable to believe what he was seeing. A moment ago, they had been fighting. They had nearly bested him. He had seen his brothers fight the rest of them, taking wounds as if from warriors their equal.

  And now there was nothing – just empty segments, crusted on the inside with spiderwebs of frost.

  ‘Jarl!’

  The voice was Trask’s, from far off and yet filled with warning. Ironhelm spun around, blocking the incoming path of a chainblade. The skitarii who bore it died swiftly, undone by two transverse slashes of the frostblade.

  The shock jolted him back into combat alertness. Some witchery had been perpetrated, some deep deception, but there was no time to gawp at it. Frei was in the heart of things now, his staff spiralling, his hoarse voice calling down more vortices of ruination. The traitors were static, either hacked apart or soon to be, and the enemy troops clustered around the pillar’s base were reeling.

  They could be killed. The contagion could be cut out, just as it had been on every world he had made part of the long hunt. That was the objective now, that was the focus.

  ‘Slay them!’ Ironhelm thundered, bursting back into the fray and laying about his enemies with all the old energy. ‘Let none live!’

  And still, for all the bluster, all the martial words, the thought wouldn’t leave him – a fragment of horror, one that he already knew presaged more ahead.

  There was no blood.

  It took eight more hours to subdue the last of the resistance. Hard fighting remained even after the Traitor Space Marines had been downed, for the warriors of the Mechanicus had little conception of fear and mutely followed their baseline programming to the end. By the time the last echo of the last shell-strike had died away, the floor of the column chamber was thick with the contorted bodies of the dead, some still twitching rhythmically as their internal systems continued to function.

  With the objective won, the tech-priests assumed command of the central column area, condoning it off and setting up gun-servitors as sentinels. Ironhelm was happy to let them work – his attention was now wholly absorbed on the silent automata. Frei and Trask joined him again, while the bulk of the surviving Wolves accompanied skitarii kill-teams into the depths of the vast edifice, hunting for insurgents that still drew breath.

  The Great Wolf looked down at the armour fragments at his feet. He nudged an empty greave with his boot, and the frost-webbed shell rocked.

  ‘Tell me, then,’ he said to Frei.

  The Rune Priest crouched down, placing his hands on the ceramite, breathing deeply. ‘For a moment, I sensed a trace, but now…’ He shook his head, and looked back up at Ironhelm. ‘Nothing, jarl.’

  Ironhelm’s expression didn’t change. ‘They fought like we did. They took wounds that would have felled one of our own.’

  Frei reached up for the undamaged armour’s pauldron and pulled the hollow corpse to one side, revealing the image on the curved face – a serpent devouring itself, ringed with flowing script in gold. ‘A Prosperine mark,’ he said.

  ‘A mockery.’

  ‘I do not know.’ Frei ran his finger over the seals and sigils on the stricken creature’s breastplate. ‘There was something else. I felt it when I entered the chamber.’ He paused. ‘In the past, when we have cleared out their nests, I have sensed power like mine. The magus, the witch, directing the rites. They die, just like the rest, for the art is weak, but this time…’

  He trailed off. Ironhelm waited for him, giving him the time to order his thoughts.

  ‘One of them was here,’ said Frei. ‘The master of these hollow things. For an instant, I might have been facing him, though I never saw his physical shape. When he withdrew, the creatures fell.’

  Ironhelm shook his head. The stink of magick still lay on the corpses. ‘I have fought traitors before,’ he said. ‘They died just as we do. They still had flesh to break and I tasted their blood on my fangs.’

  ‘These are his Legion, jarl.’

  ‘His Legion is destroyed.’

  ‘They bear his marks.’

  ‘Which could have been painted by any witch.’

  ‘You know they were not.’

  ‘What do the annals say?’ asked Ironhelm, unwilling to travel down that path and feeling his dormant anger rekindling. ‘His servants were like any other. They bled when we killed them. They marched in crimson plate, and they spoke heresy from lips that could be seen.’

  Frei got up, bristling at his master’s tone. ‘These are his sons.’

  ‘They are hollow!’ cried Ironhelm. ‘They are ghosts! Are we to fear ghosts now?’

  ‘They can still kill,’ observed Trask, bleakly.

  ‘They are the Fifteenth,’ said Frei, quietly but firmly. ‘This is what they have become.’

  ‘No,’ said Ironhelm. ‘Whatever else they were, they were Legiones Astartes. That could not be changed.’

  ‘There is the mark of Prospero,’ shouted Frei, exasperated. ‘There are the sigils we have seen on a hundred worlds. There is the eye, lord.’

  Ironhelm fought against it. He glared down at the fluted armour, the crests, the snake-figures and the embellishments. None of his retinue had ever seen one of the Fifteenth. There were no images in the archives, just scrolls from long-dead remembrancers closeted away in Wyrmblade’s vaults. He had witnessed mortal followers of the Eye-cult, many of whom had proudly called themselves Sons of Magnus before the end, but they had all been solidly mortal, clad in cheap approximations of power armour and with even less knowledge of the distant past than the Wolves themselves had. Such sorcerers were weak creatures, mumblers of cantrips they only half understood.

  There could be no doubt about the way these things had fought. The automata had been outnumbered, cornered and outgunned and had still killed more than their own tally.

  Ironhelm felt the unwelcome truth creeping up on him, slowly, submerging his doubts. ‘So can you read these signs?’ he asked Frei, gesturing towards the script running around the armour-corpse’s gorget.

  ‘I cannot,’ said the Rune Priest. ‘Maybe none can now, save the one who wrote them.’

  Before Ironhelm could reply, a new presence entered the chamber. The Great Wolf turned to see the tech-priests prostrating themselves, placing their metal foreheads against the marble and extending ironwork fingers. Fresh squads of golden-armoured skitarii marched across the threshold and took up an honour formati
on, angling heavy lasguns in facing ranks.

  Between them slid a huge, multi-segmented creature. It might once have been a man of mortal dimensions, but the ages had changed it: augmenting and mutating it, twisting its natural body and stretching sinews across mechanical replacement-units. It slithered across the marble on a bronze-ringed tail, the segments as thick as an ogryn’s waist. Multiple arms sprung from an armoured thorax, each one terminating in a different claw, wrench or drill-piece. Its head was cowled like all the higher ranking servants of Mars, but that didn’t hide a complex face of lenses, mandibles and coiled tubes, clustered under the fabric like the pipework of some vast engine.

  Its servants came with it – golden menials with eyeless faces, bearing ceremonial staves that smeared long trails of incense behind them. A long gong beat in rhythm, echoing through the vaults above and behind it.

  The creature approached Ironhelm, rearing up to full height as it did so, its many arms snickering and clicking. Lenses under the cowl zoomed in and out, accompanied by gouts of vapour from breathing tubes studded along its flanks.

  ‘My lord of Fenris,’ said Archmagos Intendant Nhem Georg Selvarios. His voice emanated from several sources at once, resulting in an overlapping chorus of machine-coarse Gothic. ‘Since you would not come to me, it seems I must come instead to you.’

  Ironhelm bowed curtly, barely troubling to hide his impatience at the interruption. All he could think about were the armour-corpses at his feet. ‘This was where the fighting was,’ he replied.

  ‘Where some of it was,’ agreed Selvarios, emotionlessly. ‘You seemed to know where you wanted to fight. You seemed to know a great deal about this difficulty. Perhaps you knew of it before it even happened.’

  Ironhelm drew in a long breath. This was a forge world under the sovereign jurisdiction of the Cult of Mars – there were limits even to his authority in such a place.