Stormcaller

by Chris Wraight

  The sun beat down into a narrow courtyard. Dawn had broken less than an hour ago and already the heat was oppressive.

  ‘If he dreams, he will wake,’ agreed Gunnlaugur, resuming the painstaking cleaning of his weapon.

  Ingvar was clad in a grey tunic, and his lean, muscled body glistened in the amber light. Soon his blond-grey hair would be slicked down, ready to take his battle-helm again. His armour would be hoisted and drilled into position, cladding him in the cocoon of murder, and he would take up dausvjer, cleaned and given rites of restoration.

  The respite had been hard won, but it had given them time to breathe.

  ‘What news of Njal?’ Ingvar asked, strolling across the enclosed space like a caged animal, flexing his arms absently.

  Gunnlaugur spat on the stone. ‘The star-speakers here are skítna. They scrape at their dreams.’ He shook his close-shaven head. Flecks of red lingering in his dirt-grey hair caught the sunlight. ‘They don’t know.’

  ‘She wants to wait for him?’ asked Ingvar, leaning against a whitewashed wall.

  ‘She wants to fight,’ said Gunnlaugur, his voice growling with approval.

  Ingvar shared the Wolf Guard’s sentiments. The Battle Sisters who had survived the assault on Hjec Aleja deserved their survival. They had fought hard for the walls, for the Cathedral, for the approaches to the last bridge. Even when the tide of plague-damned had threatened to overwhelm the entire city, they had kept fighting. Their devotions were strange, their manner alien, but in combat they showed their worth.

  ‘Then everything is ready,’ Ingvar said.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  Gunnlaugur held his weapon up. The sunlight caught the edges of the disruptor, sparkling like gold nuggets on the iron-grey of the hammer-head. He narrowed his eyes, scrutinising for flaws.

  ‘I wanted to seek your counsel,’ said Ingvar. ‘About Bajola.’

  Gunnlaugur didn’t look away from the hammer. ‘It can wait.’

  Ingvar made to speak again, but Gunnlaugur held up a warning finger. His amber eyes never left the runes on his weapon. ‘A long time, since I had to restore this myself. Feels good, to push the dirt out with my own fingers.’ He looked up at Ingvar. ‘Stormcaller will be here soon. We’ll break bones before then, you and I. That is all that matters.’ His savage face cracked into what passed with him for a smile. ‘I am not ignoring it. Just not now.’

  ‘When it is over–’

  ‘When it is over, we’ll talk. How’s your own blade?’

  Ingvar smiled dryly. ‘The rites have been sung. It’ll bite.’

  Gunnlaugur ground his cloth into the thunder hammer’s recesses.

  ‘It’ll need to,’ he said.

  De Chatelaine leaned against the balcony, high up in the hall of the Halicon. Her armoured fingers pressed against the limestone surface. She’d felt tense for a long time, and every gesture she made seemed tighter, more cramped.

  Hot morning air wafted against her face. Sweat had broken out on her forehead, tiny beads that would only grow.

  Below her, the city sprawled away in its unregulated, tangled messiness. The streets had always been crooked. Now they were choked with barricades, locked in a semi-ruined network of tumbled stone and half-dug pits. Smoke hung over the outer walls, distant across the wasteland beyond. The old Cathedral, Bajola’s place, rose up from the debris like a spike of rusted iron, still smouldering long after the fires had exhausted themselves.

  Beyond that, beyond the warren of occupied districts, the endless plain burned under a clear sky. The enemy army milled around in the heat-haze, their standards swaying drunkenly, half hidden by the clouds of filmy dust they kicked up. Other clouds roiled lazily amid that natural grime – masking clouds, sensor-defying murks.

  More fallen troops had joined them since their first attempt to storm the inner walls. Augur readings indicated thousands more tramping across the deserts to swell their numbers. The entire world was wallowing in corruption, and the enemy had whole cities of ruin to draw on. If any other bastions of purity had endured, they had long since stopped transmitting signals. The planet was infected now, and only Hjec Aleja remained, a lone outpost of Imperial rule surrounded by seething shores of disease.

  The canoness preceptor lifted her severe chin, scanning the ruins below her vantage. The Ighala Gate stood, just as it had throughout the entire siege. She could see the cloaks of her Sisters as they strode across the parapet below her, tiny with distance. Alongside them were the hunchbacked outlines of the big lascannon emplacements and rotary guns, most still in operation despite repeated assaults from the enemy.

  Her people remained crammed inside the defences like rats trapped against rising water, pressed together and jostling in the shadow of the citadel. Food was not yet a problem, but water would become one soon. The wells were running dry. One of them now foamed green, like bubbling bile. They had somehow got to it, injecting toxins from the tankers that prowled the wasteland edges. Those who’d drunk unwarily died in excruciation, their innards turned into a fizzing slurry before the end. She’d seen the bodies afterwards, locked in contortions, drenched from the bloody voiding of every orifice. The poisons had not been designed simply to kill, but to inspire terror.

  She would have hated the enemy enough without that – they didn’t need to give her fresh reasons.

  De Chatelaine heard a faint noise behind her then – a shuffle of silk on stone. Ermili Repoda, her Master of Astropaths, was waiting. His glassy eyes gazed unerringly at her, as if they were as sighted as hers.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  Repoda came to stand beside her. ‘He’s close. The Stormcaller. Njal. That’s his name – the aether’s alive with it.’

  ‘You do not know when, though.’

  ‘The art does not work in that way, canoness.’

  ‘Do they try to speak to us?’

  ‘They do not know whom to speak to. Perhaps they think we’re already dead.’

  ‘How many come with him?’

  ‘More than one squad,’ said Repoda. ‘Maybe more than two.’

  ‘We are honoured.’

  Repoda smiled thinly, and his lined, pale face looked desiccated in the sunlight. ‘You seem relaxed about his coming.’

  ‘Should I not?’

  ‘This is an Ecclesiarchy world.’ Repoda inclined his head a fraction, perhaps in equivocation, perhaps in apology. ‘The people look to you. They fear the Wolves almost as much as–’

  ‘Then they’re fools,’ said de Chatelaine. ‘They know. They know what waits for them out there.’ She turned on him. ‘We’ve worked so hard, the Wolf Guard and I, to clamp down on these fears. I won’t have them intruding, not now.’

  Repoda bowed. ‘I merely report.’

  De Chatelaine breathed in deep, tasting the smoke that hung over the entire city. It felt as if the lower reaches had been turned into a sacrificial offering, as charred and useless as a carcass on pagan flames. The stench was an accusation: This is your failure. This is your defeat.

  ‘When the Stormcaller gets here, I will bow the knee. You will bow, all my people will bow. We don’t get to choose our deliverers.’

  De Chatelaine brushed her hair back from her face. The enemy never left her thoughts, even when out of eyesight. Now, thronged on the far horizon, seamy and massive, it dominated all else.

  ‘We hold out,’ she said. ‘That is our only task. When the Stormcaller comes, he will find at least this: we did not submit.’

  The servitors were crawling all over it like lice on a corpse, their grey flesh pulling at its innards and hauling them out onto the ground.

  Jorundur watched them, wincing with every tug and wrench. Vuokho stood on the landing pad, half gutted, its flanks as black as Undrider’s had been, covered in scorch-marks and las-trails. Its huge engines loomed up into the sky, burned out, their
systems fused. The armourglass on the cockpit was cracked, the undercarriage bent and twisted. Now that the gunship was hoisted on giant service racks designed for big cargo lifters, the full extent of the damage was visible.

  He was rapt, lost in the detail of the work, though, like all his warrior kin, never fully off-guard.

  ‘I can smell you, Sister,’ Jorundur said out loud, sensing Callia’s presence before she became visible.

  The Battle Sister, de Chatelaine’s deputy, emerged from the shadows. Her armour was as battle-worn as ever, and her face carried fresh scars – long raking lines down a smooth left cheek.

  ‘You’ve been busy, Space Wolf,’ she said, looking up at the gutted internals.

  Jorundur sniffed. ‘It’ll fly again. That bastard didn’t destroy everything on it. Just nearly everything.’

  Callia’s gaze ran across the blunt angles of the gunship. It was a huge machine up close – big enough for the void, and carrying weaponry enough to gut a small army.

  As it had done, of course.

  ‘When can you get it airborne again?’ Callia asked.

  Jorundur snorted. ‘Days. Many days. If I am called to murder, then longer.’

  Callia looked disappointed. ‘We could use it.’

  ‘You said that to me before. We all could.’

  Jorundur liked Callia. She’d been there since the start, marshalling the long retreat, keeping her flamers raised the whole time. He’d seen her in action right at the end, when the enemy finally stormed the gates. Jorundur had been first into the vanguard, but she hadn’t been far behind.

  ‘They tell me more of your kind are coming,’ Callia said.

  ‘Don’t trust star-speakers. They pipe all kinds of skítna.’

  ‘They tell me a whole fleet’s inbound.’

  ‘Fekke. You thought Undrider was a whole fleet.’

  ‘It was enough,’ said Callia.

  Jorundur shook his head sourly. ‘You trust too much,’ he muttered. ‘It sticks in the craw.’

  ‘Ah, but you believe in something.’

  ‘My blade. My brothers.’

  ‘You just give it a different name.’

  ‘You name a thing, you control a thing. The Priests taught me that, at least.’

  ‘So many priests,’ mused Callia, her eyes bright with jibing, ‘and so little faith.’

  ‘Ever met a Rune Priest?’

  Callia shook her head.

  ‘You will do,’ Jorundur said.

  ‘Stormcaller is a Rune Priest, then.’

  ‘It is one of his names.’

  Callia shot him a curious, half-guilty look. ‘I’ve seen psykers at work. I could sense the divine will in them. I could feel it. It must be the same. The same source, even with your war-shamans.’

  Jorundur croaked out a harsh laugh. ‘The source? Skítja, I don’t care.’ He grinned at her – an ugly, hooked grin that made the metal studs in his face clink. ‘I saw a Priest rip a gunship in two, just like this one, and burn everything inside it like paper. They’ve slaughtered armies, they’ve scraped worlds clean. God-marked.’ He looked up at the Thunderhawk again, knowing he needed to get back to the work of restoration. His fingers moved, itching to get among the entrails of the machine. ‘They’re just like the rest of us – butchers. That’s all you need to know.’

  The smoke rolled ahead of them, drifting and breaking across derelict buildings. Ahead, the street twisted away, heavy with dust, streaked with long-dried stains on what had once been white walls.

  Hafloí applied pressure with his fingers, gently, smoothly. The mortal neck enclosed within them flexed, then burst. Hafloí’s other hand remained clamped over the mutant’s face, stifling its screams. Its legs stopped kicking, its swollen hands stopped trying to clutch at his armour. For a moment longer its body twitched, locked in muscle-rigidness. Then it flopped into torpor, leaking a mix of blood and infected fluids over his gauntlets.

  ‘Quiet,’ observed Olgeir, crouching beside the two of them. ‘Nicely quiet.’

  Hafloí relaxed, letting the corpse slide to the ground. He shook his hands free. ‘They shouldn’t be this strong.’

  ‘Plague. Gets into the muscle.’

  The big Wolf’s armour was covered in blood, some of it ritual markings, some of it evidence of recent kills. His beloved bolter, sigrún, had been left up in the citadel – this work required silence – so he carried a long-handled, twin-bladed axe with knotwork wyrms’ heads engraved on the metal faces.

  Hafloí kicked the corpse away from him, and drew his short blade – a leaf-shaped dagger with the rune hata etched on the blade. Then he looked ahead, down the street, to where it ended in a high stone wall.

  Olgeir’s helm lenses whirred faintly as he ran a scan. ‘Fifty metres. Stay close.’

  He set off, keeping his body low. For such a giant, Olgeir could move both fast and quietly, barely stirring the grime beneath his boots. Power armour made its own distinctive grinding noise, but there were ways to dampen it.

  Hafloí followed, keeping a careful watch. The lower city had been a haunt of horror ever since the first attacks. The main enemy army had withdrawn beyond the walls, but the old suburban zone was still occupied by mutants too addled or stubborn to leave. The residuals stumbled through the ruins, hunting for flesh that was now scarce, cradling bulbous stomachs and weeping scabrous tears.

  Hafloí paused at an intersection, looking down a long alley running transverse before ghosting across it. The lower city was quiet, darkening slowly as the short dusk gathered pace. Brown-blue shadows crept across the dust, running up the sides of the tight-packed hab-shells.

  It smelt foul. Corpses rotted in the heat, buzzing with flies. Icons had been daubed on the standing walls – three circles, picked out in dirty green. Some lettering lingered here and there: Terminus Est, scrawled across any heap of stones big enough to accommodate it.

  The hunt had been meagre – stabs from the gloom, neck-twists, gut-kicks. Quiet killings, just enough to clear the path, to get them where they needed to be.

  Olgeir reached his destination – a tower, half demolished, its metal skeleton visible where the render had come down. Hafloí caught up with him, slipping under the cover of the blown-open doorway.

  ‘Really?’ he voxed. ‘Nothing better?’

  ‘It will do,’ replied Olgeir, pushing ahead.

  They entered a narrow corridor built for mortals. The ceiling was low, barely above their helms. It sagged in places, stained brown, and watery gurgles came from above them. They reached a stairwell, running in zigzags up the floors. It was as dirty as everything else and strewn with the detritus of war – bloodmarks, bolt-shells in the rockcrete, scattered possessions dropped in the hurry to get out.

  Hafloí sniffed for targets as he climbed. The proximity markers in his helm were of limited use – the walking dead would not show up on them until they were actually moving – so hunt-sense was superior.

  They reached the top level, and the damaged floor creaked under them. Hafloí tensed as he left the stairwell, sensing something up ahead. Olgeir responded immediately, moving silently down the corridor towards a locked door at the end. Hafloí went with him, blade in hand. He reached the door first – a single push broke the lock, sending the metal panel swinging open.

  Hafloí slipped inside, blade ready. The room beyond was unlit and clogged with rubbish. Fabric sacks piled high, bursting with rotting foodstuffs. Insects scuttled over every surface, bloated and glossy.

  A single figure faced him, scrabbling back across the floor, eyes wide. He was emaciated and sore-ridden. It looked like he had been gnawing on something from one of the sacks, and dark fluid dribbled down his chicken-scrawn jowls.

  Hafloí strode over to him, keeping his blade raised.

  ‘Angels!’ blurted the man, wedging himself up against the far wall and
looking up at him, terrified. ‘At last.’

  Hafloí paused.

  The man got to his knees, his face trembling with fear and emotion. ‘Is it over?’ he shuddered. ‘Throne, say it’s over. Get me out of here. Please, for the love of the Emperor, get me out.’

  Hafloí glanced at the sacks. He kicked the nearest, and it spilt open. Joints of meat, crusted green with putrescence, tumbled out. He recognised a thigh, a calf, a hand – five-fingered and curled tight into a desperate claw.

  The man panicked. ‘I had to! You have no–’

  Hafloí’s blade punched through his neck, killing him instantly.

  Olgeir walked past, heading for the doorway into a connecting chamber beyond. ‘You hesitated,’ he said. ‘Don’t hope. They’re all long gone.’

  Hafloí gazed down at the man’s body. Sores had clustered around his mouth. Some of them were moving, as if tiny creatures writhed under the tight-stretched skin.

  ‘Long gone,’ he muttered.

  He followed Olgeir. The chamber beyond must have once been the man’s dorm-unit. A single bunk stood against the far wall, its grey sheets soiled. The walls were smeared with what looked and smelled like excrement.

  Olgeir moved to a floor-to-ceiling window on the west-facing wall. The glass was cracked and daubed with grease, but still intact. He pulled a catch, released the lock and hauled the window open on to a balcony outside.

  The two of them took up position behind the outer railing. Ahead of them, less than a hundred metres distant and on a level with their position, stood the upper edge of the city’s walls, semi-ruined and tumbled into piles of rubble.

  Hafloí’s helm lenses switched to magnocular vision, scrolling out over the rim of the walls and filtering the fading light beyond. Green wireframes flickered over the terrain, indicating troop formations, buildings, vehicles, all standing within a kilometre of the shattered perimeter.

  He scanned from left to right, gradually extending the range out across the plain. Positioned high up on the very edge of the city, hard under the lip of the sensor-baffling clouds, the detail was better than it had been up in the citadel.