No one would blame him. On the contrary, he would be commended. What were a few billion lives compared to the security of the entire subsector? These were the calculations a statesman made, one with the nerve to rise to the very top.
‘I have made my judgement,’ Delvaux repeated coldly. Beyond the armourglass viewers, the void-battle raged on silently. ‘Let that be an end to it.’
Klaive bowed, though his faint smile lingered a little longer, hanging on his face like the reflection of gold on glass.
‘As you will it, lord,’ he said.
The xenos engine soared up into the gloom, huge and corroded. Njal could sense the heart of corruption beating within it. Something, just a sliver, of the pilot remained buried inside, wretched and agonised, locked in millennial torment and bound to the machine it had once commanded.
The machine sensed him, too – whatever gestalt mind still functioned within its eldritch body could respond to the power of the runes. Its shattered head swung towards him and it took a heavy stride clear of the bridge. Its curved blade glowed with a dull green light, sick as poison gas, and it swung low across the horde at its feet like a reaper.
At that moment, Bloodhame’s pack opened up with a barrage of long-range bolter-fire, scything in from the left flank. A rain of shells smashed across the wraithknight’s body in a shower of explosions, rocking it and making it stumble. Tracer-lines speared out in the flickering dark, cutting through billowing smog. Raw flame-bursts spread across the xenos’s torso, washing over the curving breastplate and shoulder-arches.
The xenos engine wasn’t hard to hit – it moved slowly, its joints leaking gas and fluid with every staccato movement – but physical rounds wouldn’t be enough.
Njal whipped his staff around, building up a whirl of speed. Rune-energy lashed around him, snaking up to his clenched fists and rippling along the length of his skull-staff. The bone-totems tied to his weapon-belt clanked and jolted as the storm ramped up. He extended his staff, aiming the skull-head directly at the xenos engine. Vast arcs of lightning crackled out, snapping against the pillars.
‘Heidur Rus!’ he roared, and the echo of the war-cry rang from the pillars around him.
The wind suddenly flared into a full-blown gale. The temperature in the hall plummeted, collapsing into extreme, bone-breaking cold. Ice-crystals surged up the edges of the columns, fracturing and freezing.
Njal’s Wolves streaked out ahead of him, carving a bloody path through the half-blinded mobs of mutants standing between them and the bridge. Glowing blades hacked and danced in the shadows, all locked in a cacophony of snarling, roaring and tearing. Bloodhame’s pack secured the left flank, piling on more long-range ordnance. Long-axe’s warriors fought their way up to a shallow stairway on the right flank and held position there, lancing fire in hard at the wraithknight. Gunnlaugur and Fellblade drove up the centre, their packs gouging a path of ruin into the heart of the enemy.
Njal spoke again, and gusts of the searing wind surged across the battlefield. Mutants froze in agony, their skin instantly blackening in frostbite. Their weapons shattered, their muscles seized up. Knife-hard blasts ripped through them, throwing them from their feet and sending them spinning and slamming into ice-rimed columns.
The xenos engine limped towards Njal, its carapace already glittering with a thickening coating of hoarfrost. It shrieked, a sound like metal shearing from its fastenings. Its shoulder-mounted weaponry spun around and opened fire. The Wolves in its path leapt and pounced from danger, veering and darting around the impacts before charging back into the fray.
Njal laughed out loud, as wild and brutal as a gothi of the old ice. Tethered skulls cracked against his armour, snapping and writhing like serpents. The storm-gale intensified, ripping wraithbone from stone and sending it flying into a vortex of whirling debris. The aether-ice gripped fast, cracking everything it coated. The Wolves fought on, in their own savage element, while the hordes of the damned were shriven into submission by the void-cold maelstrom.
Only the wraithknight weathered the storm, absorbing wave after wave of impacts. Its shoulder-weapons were blasted from its hide, its greaves driven in, and its faceplate cracked further, exposing a brain-like mass of glossy folds underneath. Throughout it all, it kept lumbering towards the Rune Priest, swinging its immense blade as it came. A single sword strike ripped through Fellblade’s pack. Another swipe scattered Hauki’s. None of the Wolves got close to the creature.
‘Face me, then!’ roared Njal, feeling his whole body blaze with elemental forces. A kind of ecstasy of power thundered out, making the runes on his armour burn with a furious, cold coruscation.
The ice-wind became ruinous. Massive chunks of the hall’s wraithbone structure dislodged, crashing to the ground and sending up great clouds of dust. The wraithknight staggered, hammered by ball-lightning strikes and ravaged by the frigid gales. It stretched out a clawed hand, as black as coal amid the sheeting ice. Its tortured head emerged once more, surrounded by gouts of steam. It tried to take another stride towards the Rune Priest, to grasp at him.
‘Your body is broken!’ bellowed Njal. ‘Your soul is shriven!’
Njal swung around, his staff whistling through the air as it churned up yet more power. The hurricane overflowed from him, bleeding from the joints in his ornate armour. The air roared, thundered and sped, chilling and cracking, as irresistible as glacier-grind. Nightwing, riding the squalls high in the vaults, shrieked defiance at the monster below.
‘I name you xenos!’ Njal boomed, grasping his staff two-handed, planting his feet, and jutting the skull-tip at the creature’s head. The wraithknight towered over him, surrounded by the spinning cloud-patterns of the aether-whirlwind. ‘By the will of the Allfather, you are ended!’
Storm-fury lashed out, crashing into the monster’s midriff with an echoing explosion of multi-hued lightning and spinning ice-shards. Radial shockwaves shuddered outwards, ripping away in the deafening wail of the tempest. Every loose object in the chamber spiralled wildly around the icy vortex, dragged into the heart of the Stormcaller’s summoned devastation.
The wraithknight, reeling in the eye of the gale, tried to get a sword strike away, and hauled its massive blade upwards. The dark metal surface, latticed with thick hoarfrost, glinted amid a blizzard of driving sleet, then swooped down. The wickedly curved edge tore towards Njal, swift as the raven’s flight, perfectly aimed and weighted with massive kinetic force.
Njal swung his staff to meet it, bracing himself for the impact. The sword hit, and he was driven down into the cracking wraithbone underfoot. He felt his arms jar, his vision go black with stars. Around him, the blast-wave crashed out, flooring any mutants still standing.
Njal gritted his fangs, pushing back against the colossal pressure, feeling his staff flex as the strain took. Sweat burst out across his brow, veins throbbed in his bulging neck. The crushing power of xenos tech-sorcery came up against the bottomless well of Fenris’s world-soul, and the epicentre raged like the heart of a star.
Amid all the ice and spiralling magicks, Njal looked up at the monster. It towered over him, vast and corrupted, bleeding raw pain and madness. Every surface was coated in a thick rime, as tight and frigid as the grasp of Helwinter. The diamond-bright carapace glowed with a harsh white light, and crackles of lightning flickered across the face of it.
The frost was lethal. It was spun from utter desolation, drawn from the airless chill of Fenris’s utmost unforgiving heights, and no power, be it mortal or divine, could withstand its gnawing power forever.
At the end, it only took one word. As Njal uttered it, gasping through a clenched jawline, he even managed a grim smile.
‘Shatter.’
The creature’s sword burst apart, smashed into a thousand flying shards. The wraithknight stumbled, caught by the pull of gravity. The hoarfrost coating it contracted viciously, cracking wraithbone and driving dee
p. Wraithbone spars shattered, blown apart as cracks raced up the creature’s armour plates.
The wraithknight screamed a final time, frozen in its death-lunge, bludgeoned by the ice-wind and racked by the clinging frost.
Then it exploded, flinging shards across the entire hall. The gales whipped up the debris and hurled it into the heights. A crack of released warp-essence rushed out, shaking the columns and making the floor tremble. The wraithknight’s body disintegrated entirely, lost in a flailing tempest of crackling lightning and tearing ice-winds. Its meagre remains, harrowed by the ice into nothing more than withered scraps of flesh and metal, crashed to the ground in steaming chunks.
Njal pulled his head back, spread his arms, and howled. His warriors howled with him, charging with fresh savagery into the remaining hordes of mutant footsoldiers.
‘Gothi!’ they roared, en masse, and the sound of it made the chamber shake anew. ‘Stormurstjórn! Hjá, gothi!’
Buoyed by the surging hurricane, the Wolves cut through the cowering surviving mutants in a frenzy of unfettered bloodlust. Blades whirled in blurs of sliver-edged speed, cutting deep into the reeling masses of the damned.
Njal’s whole body still rang with storm-magic. Every muscle blazed with pain from where he’d met the creature’s blade, but his blood still ran fast with hyperadrenaline. The last forks of lightning still sparked across his amour, vital and dagger-sharp.
He kicked free of the wraithknight’s downed corpse and started to move again. The chasm’s edge drew nigh. On the far side, Njal could see the wraithbone architecture give out, replaced by a vast wall of rusting iron. Grotesque gargoyles, huge and crusted with the patina of ruin, glared out over the chasm amid riveted panels the colour of dried blood. A high portal gaped open, its interior velvety dark. Across the gate’s lintel were carved words of ruin in a language that no mortal had ever spoken.
As he gazed at the portal, Njal felt the aura of absolute decay wafting out through the gateway. It was like a portal into the maw of Hel.
‘To the bridge!’ he commanded, his voice raw, striding out into the sea of bodies.
The Wolves surged forwards alongside him, driving the mutants over the chasm’s edge. Bloodhame’s pack came in from the flanks, with Long-axe’s not far behind. The squads went swiftly now, unhindered, killing freely.
‘First test passed,’ Njal gasped, under his breath, before joining them in the slaughter.
Kefa Primaris filled Hlaupnir’s forward scopes. The globe was dirty grey and striated with lines of earth-brown cloudbanks. Even from the extremes of the orbital approaches, the massive urban coverage was clearly visible – vast geometric patterns of transit clusters and ground-level shield patterns. On full magnification, augurs showed up the core spire zones, the tracts of power-gen stations, the furrowed wastelands seething with chem-effluent.
Lights glinted in the shadow of the solar terminator – trillions of them, sparkling in the void with a beauty of abundance.
Olgeir left his throne and walked up to the railing around the command platform, gazing intently at the armourglass portals. ‘Signals, Hanek,’ he said.
‘Standard system traffic,’ the sensorium officer replied, scouring his pict-feed assiduously. ‘Several hundred carriers in high orbit. No military-grade warp-capable vessels. We’re not… Oh, we are. We’re being intercepted.’
As Hanek spoke, Olgeir saw it for himself – six fighters burning towards them in formation. They were smaller than Imperial Navy Furies, with what looked like lone prow-mounted lascannons and limited missile tubes. Each had navy-blue livery on angular wings marked with a white hawk’s head.
‘Calm them down,’ said Olgeir.
Hanek broadcast the standard approach codes as Thraid pulled the Hlaupnir two points away from an intercept course and dipped the cockpit towards Kefa Primaris’s orbital holding zones.
‘Unauthorised vessel,’ came a tinny order over the ship-vox. ‘Stand down or be disabled.’
Olgeir glanced at Hanek, raising an eyebrow. ‘Are they serious?’
‘They’re powering up, lord.’
Olgeir shook his head in irritation. ‘Get me a visual link.’
Hanek’s fingers ran across his console. ‘Shunting to your throne now.’
Olgeir went back to his command throne and sat heavily in it, clicking a rune on the armrest panel. A thin translucent screen spun out from the holocast projector revealing a pict-feed of a helmeted pilot in a cramped cockpit.
‘Can you see me?’ Olgeir asked, addressing the image.
There was a brief delay, a visual freeze, and the transmission juddered into life again.
‘I… Yes. Getting a signal.’ The pilot rapped the side of his helmet, as if checking to make sure his view was genuine. ‘Lord,’ he added hastily.
‘Good. Then you know what I am, you have our codes, and you know what I will do to you if you fail to power down and fall into escort formation.’
The pilot looked briefly uncertain. ‘I have orders–’
‘Here are your new orders. You will escort us to the zone above the capital spires. You will send ahead orders for a lander to bring me to the governor. You will make sure he is ready for me on arrival.’
‘It will be done, lord. It is… I mean she is…’
Olgeir sighed. Mortals were no use when they let their awe get the better of them. ‘Do it now.’
He cut the link. Out in the void, the fighters pulled out of their attack run and split into two groups. They turned expertly and took up flanking position around the Hlaupnir.
‘We have our coordinates,’ reported Hanek. ‘They’re guiding us in.’
Olgeir leaned back in the throne, watching the arc of the planet swell in the forward viewers. He already knew how it would be – hyper-urban, towering habs, thick layers of industrial smog, crammed with worker-souls like insects in their nests. They were the greater part of the Imperium’s teeming quadrillions. They were the backbone, the template, the standard pattern of human existence in the galaxy.
It was a depressing thought.
‘Take us in,’ said Olgeir, grimly.
Baldr ran with the pack across the bridge, glancing up at the towering cliff-face ahead. Bolt-rounds still fizzed out from the chasm’s edge, but fewer than before. All blades were bloody now, caked with the thick residue of mortal fodder. He was still exhilarated from witnessing Njal’s true power. The spectacle had been magnificent, though all of them knew sterner tests would lie ahead. The most powerful denizens of the plague-hulk would be stirring now, uncurling from whatever dark pits they were spawned in, slowly reacting to the intruders within the vessel’s vast body.
We will be its disease.
Njal’s words still echoed in Baldr’s mind. He hadn’t liked hearing them the first time – too close for comfort. He could feel the collar chafing at his neck as he ran, jostled by the cables running up the inside of his gorget. At times, the circlet felt hot, at others, rough, like uncured hide. He could never quite forget that he wore it, no matter how close the fighting became.
The portal loomed above him. Already the vanguard had fought through it, hurling frag grenades into the dark before racing after them to clear out the corridors beyond. Baldr was part of the second wave across, close on Álfar’s heels, just ahead of Ingvar and Gunnlaugur.
He could hear his breathing echoing harshly inside his helm. He was pushing himself hard, just as he had planned to do, all to show his brothers that he was back to full fight-potential. Only in combat could he truly shake off the sense of shame that marked him, just as the torc marked him. There could be no shame in the rush of the hunt, and so he hurled himself into it, caught up in the bloody-mawed embrace of his heritage.
Once through the portal, the air instantly changed. The musty atmosphere of the eldar warship gave way to a close, hot, humid bloom of gaseous vapours. The tunn
el closed down around him quickly, collapsing in on itself until barely more than head height. The dark shadows of his battle-brothers charged up ahead, forging a path into the eternal gloom. Ahead, the iron-ribbed lengths of twisting tunnel walls grew ever tighter.
‘More targets,’ reported Álfar from up ahead.
A second later, Baldr received the same data. Runes blinked into life on his helm-display, homing in from all directions. It was near impossible to gauge distance and orientation – the paths twisted quickly into sweeping curves, before branching off into dozens of alternative routes. The metal outlines of the walls dissolved into what looked like pus-coloured layers of fleshy matter. Baldr saw bulbous polyps throbbing amid the slime, glowing softly, and his boots sunk deep into gurgling pools of liquid that splashed up against his greaves as he ran.
He risked a look over his shoulder. The bulky outline of Ingvar’s power armour was visible a long way further back. Beyond that, nothing. Locator runes for the rest of the packs seemed caught in some kind of lag, and didn’t report true.
The tunnel snaked around to the right, angling sharply. Long trails of saliva-like ooze ran from the low ceiling. False colour patterns imposed by his helm did nothing to disguise the essential darkness, the claustrophobia, the foulness.
Then he heard bolter-fire from up ahead, followed by Fenrisian curses coming over the pack-vox.
‘Flamers!’ came a furious order – Baldr couldn’t tell from whom.
The tunnel around him shuddered, rocked as if by a quake. Baldr nearly plunged headlong into the filth at his feet, and skidded to a halt. He saw Álfar up ahead; he had stopped running.
‘Something just… shifted,’ the shieldbearer said.
A sucking sound ran along the tunnel walls, like skin being ripped from flesh.
Stormcaller Page 20
