Stormcaller

by Chris Wraight

  He had told himself for so long now that the reform would come soon – that he would cast off the ephemeral trappings of luxury. He would undertake penance. The petty flashes of vindictiveness would cease, and he would lead a real crusade. In the higher echelons of the Ministorum there were, he knew, voices raised against him. Stories of excess had filtered their way back to Terra and Ophelia VII. He needed to prove himself. He needed a grand gesture, something to still those wagging tongues.

  His mournful gaze flickered up to the great crystal viewscreen. The planet was out there somewhere ahead, unsuspecting, unprotected.

  It was a high price to pay to restore his position, but there were other justifications, ones that the Wolves would never accept. Klaive had always been right – even the risk of letting the world fall to the Ruinous Powers was not worth entertaining.

  So it was not all about him, not just about his faltering vocation. There were reasons. Good ones.

  He sniffed. The temptation to chew on his nails became overwhelming.

  ‘Lord Cardinal.’

  Delvaux stirred out his reverie. Harryat, Vindicatus’s bridge-captain, stood at the base of the throne’s dais, bowing. He was a broad-chested, square-jawed man in a trim crimson uniform – the best of the Ecclesiarchy’s officer cadre.

  ‘What is it, captain?’ asked Delvaux, placing both hands in his lap and curling them into fists.

  ‘Communication from Heimdall. They’re asking for confirmation that we intend to hold position.’

  Delvaux felt a twinge of panic. So quick. How do they know?

  ‘How soon before we’re ready to move off?’ he asked.

  ‘The engines took some damage,’ said Harryat. ‘We’re working on restoring full power. It will not be long. An hour, no more.’

  Delvaux drew in a frustrated breath. ‘An hour is not good enough. I gave the order. I expect it to be complied with.’

  Harryat didn’t flinch. Unlike most of the others, he could look Delvaux in the eye while giving bad news. ‘If we ignite the main drives now for a full burn, the damage will be permanent. The work can be done swiftly – I have three hundred crew working on it.’

  ‘Thirty minutes,’ said Delvaux. ‘That is all I will give you.’

  Harryat looked like he was going to protest, but then his gaze shifted up to the two Penitent Engines standing behind Delvaux’s throne, and he changed his mind. ‘We will do what we can,’ he said.

  ‘No, captain,’ said Delvaux, fixing him with a heavy stare. ‘You will do what I tell you. In thirty minutes this ship will be headed for Kefa Primaris, at full burn.’

  ‘And the Wolves?’

  ‘Tell them the agreement stands. Tell them they’ve detected rogue energy spikes while we repair the main power system.’ Delvaux rolled his eyes. ‘Love of the Throne, tell them whatever you want – just keep them quiet. They should be concentrating their efforts on the hulk.’

  Harryat nodded brusquely, but for an instant his face gave away a flash of what he really thought.

  He wishes to stay, to fight alongside them.

  ‘And do not forget, captain,’ said Delvaux, his voice darkening, ‘where your loyalty lies. The beasts can howl at shadows all they wish, but our task is the safeguarding of souls from corruption. Better to die in the flames than succumb to damnation, is that not so?’

  Harryat drew in a curt breath. ‘It is just as you say, my lord.’

  ‘Now go,’ said Delvaux, dismissing him with a wave, ‘and do not return until you have given me what I need to destroy that world.’

  Baldr’s eyes flickered open. He tensed immediately, going for his weapon, but his limbs did not obey him. He tried to move, to struggle against whatever force held him in place, but he remained stubbornly immobile.

  His mind felt cloudy. Pain – hard, unyielding – throbbed all over him. Sluggishly, he realised that he was not wearing his helm. The rest of his armour was intact, but he was breathing the unfiltered air of the hulk’s interior. It was foul, like ingesting faeces, and he felt the gag-reflex at the back of his throat kick in.

  The space around him was jet-black and as hot as blood. Without the aid of his helm-lenses, it took a while for his eyes to adjust – even his occulobe-enhanced optics struggled without any kind of light source to latch on to.

  He blinked heavily, staring out into the utter blackness. He made out the faintest hint of darker edges in the gloom. The sound of something gurgling thickly echoed close by. He tried to move again, pushing hard against his bonds, and failed.

  Then, a long way ahead of him, a soft green light bled out of the darkness. It was the first chance Baldr had to orientate himself – he was upright, suspended less than a metre above the floor of some narrow, low-roofed chamber. His arms and legs appeared to have been absorbed into the walls around him – thick knots of organic material clamped him in place, twisting over his body like tree roots.

  The light continued to grow. The floor was illuminated by its creeping progress, exposing fungoid nodules clustered tightly together. They thronged like a carpet of spores, thick and bulbous, glistening faintly as the crepuscular light-shafts slipped through the murk. Long, stringy tendrils hung in loops from vaults above, each one swollen with trembling pustules.

  Baldr tensed his arms, pushing against the bonds that held him in place. Whatever the roots were made of, they were incredibly strong – he forced one of them to flex, just by a few millimetres, before having to relax his muscles again in exhaustion.

  By then, the greenish tinge had sunk across the whole chamber. A shadowy figure clarified at its far end, slowly hobbling. Baldr heard wheezing breath. He smelt a fustiness, like long-mouldered bread. He saw cloven hooves treading down the fungus, sinking into the deep layer of milky softness underfoot.

  Slowly, the outline of a Plague Marine appeared. Unlike any uncorrupted Adeptus Astartes, he hunched over almost double. His shoulders bulged with growths. His ancient armour, pitted with jagged holes, hung from a warped frame, and flesh as pale and grey as Baldr’s own livery protruded from the gaps.

  The Plague Marine carried a staff – a gnarled thing, knotted like a vine. The green light came from a hollowed-out human skull at its tip. The creature’s own head was helmless and withered. Vaguely human features competed with knots of tumours. Two deep-set, heavy-lined eyes looked up rheumily at Baldr.

  ‘Welcome, Son of the Wolf King,’ said the creature.

  The voice was quiet, and old. There was a kindness to it, as if the speaker knew what suffering had been caused to bring him there and regretted it. Nothing about that voice suggested the speaker had once been a Space Marine, and yet the armour was there to prove it – dull grey-green, still bearing the forbidden marks of Mortarion’s old Legion under a thick layer of rust and dirt.

  Baldr felt the ancient hatreds kindle quickly. It was automatic, primed by a lifetime of gothi warnings and augmented by decades of psycho-conditioning.

  Traitor.

  Baldr bared his fangs instinctively. The hunched Plague Marine moved close enough, so he spat, tasting acid on his curved teeth as he sent it into the grey-skinned face before him.

  The spittle sprayed across the Plague Marine, fizzing as it impacted. The stooped figure wiped it away with a hooked, arthritic finger. He sucked on the fingertip, musingly.

  ‘A long time,’ he muttered. ‘A long time since one of you got close enough to spit.’

  Baldr raged again at his bonds, straining to get a weapon-hand free.

  ‘Rest,’ the Plague Marine urged. ‘Please. You will only damage yourself. Do you think we would have placed you in bonds you could break?’

  Baldr’s amber eyes narrowed. ‘Know this,’ he snarled. ‘I will die before I give you anything you value.’

  ‘No doubt you would, if that were an option.’ The creature smiled sadly. His voice remained soft, almost melodic
ally so. Two moist eyes shone in the dark, peering out from a ruined, sepulchral face. ‘But I do not wish to hurt you, Space Wolf. On the contrary.’

  Baldr’s eyes roved across his surroundings, looking for something – anything – that he might use to extricate himself. There were always features of an environment that could be used. The Archenemy were powerful, but also capricious, and their desire to prolong agony rather than go for the swift kill was a weakness he had used before.

  ‘What are you?’ Baldr asked.

  The Plague Marine raised a scab-covered eyebrow. ‘That is a question,’ he wheezed. He limped over to a natural outgrowth in the chamber’s walls – a rock shelf in a fungus-filled grotto – and painfully sat down. The experience of watching him move was unsettling, for he carried himself like a decrepit old man, his breath rattling, his hands shaking. After seating himself, he slumped, letting the curve of his spine drag his head down even further. He kept hold of the skull-staff, though.

  ‘What answer would satisfy you?’ he asked. ‘You would not believe much that I tell you. It will all be the truth, of course. Those of my Legion rarely tell lies. An old habit. We left the lying to others.’ He chuckled dryly. ‘What use is a lie? It gains you a little advantage, but this is the Eternal War, and eternals have no use for little advantages.’

  Without meaning to, Baldr found himself listening, and cursed himself inwardly. The Plague Marine’s voice remained quiet, almost tremulous. There was no threat in it at all – no bombast, no defiance. It wasn’t even resigned.

  ‘My name was Jeshua Ben Gur. I was born ten thousand, two hundred and sixty-nine years ago, by the reckoning of Terra. I grew up in sight of the Imperial Palace. That is more than you can boast, scion of the ice. I do not remember much of it, though – they took me for the Legion when I was eight, even before the primarch had been found. Younger than you were when they came for you, I expect.’ He drew in a tremulous breath. ‘I recall golden spires. I never saw them again, not even when the Siege came and we ran at the Gates in a world of fire. Sometimes I dream of those spires, and those flames. I no longer know if my memory of them is even reliable. Who knows? They are long gone now, and there is no going back to check.’

  He coughed, bringing up a lumpy gobbet of phlegm. He spat it out and it landed, bloodily, on the chamber floor.

  ‘After that I was called many things. I have lived a long time. Not, of course, for ten thousand years – the Eye melds time in strange ways – but long enough. When Calas brought the change with him, I changed too. I learned new things and forgot old ones. I learned that every situation brings its opportunities. I became a gardener. Do you believe that? A cultivator of forgotten things. I discovered that some lives will flourish in the dark. Some harbour their own light, inside themselves, cradled in phosphor, needing no sun or starlight to warm them.’

  Baldr couldn’t stop listening. A warning voice in his head screamed at him to plug his ears, to recite some litany against corruption, but he was unable to comply. He felt his muscles relax in their bonds. Even his wounds, which had been angrily painful, felt numb.

  ‘There are organisms that thrive on decay, Son of Russ. There are creatures that lap up the matter of the dying and transform it to sustain themselves. Do they have no place in the galaxy? Do they have no beauty of their own?’ He chuckled sadly. ‘They need their champions, too. It cannot all be ice and iron, talon and tooth.’

  The Traitor looked up directly at Baldr, and the light from the staff fell across his face. His skin was impossibly lined, like a reptile. Glossy sores bunched around dry lips, swollen with dark blood.

  ‘The name I took in the Garden was the Mycelite. I lived for a long time there. I sat at the feet of the caged goddess and listened to her weeping. That taught me pity. I determined that striving against the inevitable was a peculiar kind of cruelty. It has to be ended. The War, everything, the whole meandering story – it has to be ended. And it will be, thankfully. It has started at last, and the whole carnival will finally pass into the long night again. Everything – all the striving, all the contests, they’ll all slide away. It’ll start at Cadia – you know that? The threads are pulling together there.’

  The Mycelite’s speech flitted from subject to subject, but as Baldr listened to the sibilant tones in the warm dark, he felt as if there were some truth there, ready to be grasped if only he could glimpse it. Nothing he heard made him angry any more – only curious.

  ‘Is that why you are here?’ Baldr asked, surprising himself as he heard the words leave his mouth.

  The Mycelite shook his head. Every gesture he made had a kind of sorrowful benevolence to it, like a weary grandfather gently correcting the errors of a wayward protégé.

  ‘Matters have gone awry,’ he said. ‘You responded swiftly, and your Rune Priest already burns his way towards the heart of my kingdom. Perhaps he will halt my spores landing, perhaps not. I have sent my servants to hinder him, but it no longer much matters to me, truth be told. The Traveller will be here soon, and then the tide will be rising faster than even your rune-witches can handle.’

  He got to his feet once more, leaning heavily on the staff. Rasping from the effort, he limped up to Baldr again.

  ‘But surprises can still be found – flowers amid the filth. That is another thing I learned.’

  The Mycelite extended a withered hand and ran it down Baldr’s cheek – gently, like a caress.

  ‘You are here,’ he breathed, as tenderly as a father. ‘And, amid all the ruin, I could not have asked for more than that.’

  For a long time, Hafloí had doubted the sagas recounted by the Grey Hunters around the fire-pits. He had fought well with his old pack of Blood Claws, charging recklessly into the oncoming storm alongside his battle-brothers, whooping and howling as his bolt pistol kicked and his axe whirled. He’d existed for nothing else. Combat had been a rush, thumping in his temples, fuelling the white-hot furnace at his warrior’s core. His brothers had all been the same – flame-haired, hot-blooded, short-fanged and short-tempered.

  They were called Blood Claws for a reason. At times, it seemed that his gauntlets were never free of it. He revelled in the killing, each time testing himself a little further, seeing just how far he could push the immense gifts he had been given. There was nothing finer, nothing purer – to be young, and vital, and given the power of a demigod to use in the cause of humanity.

  The summons to leave that existence and join Járnhamar had been a shock, and an unwelcome one. Packs of young bloods were expected to fight together, to grow older and tougher together until their locks greyed and their fangs curved. After taking the Helix, that is what he’d been told would happen.

  ‘You will be shield-brothers until death takes you,’ the old Wolf Priest, Aesde, had told him, his ancient yellow eyes glowing in the firelight of the Aett. ‘Mark the names. They shall stand with you at the End Times when fire consumes the galaxy and Russ comes again.’

  It had been difficult to leave after that – to be joined to an older, colder band of brothers. Grey Hunters were tempered and harrowed by time. Each one of them had been beaten into something tougher and harder, and the flames within them had shrunk with it. From the beginning, they had looked down on him, and he had looked down on them. The two of them might as well have been different breeds.

  If times had not been so straitened, if the entire Chapter were not stretched as thin as throttle-cord by the Long War, then it would never have happened. Ragnar had told him as much when he’d delivered the order. He’d done it in person, at least. That ought to have been a rare honour, but the tidings were too bad for him to see it.

  ‘Everything is changing,’ Ragnar had said, back on Fenris. ‘The old order is eroding. You will have to learn faster than those you leave. Your new pack will test you, and you will rage against them.’ Ragnar had gazed down at him impassively, giving nothing away. ‘But you can learn from this. I
f you weather the storm, you will rise even faster than I did.’ A wary smile. ‘And I never fought as a Hunter. So we are both misfits.’

  At the time, Hafloí had listened in silence, part awed by the Wolf Lord standing before him, part sullen from the news. Now he saw what Ragnar had been trying to tell him. If he had not been so thick-headed, so stuffed with rage and kill-urge, he might have appreciated it at the time.

  Járnhamar fought so differently. Each one of them, taken individually, was far stronger than him – far wilier, far more experienced and far more adaptable. He’d seen it on Ras Shakeh, on the plague destroyer, and now within the hulk itself. For all he’d boasted of his Traitor kill on Hjec Aleja, he’d always known he needed to overachieve just to keep up with his taciturn, grim-faced brothers. He could boast, and they would indulge him, but every one of his new brothers had kill-tallies far in excess of his.

  So it was that, as Hafloí sprinted through the arteries of horror in the depths of the plague-hulk, his breathing was ragged, his heart-rate was dangerously high, and his muscles were shrieking with pain. The packs had been fighting non-stop for hours, lost in the swirling hordes of mutated enemy soldiers. Since the passage of the bridge, they had been attacked constantly. The mutants never stopped coming. At times they burst from the walls like larvae from pupae, scattering into the open with embryonic fluids still trailing from their diseased flesh. There was never room to properly fight, only to hack and kick and claw them back into submission before treading their remains into the knee-thick filth.

  Throughout, the Hunters around him fought on with undiminished fervour. Their endurance was phenomenal. Hafloí stayed close to Gunnlaugur for most of the descent, and for the first time he truly saw what it took to become vaerangi. The Wolf Guard hewed with undiminished heft and purpose, roaring out his defiance even as the air around him hummed with heat and hatred. The raw fires of the underworld could have rippled across him and he would have shouldered them aside. He was immense – unbowed, furious, unstoppable.